The European Media Art Festival Osnabrück (EMAF) has its origin in a workshop for experimental films at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Osnabrück. This resulted in a film meeting in 1981: the so-called “Experimental Film Workshop”, and the foundation of the association of the same name, which is still the sponsor of the EMAF today. In 1988, the “Film and Television Year” proclaimed by the EU offered the opportunity to put the festival on a new footing. The team of students put together a new concept for this – under the title “European Media Art Festival”.
Today, EMAF is regarded internationally as one of the most influential forums for contemporary media art. Each year it offers its visitors an overview of current artistic productions in film programmes, exhibitions, performances and hybrid formats. Guest-curated projects and retrospectives provide in-depth insights into historical positions and contexts.
At the heart of the festival is the annually changing theme, which in the exhibition, in specially curated film programmes and talks by theorists from various disciplines, illuminates the interfaces between artistic practice, technological development and social reality. The main themes of the last few years have included documentary working methods in art (2018: Report. Notizen aus der Wirklichkeit /i.e. Report. Notes from Reality), the relationship between language and transgression (2019: Wild Grammar), the entanglements of I and We (2020: First Person Plural), the multiple relationships between possession and being possessed (2021: Possessed), our entanglement in the world of things (2022: The Thing is) and an understanding of time and history that is becoming increasingly questionable (2023: Trembling Time).
