03 Oct 2012

No More Westerns Impakt Festival 2012 – critical and creative views on contemporary media culture

No More Westerns is the 23rd iteration of the Impakt arts and media festival – a yearly event that seeks to identify emerging paradigms in media culture, this year curated by Cher Potter and Samantha Culp.

In 2012, the Impakt Festival heralds the end of the dominance of the Western media culture, acknowledging the changes within the media landscape as a result of economic and geopolitical shifts on the world stage.

No More Westerns will not be a purely theoretical overview nor a scientific analysis, but rather an imagined future scenario from which to look at alternate flows of culture and aesthetics in a post-Western world. The themes of the festival – Global South science fiction (shifted futurisms), regional/production partnerships that bypass The West (Africa-China) and considering America as 'just another country' - can be viewed as the imaginary starting points for new approaches to terms such as modernity. A shifting global viewpoint is becoming increasingly prominent in our thoughts and our perceptions: the world is no longer determined by the West or by models of supposed opposites such as centre - periphery, East - West, ruler - subject and self - other.

No More Westerns will encompass an exhibition, screening programs, music performances, public talks, round table discussions and media masterclasses. No More Westerns extends beyond the physical plane with our online program, including online art works, exclusive music mixes, B-side video programs, highlighted apps and translated content, all of which will feature on our blog, Twitter/Weibo, and via the hashtag #NMW.

The exhibition will show the works of and collaborations between a variety of young, up-and-coming international artists as well as less traditional, commercial and amateur 'makers'. Relevant issues surrounding originality, hybrid authorship and modified global perspectives will be examined whilst the distinctions between artist/curator/audience will be deliberately blurred.

ARTISTS INCLUDE:
AES+F, Sophia Al-Maria, Rik Aw & Pok Yue Weng, Babak Radboy & Item Idem, Wafaa Bilal, Rutherford Chang, Chto Delat, Crystal Beacon, db-db (Francis Lam), Double Fly Art Center, Doug Fishbone, Foundland, Ho Tzu-Nyen, Leng Wen, Kareem Lotfy, Lu Yang, Michael MacGarry, Mehreen Murtaza, Katja Novitskova, The Otolith Group, Paulo Nazareth, The Propeller Group, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

WITH FESTIVAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY AMONGST OTHERS:
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Senior Lecturer of Law, Birkbeck London and author of 'What if Latin America Ruled the World' 2010), Sohail Inayatullah (Futurist, Professor at the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkung University, Taiwan), Omar Kholeif (Curator at FACT, Liverpool and Senior Editor at Ibraaz Publishing, London), Jaap Kooijman (author of 'Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture' 2008, and senior lecturer of Media and Culture studies at Amsterdam, Netherlands), Vinay Lal (cultural critic and professor of history at Delhi University and the UCLA), Nat Muller (independent new media curator, Rotterdam, Netherlands), Louise Muller (Independent researcher), Ruangrupa (artists initiative, Jakarta), William Uricchio (Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts), Zafka Zhang (co-founder of China Youthology, Beijing, China)

The Impakt Festival's Festival Fellow this year is Parmesh Shahani who heads the Godrej India Culture Lab – a space that aims to interrogate the textured nature of Indian modernity by cross-pollinating the best minds working on India from across the academic, creative and corporate worlds.

The 23rd edition of the Impakt Festival takes place October 24 – 28, 2012 across the venues of CBKU Gallery, Theater Kikker, Filmtheater 't Hoogt and the Academiegalerie in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

To paraphrase science fiction author William Gibson's semi-prophetic vision of the future: 'The post-Western world already exists. It's just not very evenly distributed yet'.


For all inquiries please contact Femke Gerritsma: femke@impakt.nl or T +31 (0) 302944493