In its 20th edition, Forum Expanded brings together 24 works from 21 countries. Employing practices that span installation, film, video and sculpture, the selected artists and filmmakers employ translucence as a means of engaging with the cataclysmic realities of the present. Whether dealing with personal or collective histories, ongoing wars, extractivism, legacies of colonialism or social inequalities, their approaches frequently hinge on intervention rather than observation. Be it through tinted glass, virtual reality, historical speculation or sonic augmentation: their works actively project ideas, images and sounds that alter how we perceive reality and refract our view of the world. They make what is missing even more tangible by redirecting our gaze and throw what lies beyond or outside of our perception into ever sharper relief as a result.

Neda Saeedi’s Sinking Suns illuminates silent green’s Betonhalle, the venue for the Forum Expanded exhibition, with fragile, mesmerising lightscapes created using tinted glass objects and overhead projectors. A foreboding beauty emanates from these ephemeral sculptures, which act as portals to another space and simultaneously remind us that sunsets are at their most spectacular when the air is most polluted.

Other installations in the exhibition similarly draw on and interrogate methods of visual displacement, such as Alisa Berger’s dual-channel video and VR installation RAPTURE, in which the protagonist is transported to his childhood home, a place which he can now only access virtually. Ginan Seidl’s 3-channel video installation J-N-N explores the invisible presence of ghostly Jinns in past and present-day Iraq. While on the lawn outside of the venue, the visitor’s own smartphones provide the lenses through which they can experience the augmented reality installation Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland (ADfD) (Alternative Monument for Germany), a community-based virtual monument to migration in Germany.

At silent green’s Kuppelhalle, a special presentation of Lisa Jackson’s 360-degree dome projection film Wilfred Buck’s Star Stories provides an immersive view of Indigenous astronomy. Ininew astronomer Wilfred Buck shares four stories from Cree cosmology. A video installation at the Embassy of Canada’s Marshall McLuhan Salon expands on this work and provides further insights into Buck’s research and thinking. The project is presented in partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Berlin and with the kind support of Indigenous Screen Office and Canada Media Fund.

The gaze towards the sky into the stars is also present in this year’s film programme: Riar Rizaldi’s film Mirage: Eigenstate uses the template of Carl Sagan’s classic American TV show Cosmos to decentre the dominance of Western science and explore other ways of interpreting reality, such as through tropical Sufi mysticism.

Kevin Jerome Everson and his crews in three locations across North America directed their Super 8 and 16mm cameras straight at the sun to document a solar eclipse across three North American time zones in When the Sun is Eaten (Chi’bal K’iin).

In Pidikwe (Rumble), Caroline Monnet speculates on an alternative cultural history, one in which Indigenous contributions to art and culture are recognised and celebrated. Her performative short film posits dance as a system of knowledge and a healing tool rooted in community.

Stéphanie Lagarde’s Extra Life (and Decay) imagines communal action across generations, classes, genders and even species. Positing hospitality as a survival tool to fight morbid politics of isolation, this multi-layered short film draws a line between the invention of nuclear families and managed forest plots as controllable, normalized units of profitability.

Spetsialna Operatsiia (Special Operation) provides a haunting account of the occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine by Russian troops in the early days of the invasion in February 2022. Using CCTV camera footage taken on site and adding a sparse, reduced soundtrack void of human voices, director Oleksiy Radynski creates an almost disembodied examination of military logic.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Forum Expanded, a programme of talks and panels together with retrospective screenings of selected works from previous editions will be presented. The anniversary programme is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund. More information on titles and guests will be published in the run-up to the festival.