Artistic Research Festival

In cooperation with Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung

What does artistic research do when it resists the impulse to explain itself? What happens when we step away from definitions and instead dwell in the spaces where research unfolds — affective, embodied, speculative, and shared?

This first iteration of the Artistic Research Festival unfolds through contributions from the artistic research community of the Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung. Over several days and across venues, it intertwines the methodologies, trajectories and artistic forms that shape the fellows’ practices. 

The Berlin Artistic Research Program supports artists across disciplines through fellowships, production funding, and a research community that fosters exchange among the participants. It was launched in 2020 by the Society for Artistic Research in Germany (gkfd) and is funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

The District 
Mykola Ridnyi, Ukraine, Germany, 2023, 20min. English

Here and now, and after? 
İz Öztat, Germany, 2025, 26 min. German, English with English Subtitles

The screening at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA consists of two moving image works, Here and now, and after? by İz Öztat and The District by Mykola Ridnyi. Both artists use performative strategies—one puppetry, the other a time-traveling walk—to explore the tensions between individual agency and systemic violence of repression and warfare. 

The screening is followed by a conversation with the artists. 

The District transports us to the neighborhood of Northern Saltivka in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In 2022, it became a frontline of the Russian invasion, suffering severe destruction. A walk through this “ghost district” traces a tenuous coexistence of past and present, external and internal landscapes, facts and memories. A voiceover accompanies the walk, recalling the artist’s childhood and youth in places that no longer exist.

Here and now, and after? is a puppet play for camera by İz Öztat that negotiates artistic agency, accountability, and the self’s relation to the Other. The video draws on Kasperle theater—a centuries-old German-language puppetry tradition—as a politically engaged pedagogical form, while referring to the Faustian pact as a literary motif. Imbued with cultural associations and projections, ideologies and stereotypes, a collection of puppets are brought to life to enact and reflect on the present, the figure of the artist and their contractual obligations to the state. The play is structured around three contracts: between Faust and the devil, the artist and the state, and the negotiation of erotic power-play. As agreements are reached by some puppets, others defy authority, demanding justice on their own terms.