“Multivision” Festival continues to explore animation as visual art.  For eight continuous years the Festival has been featuring the Best Video Installation section created specifically for those animation works which are closer to tableaus, sculptures or film sets than to cinema.  This exhibition features 18 creations by video artists from across the globe shortlisted in the 2018 competition.

This year, the exhibition traditionally timed to coincide with the Festival has gained some new, philosophy-tinged undertones, much to the genuine joy of the Festival’s President, Svetlana Petrova, herself a philosophy graduate.

You will find out everything you long wanted to know but were afraid to ask the philosophers about. 

What is the difference between the transcendental and the transcendent? Do time and space exist in our mind a priori, as believed not only by the great German thinker Immanuel Kant, but also by video artists Tianran Duan (“Maze of Noumenon”, China) and Mirai Mizue (“Dreamland”, France/Japan), or are they perceptible through sensory experience, as demonstrated by the characters of Nikita Diakur's “Fest” (Germany), busily cracking their own skulls and incidentally tearing the polygon mesh of the space itself in the deliberately absurd, YouTube-like video?  What is the structure of Heaven and Hell like? Where are the borderlines of dreamland?  Can we see the architectonics of past and present?  Do satellite maps, CCTV cameras and distorted camera lenses act as our new sense organs? What is the relation between the noumenon, the thing-in-itself, and the phenomenon of the fat ginger cat skating in endless Olympic circles through various social media? This list of questions raised by a modern-day Kantian is far from being exhaustive. The stars of contemporary video art have all the answers ready. In addition to the artists already mentioned, the exhibition features Boris Labbé (France) with his new creation entitled “The Fall”, Vergine Keaton (France) with her long-awaited “The Tasmanian Tiger”, the mind-blowing Italian artist Donato Sansone (“Bavure”), the ever-experimenting François Vogel (France), the meditative Hans Op de Beeck (Belgium), and others. 

As in the previous years, our joy wouldn’t be complete without the world’s first unhuman contemporary artist, the globally praised Zarathustra cat, kindly and unfailingly supporting the Festival’s boldest initiatives, at times transcending the realm of pure reason.