Berlinale Forum Expanded: 19 going on 20 (Redux)

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 2pm for “19 going on 20 (Redux),” presented in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival. The program presents films by Vika Kirchenbauer, Tomonari Nishikawa, Zuza Banasinska, Shelly Silver, Eduardo Williams, and Mariano Blatt and is curated by Ulrich Ziemons.

This February, the Forum Expanded section of the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) celebrated its 20th anniversary. Founded in 2006 and organized by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, the festival section has, over the course of the last two decades, fostered a vibrant space for formal and thematic cinematic innovation, for artists’ moving image, experimental and expanded cinema, video and film installations, performances, concerts, readings and discussions. On the occasion of the special birthday, a program of films and installations from the first 19 years of Forum Expanded’s existence was presented at the 75th Berlinale.

With the short film program “19 going on 20 (Redux),” a selection of the films presented in Berlin at the beginning of the year travels to e-flux Screening Room. The program is comprised of five short films made and presented at Forum Expanded between 2016 and 2024 and gives an insight into the wide aesthetic and thematic range of its curatorial approach: from structuralist landscape film to feminist intervention, from poetry to performance to auto-fictional re-workings of personal and found footage.

Films

Vika Kirchenbauer, Untitled Sequence of Gaps (Germany, 2020, 13 minutes)
Composed of vignettes in different techniques and materialities, Untitled Sequence of Gaps uses the form of an essay film to approach trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum–on what is felt but never seen. Shifting between planetary macro scales, physical phenomena, and individual accounts of affective subject formation, the film considers violence and its workings, class and queerness not through representation but from within. The montage is slow and rhythmic, yet uneven. The flow of images is interrupted by gaps no less significant than the imagery itself. Footage in which public memory stands in for personal remembrance stands along sequences recorded via infrared imaging, under ultraviolet light or microwave radiation. While pondering the effects of the invisible and the power inherent in shifting violence beyond visibility, the piece reflects digital archives and technologies that help shape the relation to past, present, and future. Ghosts appear from holes ripped into time by an unremembered childhood, and a witch-burning ritual in the artist’s rural hometown serves as a foil against which to question the politics of visibility.

Tomonari Nishikawa, Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon (Japan, 2016, 10 minutes)
“Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon shows ten bridges on Yahagi River, which runs near where I grew up in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. I shot each bridge twice, first in the morning and again in the evening of the day. I exposed only one sixth of the frame at a time and exposed the entire film six times to have a full-size image, from the left side of the frame to the right side. The morning shots show the left side dark, as it was darker when I did the first exposure than when I was exposing the last part, and the evening shots show vice versa. Yahagi River has about 70 bridges. The bridge in the first shot is the closest to the source of the river, which is in Hiraya Village, Nagano Prefecture, and the last bridge is the last one before the river merges into the ocean.” – Tomonari Nishikawa

Zuza Banasinska, Grandmamauntsistercat(Poland/Netherlands, 2024, 23 minutes)
Created from archival materials of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, Grandmamauntsistercat tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandistic tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a site of auto-fictional memory, its scientific register shifted toward a treatment of the images themselves as specimens. The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Yaga, is reimagined as a prehistoric goddess from the time of matriarchy. This transformation provokes layered reflections on kinship and identity as the child navigates binary gender roles. The women of the family find a home in the archive, engaging in a process of self and world-making that transforms the often sexist and anthropocentric images into tools of freedom and resistance.

Shelly Silver, The Lamps (USA, 2016, 4 minutes)
“The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, née Plötz, was an unsung member of the New York Dada Movement. She was a poet, artist, vaudeville performer, runaway, rabble-rouser, cross-dresser, and all around public provocateur. She actively did not fit into her historical moment, and like most misfits, suffered for it. As with many women artists throughout history, her cultural legacy has been obscured and in some instances appropriated into the oeuvres of better-known male peers. Some researchers believe that the Baroness was the artist behind ‘Fountain,’ the ready-made urinal attributed to Duchamp. The Lamps details her trip to the Naples Archeological Museum in the early 1900s where she breaks into ‘Il Gabinetto Segreto,’ a secret room filled with erotic objects from Pompeii.” – Shelly Silver

Eduardo Williams, Mariano Blatt, Parsi(Argentina/Switzerland, 2018, 23 minutes)
Using “No es” (It isn’t) as its motor–a driving, pulsing, cumulative, constantly evolving poem by Mariano Blatt, which consists of a list of images, people, memories, landscapes, phrases, and ideas that “seem to be but are not–Parsi whisks its viewers away into a perpetual movement through spaces and around people. We are taken on a breathless ride through bustling neighborhoods, from person to person, thrown, dipped under water, rushed from image to image, creating in the process yet another poem which is caressed by, crashes into, and spins next to “No es.”

Bios

Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. Through video, installation, music, and theoretical writing, Kirchenbauer’s practice examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within societal power structures. Often relating personal and collective memory/non-remembrance to the politics of spectatorship, Kirchenbauer’s work continuously negotiates the role of affects in the field of contemporary art and questions the ways in which marginalised bodies become experienceable in exhibition spaces.
For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Born in Nagoya, Japan in 1969, Tomonari Nishikawawas a filmmaker, artist and curator. He earned a BA in Cinema and Philosophy from Binghamton University, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. Nishikawa passed away in April 2025 in New York. At the time of his passing, he was a senior professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, where he was a major force in founding the MFA program. Nishikawa left behind a profound legacy as a filmmaker/artist, performer, curator, teacher, and friend to many in the experimental film community.

Zuza Banasińska (1994) is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, based in Amsterdam. In their practice, they are interested in the reproduction of images and how these enable the reproduction of systems, subjects and bodies. They engage with this theme through the lens of embodying and queering archives. In their essay films and installations, they employ a multi-layered approach that incorporates found and recorded video, game engines, sound, and sculpture to construct intricate ecosystems. These serve as spaces for interrogating and destabilizing entrenched notions of identity, gender, and representation.

Shelly Silver is a New York based filmmaker and artist working with the still and moving image. Her work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and–increasingly in recent years–the watcher and the watched. Spoken and written language, collaged narratives, framings in time and space, all become clues into shifting locations of power, identity and desire. To speak and to listen, to look and let oneself be seen, is, or should be a pleasure, and like all pleasures, tinged with ambiguity and risk. Silver’s practice is a labor of attention.

Eduardo Williams (b.1987, Argentina) studied at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires before joining Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France. He has directed various short films and a feature, which have been presented at international film festivals. His works explore a fluid mode of observation, looking for shared relations and spontaneous adventures within both physical and virtual networks.

Mariano Blatt (b.1983, Argentina) is a poet, literary editor and co-director of Blatt & Ríos, an independent publishing house. His ongoing poem No es is a lifelong writing project.

Ulrich Ziemons (1982) is the head of the Berlinale section Forum Expanded. Since 2006 he has worked for Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in various functions. He was a member of the selection committee for the short film program of the Kassel Documentary Film Festival and has curated film series and programs for, among others, Kunstverein Leipzig, Kochi Muziris Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, as well as KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Berlin Biennial. He is the author of the book Aufzeichnungen eines Storm Squatters (2014), a monograph on the Weather Diary video series by US-American experimental filmmaker George Kuchar.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.