“MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE”: NÉA TÉCHNI VIDEO ART FESTIVAL, BELGRADE/2026
Yichu Li — YICHU 1.0 (2025) United States · Post-Humanism YICHU 1.0 is a 10-minute experimental art film and audiovisual performance work by multidisciplinary artist and sound designer Yichu Li. Created during her time at Central Saint Martins, the project sits at the cutting edge of digital art, merging machine-generated AI visuals, ritualistic performance, and heavy electronic soundscapes. Rather than painting a standard bleak dystopia or an idealized utopia, Li builds a "protopia" — a living, fluid future where technology and raw human emotion awkwardly but beautifully coexist. The film maps out a surreal rite of passage, detailing how identity, intimacy, and maternal or feminine energy mutate when transferred into a digital network.
Wenwen Deng — New Travelogue: Mayflys (2025) United Kingdom · Post-Humanism Blending traditional landscape aesthetics with futuristic digital rendering, the film functions as a modern, speculative reimagining of classical travel literature. It uses the biological mythos of the mayfly to explore the fleeting nature of human existence, digital transience, and our rapidly changing relationship with the natural world. In classical literature and biology, the mayfly is the ultimate symbol of fleeting life, often living for only a single day once it reaches maturity. Deng uses this tiny creature to mirror modern human life in a fast-paced, hyper-digital society, suggesting that our trends, digital footprints, and even our individual lives are accelerating into hyper-short, mayfly-like lifespans. New Travelogue: Mayflys stands as a breathtakingly beautiful, melancholic cinematic poem. By turning technological acceleration into a fluid, meditative journey, Wenwen Deng offers a captivating space for viewers to contemplate their own brief, beautiful moment under the sun
Vita Plavšić — Herring (2025) "Herring" (2025) is a highly atmospheric, conceptual short art film where the artist, known for her deeply introspective work that blends mundane everyday routines with surreal, dreamlike psychological landscapes, Plavšić uses this piece to dissect the themes of domestic monotony, cultural inheritance, and sensory memory. Herring looks closely at the repetitive, mechanical nature of food preparation and preservation. The film functions like a quiet fever dream. It takes a familiar kitchen setting and slowly distorts it, leaving the viewer with an uneasy feeling that something strange and unsaid is lingering just outside the camera's frame. Ultimately, Herring stands as a quiet yet powerful meditation on the hidden emotional weight trapped within our daily habits, urging the audience to look past the surface of the ordinary to find the strange poetry underneath.
täuelxsız — aştyq jailağan dala (The Hungry Steppe) (2025) Kazakhstan · Hauntology Premiered internationally in Paris as part of the Projet Betula: Speak Volumes program, the work stands at the forefront of Central Asia's modern art-activism movement. It utilizes physical performance, spoken-word poetry, and digital cinema to confront one of the most devastating and historically suppressed traumas in Kazakh history: the Asharshylyk (the catastrophic, Soviet-engineered famine of 1930–1933). The cinematography treats the immense, sweeping open spaces of the Kazakh landscape with a cold, respectful reverence. The vast emptiness of the modern steppe visually mirrors the tragic void left behind by the loss of over a quarter of the country's population. aştyq jailağan dala functions as both a painful monument to the past and an act of cultural survival. By translating raw historical trauma into cutting-edge contemporary video art, täuelxsız creates an essential space for collective mourning, healing, and national reclamation.
Theo Macdonald — The Oshima Gang (2025) New Zealand · Psychogeography "The Oshima Gang" (2025) is a 20-minute experimental documentary which functions as an architectural critique of an environment, inviting viewers to sit with the strange, uneasy displacement of feeling like a foreigner within their own homeland. The heartbeat of the film is a fascinating ghost story from movie history. Back in 1982, the rebellious Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, to shoot his famous World War II movie, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, starring David Bowie. Instead of traveling to the tropical, sun-soaked island of Java, Indonesia, where the story actually takes place, Oshima used Auckland’s heavy, old colonial buildings as a grand stage, cleverly disguising New Zealand’s architecture to masquerade as an entirely different world.
tannelvits — Cunticles (2021) Russia · Post-modernism "Cunticles" (2021) is a provocative, boundary-pushing experimental art film and audio-visual exploration by the underground electronic musician and multimedia artist tannelvits. Known for crafting abrasive, raw electronic music tracks and dark, texture-heavy sensory experiences, tannelvits utilizes this video project to challenge traditional ideas surrounding the human body, digital sexuality, and censorship. Borrowing elements from body horror aesthetics and underground queer art, the project pushes the viewer past their comfort zone, transforming taboo themes into a mesmerizing dance of abstract, pulsating shapes and visual noise. Cunticles stands as an uncompromised, hypnotic meditation on the rawest elements of human biology, forcing the audience to look directly at the strange, beautiful, and uncomfortable realities of the physical form.