Since the beginning of the 2000s, Stefan Panhans has made a name for himself with works that refuse to be clearly assigned to an artistic genre or field of practice and entwine still and moving, as well as found and newly created images and spaces within constantly changing constellations. Doing so, he works with photography in which filmic plots are intimated, video installations that merge elements of theatre and computer games, texts that evolve like fictions you can enter, and performances that become films. He produces images of a present that is defined by the rhythms of goods and media consumption, that prefabricates their promises of salvation in the form of advertising, therapies and lifestyles and, doing so, fans the desires for the authentic and the immediate at the same time, and lets them ossify in their own clichés. Read More

Just the first few seconds of this film are enough to create an all-pervading sense of oppression that predominates for the next 15 minutes. “Berlin Metanoia” is a dark, almost (hellishly) dreamlike trip into the innermost realms of a city that loves to market itself as young and cool, but which has lost its soul somewhere between hipsterism, tourist onslaughts and hype. In his latest short fiction film, which celebrated its premiere at the 2016 Berlinale, Erik Schmitt approaches the latent psychotic Berliner identity with an intensity that continues to reverberate for a long time afterwards. Read More