EMAP Residents 2022: Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva
New resident artists at IMPAKT announced
This year we are welcoming artist duo Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner as the 2022 EMAP Resident artists at IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture]. The European Media Art Platform (EMAP) is a partnership of 15 European media art organisations, supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Since 2018, EMAP has been supporting artists in the production of new work. During their 2-months residency, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner will produce a new video installation, titled My Want of You Partakes of Me: a multi-channel, experimental moving image work exploring how the boundaries of the body are perpetually reconfigured through different modes of knowing the world.
My Want of You Partakes of Me centres around five stories, from across a long historical period. The stories range from the 13th century poet Dante Alighieri, to a Chinese molecular biology lab, from the science fiction author Octavia Butler, to the late nineteenth century French physiologist Claude Bernard. The stories will be narrated by professional and non-professional actors who will be placed in different locations and recorded using a range of imaging techniques, from cinema cameras to 360-degree cameras. Over the past year, Litvintseva and Wagner made the recordings for My Want of You Partakes of Me. During their residency at IMPAKT, they will finalise the production of the film. They will produce the animations, edit the piece, and produce the musical score.
IMPAKT selected Litvintseva and Wagner because of the exceptional quality of their work and the richness of scientific references in their proposal. The works of Wagner and Litvintseva are eloquent and have a distinct style and approach. The project the artists will develop in their residency is the third part of a series of works that stands out because of its inspiring critical analysis of the historical development of technology and the role it has in our world today.
This trilogy began with A Demonstration (2020), a retake on the taxonomies of monsters from modern European science, and continued with Constant (2022), which examines the history of the modern metric system. The latter is one of the key artworks included in the upcoming IMPAKT Festival 2022: The Curse of Smooth Operations. Read more about the festival here
About the artists
Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva began collaborating in 2018. Their practice is grounded in moving images and extends to installations, live performances, texts, and lectures. Wagner and Litvintseva often take the human body as the starting point for their projects, exploring where the body ends, and the world begins. Their focal point in recent years is exploring how we perceive and construct our physical identity in relation to hegemonic knowledge systems. This is not the first time IMPAKT is working with Wagner: in 2016, before starting his long-term collaboration with Litvintseva, he was already a resident artist at IMPAKT.
About EMAP
The European Media Art Platform (EMAP), co-funded by Creative Europe since 2018, is a consortium of 15 leading European media art organisations specialised in Digital and Media Art, Bio Art and Robotic Art. Through an open call, EMAP members offer practitioners two-month residencies to support emerging media artists in the production of new work. Previous EMAP artists at IMPAKT are: Anna Ridler (2018), Joana Moll (2019), Clusterduck (2020) and Liliana Zeic (2021). https://emare.eu/