Type: Experience

This year from week 39 up to and including 42, Viborg Animation Festival holds a Treasure Hunt for the entire family. Around Viborg’s center you can find pictures of animal-human like creatures who are visiting from their stop-motion universe made by this year’s VAF Artist: Niki Lindroth von Bahr.
Come along on a breezy walk and try to find the different animals around on the streets and the shops.

Keep a cool mind and have a sharp eye for the details because it is exactly the details you should be looking for to answer the questions for each picture. When you have answered all the questions a VAF prize awaits!

Do you want to create animation yourselves? Visit VAF in week 39 and go for the ANIMNOK childrens creative workshop in Student House or dive down in to marvelous Animanimals-univers in the Tinghallen foyer.

Where do I get the Scavenger map?

Get a physical copy of the Scavenger map at Tinghallen during the festival OR save the online version above.

What happens when conditions and circumstances push our will to fight for what’s right for our communities and our world to the breaking point? Mikkel Hørlycks photo series cover migration to Europe, long-running addiction, an orphanage for vulnerable children, the consequences of corona virus, eating disorder and soldiers from Denmark and our allied nations. The common denominator of Hørlyck’s photos is an exploration of the human will to survive, universal emotions connecting the stories of vastly different subjects.

Starting week 40, the exhibition will be shown at Viborg main library, where Mikkel Hørlyck will speak October 11 at 18:30 (more info at viborgbib.dk)

11.-29. september weekdays 08.00-16.00
NB: 27. september 08.00-21.00 & 28. september kl. 08.00-20.00.

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

For VAF 2023 Visuel HF’s 1st year will be animating in colored sand during a five-day workshop with interdisciplinary artist Signe Klejs.

Workshop at seven public locations in the center of Viborg – Mon-Fri at 9 – 15. The works can be experienced around the clock – also after the workshop.

Many people might know Signe Klejs’s light installations on the bridges in Bjerringbro and Aarhus, but at the same time Klejs has over the years created a number of ephemeral works in colored sand – among others for the art museum Brandts in Odense and in the coming six months for the art museum ARoS in Aarhus. See Signe’s previous installations and screen-based works here: www.signeklejs.dk.

Based on the same technique, Visuel HF’s young talents now have the opportunity to make their mark in colored sand and thus add a changing narrative to the selected locations. Common to the works by the students is that they undergo change over time, because even though the material is heavy and sturdy, the patterns in which the young people arrange it are fragile to influences by weather and people passing by. Exactly these entropic, random conditions in the system are investigated in the workshop during VAF.

Phenomenal Viborg proudly presents its very own Virtual Museum – a social VR experience that allows you to explore a variety of virtual worlds, together with friends and family. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality and motion tracking technology, the Virtual Museum allows you to explore different magical experiences, in the same physical space. Each floor in the experience has something new to offer, so stay tuned for information on the different experiences that are showcased in this year’s Virtual Museum!

Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR, so the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and makes it more like being in a physical exhibition.

Museum-scale VR
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.

Easy to Use
No experience or special skills required: all you have to do is move around and explore. We don’t use controllers or special interfaces, so anyone (ages 13 and up) can try the experience.

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday: kl 14:00 – 20:00

Age limit: 13 years

Join us for the official opening of Viborg Animation Festival 2023!

Viborg UNESCO Creative City invites all of Denmark and the rest of the world to join in an annual drawing campaign!

Drawing is absolutely fundamental to humankind, regardless of background and origin. The earliest traces of our species are drawings in caves, and most of us draw before we speak.
In Viborg, we have a special and long-standing position of strength in drawing, animation, children’s culture and creativity. We know the value of drawing for children, for young people and adults. Unfortunately, most Danish children stop drawing from the third grade and onwards. This is a problem as we are losing creativity. We strive to change that.

For the last two years Viborg UNESCO Creative City has therefore invited children and young people from all over the world to draw through the global drawing campaign TegnHåb, circling around corona and trust. The ambition is to strengthen our understanding of the value and importance drawing has for children and young people’s creativity and development. Because we have to nourish the passion for drawing.

In the same period, Viborg Municipality created Grønne Sammen (Green Together) – together for a sustainable future – with focus on green transition and sustainability. In this year’s edition, we link the two initiatives, inviting Denmark and the rest of the world to join DrawHope – Green Together 2023 – based on 20 drawing challenges.

This year, we received approx. 1200 drawings from 15 countries spread over five continents, once again making the campaign a global event, and animators in Viborg, Columbia and Georgia are currently working on creating series of animated films based on the drawings. Two animated films are being produced by Multara Al-Ameri, who graduated from The Animation Workshop, and a Colombian animator based on drawings from a 7th grade team in visual arts from Vestre Skole in Viborg and a corresponding team from school in Cali, Columbia. Drawings and animations are shown and projected during VAF in the Music School’s large windows and later in the year in Cali Columbia, York England and in Tbilisi Georgia.

Exhibited in the windows at the Kulturskolen foyer in Gravene, 8800 Viborg

What happens when conditions and circumstances push our will to fight for what’s right for our communities and our world to the breaking point? Mikkel Hørlycks photo series cover migration to Europe, long-running addiction, an orphanage for vulnerable children, the consequences of corona virus, eating disorder and soldiers from Denmark and our allied nations. The common denominator of Hørlyck’s photos is an exploration of the human will to survive, universal emotions connecting the stories of vastly different subjects.

Starting week 40, the exhibition will be shown at Viborg main library, where Mikkel Hørlyck will speak October 11 at 18:30 (more info at viborgbib.dk)

11.-29. september weekdays 08.00-16.00
NB: 27. september 08.00-21.00 & 28. september kl. 08.00-20.00.

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

For VAF 2023 Visuel HF’s 1st year will be animating in colored sand during a five-day workshop with interdisciplinary artist Signe Klejs.

Workshop at seven public locations in the center of Viborg – Mon-Fri at 9 – 15. The works can be experienced around the clock – also after the workshop.

Many people might know Signe Klejs’s light installations on the bridges in Bjerringbro and Aarhus, but at the same time Klejs has over the years created a number of ephemeral works in colored sand – among others for the art museum Brandts in Odense and in the coming six months for the art museum ARoS in Aarhus. See Signe’s previous installations and screen-based works here: www.signeklejs.dk.

Based on the same technique, Visuel HF’s young talents now have the opportunity to make their mark in colored sand and thus add a changing narrative to the selected locations. Common to the works by the students is that they undergo change over time, because even though the material is heavy and sturdy, the patterns in which the young people arrange it are fragile to influences by weather and people passing by. Exactly these entropic, random conditions in the system are investigated in the workshop during VAF.

The Fury

For VAF 2023 Viborg Kunsthal proudly presents the European premiere of The Fury – an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video installation and a never-before-seen 360 video by highly acclaimed Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

International video artist Shirin Neshat has roots in two cultures: the Iranian, which she left at a very young age, and the American, having formed the physical framework of her life. Her new work, The Fury, consists of a Virtual Reality work produced for Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Khora Contemporary and The Animation Workshop. The work is presented as part of the Viborg Animation Festival 2023.

The Fury is a chaotic and fantastic mix of cinematic real time, flashbacks and dream visions, where Neshat uses music and dance to process and convey the trauma of the protagonist. The work depicts an Iranian woman obsessively dancing an erotic dance to beautiful Persian music in the privacy of her small apartment and out onto the streets of New York. The more she dances, the more she falls into a trance, as if there were nothing between her body and the music.

The work explores how VR can expand and amplify the characteristically exotic, breathtaking, and at the same time completely unfreezing imagery characterizing Neshat’s works. Neshat’s cinematic works often contain a desire to involve the viewer both physically and emotionally, and the new VR work further contributes to this.

For additional opening times, see https://viborgkunsthal.viborg.dk/besoeg/aabningstider-og-entre/

Read more about the artist
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/shirin-neshat/

Attendees can  experience the pieces from 10:00 – to 17:30

26-28.09
Voting

29.09 at 19:30 (Doors open)
Award ceremony at VAF Awards

Phenomenal Viborg proudly presents its very own Virtual Museum – a social VR experience that allows you to explore a variety of virtual worlds, together with friends and family. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality and motion tracking technology, the Virtual Museum allows you to explore different magical experiences, in the same physical space. Each floor in the experience has something new to offer, so stay tuned for information on the different experiences that are showcased in this year’s Virtual Museum!

Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR, so the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and makes it more like being in a physical exhibition.

Museum-scale VR
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.

Easy to Use
No experience or special skills required: all you have to do is move around and explore. We don’t use controllers or special interfaces, so anyone (ages 13 and up) can try the experience.

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday: kl 14:00 – 20:00

Age limit: 13 years

Viborg UNESCO Creative City invites all of Denmark and the rest of the world to join in an annual drawing campaign!

Drawing is absolutely fundamental to humankind, regardless of background and origin. The earliest traces of our species are drawings in caves, and most of us draw before we speak.
In Viborg, we have a special and long-standing position of strength in drawing, animation, children’s culture and creativity. We know the value of drawing for children, for young people and adults. Unfortunately, most Danish children stop drawing from the third grade and onwards. This is a problem as we are losing creativity. We strive to change that.

For the last two years Viborg UNESCO Creative City has therefore invited children and young people from all over the world to draw through the global drawing campaign TegnHåb, circling around corona and trust. The ambition is to strengthen our understanding of the value and importance drawing has for children and young people’s creativity and development. Because we have to nourish the passion for drawing.

In the same period, Viborg Municipality created Grønne Sammen (Green Together) – together for a sustainable future – with focus on green transition and sustainability. In this year’s edition, we link the two initiatives, inviting Denmark and the rest of the world to join DrawHope – Green Together 2023 – based on 20 drawing challenges.

This year, we received approx. 1200 drawings from 15 countries spread over five continents, once again making the campaign a global event, and animators in Viborg, Columbia and Georgia are currently working on creating series of animated films based on the drawings. Two animated films are being produced by Multara Al-Ameri, who graduated from The Animation Workshop, and a Colombian animator based on drawings from a 7th grade team in visual arts from Vestre Skole in Viborg and a corresponding team from school in Cali, Columbia. Drawings and animations are shown and projected during VAF in the Music School’s large windows and later in the year in Cali Columbia, York England and in Tbilisi Georgia.

Exhibited in the windows at the Kulturskolen foyer in Gravene, 8800 Viborg

Get a beer at the coolest place in town while you watch amazing animation. You can drop by anytime and watch selected programs from this year’s nominated short films in casual surroundings.

Ølluminati has closed of half of the bar to act as an alternative cinema venue during VAF. During the festival week you can drop by and watch amazing short films while you get a drink. Each night you can experience different programs. Make sure to try one of the annual VAF Beers with labels decorated by VAF Artist Niki Linroth von Bahr, and brewed by Ølluminati super-brewer and owner, Theis Bach Nielsen

• Tuesday – Screening VAF Best Short Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Short Film Award
• Wednesday –  Screening VAF Best Graduation Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Graduation Film. Plus, meet VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, in interview at 8.30 pm
• Thurday  – Screening VAF Best Experimental Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Experimental Short Film Award
• Friday – VAF Artist Short Film – A selection of short films by the VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr

What happens when conditions and circumstances push our will to fight for what’s right for our communities and our world to the breaking point? Mikkel Hørlycks photo series cover migration to Europe, long-running addiction, an orphanage for vulnerable children, the consequences of corona virus, eating disorder and soldiers from Denmark and our allied nations. The common denominator of Hørlyck’s photos is an exploration of the human will to survive, universal emotions connecting the stories of vastly different subjects.

Starting week 40, the exhibition will be shown at Viborg main library, where Mikkel Hørlyck will speak October 11 at 18:30 (more info at viborgbib.dk)

11.-29. september weekdays 08.00-16.00
NB: 27. september 08.00-21.00 & 28. september kl. 08.00-20.00.

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

At the tail end of the Summer of 2023, photography students from Media College Denmark invited citizens of Houlkær to drop by the school’s studio and have their picture taken – lit, composed, and edited as professional photos are. During the VAF events in Houlkær, large scale reproductions of the portraits are exhibited in the city, inviting visitors to reflect on the diversity of the local community as well as what we have in common.

27.-29. september hele døgnet / all hours

Media College Denmark & Viborg Gymnasium, Skaldehøjvej 2-12, 8800 Viborg
Udendørs areal / Outdoors area

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

For VAF 2023 Visuel HF’s 1st year will be animating in colored sand during a five-day workshop with interdisciplinary artist Signe Klejs.

Workshop at seven public locations in the center of Viborg – Mon-Fri at 9 – 15. The works can be experienced around the clock – also after the workshop.

Many people might know Signe Klejs’s light installations on the bridges in Bjerringbro and Aarhus, but at the same time Klejs has over the years created a number of ephemeral works in colored sand – among others for the art museum Brandts in Odense and in the coming six months for the art museum ARoS in Aarhus. See Signe’s previous installations and screen-based works here: www.signeklejs.dk.

Based on the same technique, Visuel HF’s young talents now have the opportunity to make their mark in colored sand and thus add a changing narrative to the selected locations. Common to the works by the students is that they undergo change over time, because even though the material is heavy and sturdy, the patterns in which the young people arrange it are fragile to influences by weather and people passing by. Exactly these entropic, random conditions in the system are investigated in the workshop during VAF.

The Fury

For VAF 2023 Viborg Kunsthal proudly presents the European premiere of The Fury – an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video installation and a never-before-seen 360 video by highly acclaimed Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

International video artist Shirin Neshat has roots in two cultures: the Iranian, which she left at a very young age, and the American, having formed the physical framework of her life. Her new work, The Fury, consists of a Virtual Reality work produced for Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Khora Contemporary and The Animation Workshop. The work is presented as part of the Viborg Animation Festival 2023.

The Fury is a chaotic and fantastic mix of cinematic real time, flashbacks and dream visions, where Neshat uses music and dance to process and convey the trauma of the protagonist. The work depicts an Iranian woman obsessively dancing an erotic dance to beautiful Persian music in the privacy of her small apartment and out onto the streets of New York. The more she dances, the more she falls into a trance, as if there were nothing between her body and the music.

The work explores how VR can expand and amplify the characteristically exotic, breathtaking, and at the same time completely unfreezing imagery characterizing Neshat’s works. Neshat’s cinematic works often contain a desire to involve the viewer both physically and emotionally, and the new VR work further contributes to this.

For additional opening times, see https://viborgkunsthal.viborg.dk/besoeg/aabningstider-og-entre/

Read more about the artist
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/shirin-neshat/

Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly is a journey where we follow a butterfly through a contemporary mask of happiness.

This mask is shiny and golden, plastic and metal – but behind it is a world where nature is decaying, climate is drastically changing, the fever of revolution is boiling and the planet we live on is reinventing itself. The experience invites you to rediscover this world and plant seeds from the past, in order to contribute to a hopeful future. Abner Preis is an artist and storyteller who conveys a hopeful message with his colourful, humorous and critical installations. He combines simple drawings and cheerful, collage-like backgrounds with experience and interaction in digital worlds.

For Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly, Abner developed an Augmented Reality installation where the participant is lead by an augmented butterfly through a world that is influenced by humans, but eventually gets taken over by technological butterflies, bees and low poly flowers. The AR installation provides access to a world where urgent issues such as climate change, the refugee crisis, economic recession and consumerism become almost tangible.

Abner Preis is a story-teller whose work is rooted in personal aspirations to give one hope in a situation that seems hopeless, to transfer the ability to laugh at sadness, and to seduce viewers into seeing beauty in bleak objects by offering compositions that play to emotion before aesthetics. What his extensive research, sensitivity and awareness provide is the simple and extremely difficult ability to tell a story with visuals that can be felt before they are understood. You can take it in at first glance, but generally don’t bargain for what happens once you’ve opened the door. What you see is what you get. There’s just a whole lot stacked beneath that.

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.

Phenomenal Viborg proudly presents its very own Virtual Museum – a social VR experience that allows you to explore a variety of virtual worlds, together with friends and family. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality and motion tracking technology, the Virtual Museum allows you to explore different magical experiences, in the same physical space. Each floor in the experience has something new to offer, so stay tuned for information on the different experiences that are showcased in this year’s Virtual Museum!

Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR, so the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and makes it more like being in a physical exhibition.

Museum-scale VR
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.

Easy to Use
No experience or special skills required: all you have to do is move around and explore. We don’t use controllers or special interfaces, so anyone (ages 13 and up) can try the experience.

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday: kl 14:00 – 20:00

Age limit: 13 years

Body Time is an animation project for kids and families made in collaboration with the Belgian artist Katrien Oosterlinck. An animation film and a hoodie with coloured shapes guide your hands to make contact, to create contact. Come and try a different experience of calmness, presence and togetherness.

Program: 

Wednesday 27/9

• kl 16.00 – 16.45

Thursday 28/9

• kl 16.00 – 16.45

Saturday 30/9

• kl 10.00 – 10-45
• kl 11.00 – 11.45
• kl 13.00 – 13.45
• kl 14.00 – 14.45

The movers and shakers of Houlkær open their doors for a lovely afternoon of activities for attendees of all ages. Following a session of communal dining and song, participants are invited to explore exhibitions, installations, workshops and more in the city. As the light fades, a new “burning sculpture” is unveiled, and photos and drawing made by students at Houlkær-based Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium are projected at scale.

27. september 16.00-21.00
Forskellige steder i Houlkær / Various locations in Houlkær

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

Check the full programme for Houlkær by Night here

Viborg UNESCO Creative City invites all of Denmark and the rest of the world to join in an annual drawing campaign!

Drawing is absolutely fundamental to humankind, regardless of background and origin. The earliest traces of our species are drawings in caves, and most of us draw before we speak.
In Viborg, we have a special and long-standing position of strength in drawing, animation, children’s culture and creativity. We know the value of drawing for children, for young people and adults. Unfortunately, most Danish children stop drawing from the third grade and onwards. This is a problem as we are losing creativity. We strive to change that.

For the last two years Viborg UNESCO Creative City has therefore invited children and young people from all over the world to draw through the global drawing campaign TegnHåb, circling around corona and trust. The ambition is to strengthen our understanding of the value and importance drawing has for children and young people’s creativity and development. Because we have to nourish the passion for drawing.

In the same period, Viborg Municipality created Grønne Sammen (Green Together) – together for a sustainable future – with focus on green transition and sustainability. In this year’s edition, we link the two initiatives, inviting Denmark and the rest of the world to join DrawHope – Green Together 2023 – based on 20 drawing challenges.

This year, we received approx. 1200 drawings from 15 countries spread over five continents, once again making the campaign a global event, and animators in Viborg, Columbia and Georgia are currently working on creating series of animated films based on the drawings. Two animated films are being produced by Multara Al-Ameri, who graduated from The Animation Workshop, and a Colombian animator based on drawings from a 7th grade team in visual arts from Vestre Skole in Viborg and a corresponding team from school in Cali, Columbia. Drawings and animations are shown and projected during VAF in the Music School’s large windows and later in the year in Cali Columbia, York England and in Tbilisi Georgia.

Exhibited in the windows at the Kulturskolen foyer in Gravene, 8800 Viborg

Get a beer at the coolest place in town while you watch amazing animation. You can drop by anytime and watch selected programs from this year’s nominated short films in casual surroundings.

Ølluminati has closed of half of the bar to act as an alternative cinema venue during VAF. During the festival week you can drop by and watch amazing short films while you get a drink. Each night you can experience different programs. Make sure to try one of the annual VAF Beers with labels decorated by VAF Artist Niki Linroth von Bahr, and brewed by Ølluminati super-brewer and owner, Theis Bach Nielsen

• Tuesday – Screening VAF Best Short Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Short Film Award
• Wednesday –  Screening VAF Best Graduation Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Graduation Film. Plus, meet VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, in interview at 8.30 pm
• Thurday  – Screening VAF Best Experimental Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Experimental Short Film Award
• Friday – VAF Artist Short Film – A selection of short films by the VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr

What happens when conditions and circumstances push our will to fight for what’s right for our communities and our world to the breaking point? Mikkel Hørlycks photo series cover migration to Europe, long-running addiction, an orphanage for vulnerable children, the consequences of corona virus, eating disorder and soldiers from Denmark and our allied nations. The common denominator of Hørlyck’s photos is an exploration of the human will to survive, universal emotions connecting the stories of vastly different subjects.

Starting week 40, the exhibition will be shown at Viborg main library, where Mikkel Hørlyck will speak October 11 at 18:30 (more info at viborgbib.dk)

11.-29. september weekdays 08.00-16.00
NB: 27. september 08.00-21.00 & 28. september kl. 08.00-20.00.

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

At the tail end of the Summer of 2023, photography students from Media College Denmark invited citizens of Houlkær to drop by the school’s studio and have their picture taken – lit, composed, and edited as professional photos are. During the VAF events in Houlkær, large scale reproductions of the portraits are exhibited in the city, inviting visitors to reflect on the diversity of the local community as well as what we have in common.

27.-29. september hele døgnet / all hours

Media College Denmark & Viborg Gymnasium, Skaldehøjvej 2-12, 8800 Viborg
Udendørs areal / Outdoors area

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

For VAF 2023 Visuel HF’s 1st year will be animating in colored sand during a five-day workshop with interdisciplinary artist Signe Klejs.

Workshop at seven public locations in the center of Viborg – Mon-Fri at 9 – 15. The works can be experienced around the clock – also after the workshop.

Many people might know Signe Klejs’s light installations on the bridges in Bjerringbro and Aarhus, but at the same time Klejs has over the years created a number of ephemeral works in colored sand – among others for the art museum Brandts in Odense and in the coming six months for the art museum ARoS in Aarhus. See Signe’s previous installations and screen-based works here: www.signeklejs.dk.

Based on the same technique, Visuel HF’s young talents now have the opportunity to make their mark in colored sand and thus add a changing narrative to the selected locations. Common to the works by the students is that they undergo change over time, because even though the material is heavy and sturdy, the patterns in which the young people arrange it are fragile to influences by weather and people passing by. Exactly these entropic, random conditions in the system are investigated in the workshop during VAF.

The Fury

For VAF 2023 Viborg Kunsthal proudly presents the European premiere of The Fury – an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video installation and a never-before-seen 360 video by highly acclaimed Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

International video artist Shirin Neshat has roots in two cultures: the Iranian, which she left at a very young age, and the American, having formed the physical framework of her life. Her new work, The Fury, consists of a Virtual Reality work produced for Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Khora Contemporary and The Animation Workshop. The work is presented as part of the Viborg Animation Festival 2023.

The Fury is a chaotic and fantastic mix of cinematic real time, flashbacks and dream visions, where Neshat uses music and dance to process and convey the trauma of the protagonist. The work depicts an Iranian woman obsessively dancing an erotic dance to beautiful Persian music in the privacy of her small apartment and out onto the streets of New York. The more she dances, the more she falls into a trance, as if there were nothing between her body and the music.

The work explores how VR can expand and amplify the characteristically exotic, breathtaking, and at the same time completely unfreezing imagery characterizing Neshat’s works. Neshat’s cinematic works often contain a desire to involve the viewer both physically and emotionally, and the new VR work further contributes to this.

For additional opening times, see https://viborgkunsthal.viborg.dk/besoeg/aabningstider-og-entre/

Read more about the artist
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/shirin-neshat/

Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly is a journey where we follow a butterfly through a contemporary mask of happiness.

This mask is shiny and golden, plastic and metal – but behind it is a world where nature is decaying, climate is drastically changing, the fever of revolution is boiling and the planet we live on is reinventing itself. The experience invites you to rediscover this world and plant seeds from the past, in order to contribute to a hopeful future. Abner Preis is an artist and storyteller who conveys a hopeful message with his colourful, humorous and critical installations. He combines simple drawings and cheerful, collage-like backgrounds with experience and interaction in digital worlds.

For Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly, Abner developed an Augmented Reality installation where the participant is lead by an augmented butterfly through a world that is influenced by humans, but eventually gets taken over by technological butterflies, bees and low poly flowers. The AR installation provides access to a world where urgent issues such as climate change, the refugee crisis, economic recession and consumerism become almost tangible.

Abner Preis is a story-teller whose work is rooted in personal aspirations to give one hope in a situation that seems hopeless, to transfer the ability to laugh at sadness, and to seduce viewers into seeing beauty in bleak objects by offering compositions that play to emotion before aesthetics. What his extensive research, sensitivity and awareness provide is the simple and extremely difficult ability to tell a story with visuals that can be felt before they are understood. You can take it in at first glance, but generally don’t bargain for what happens once you’ve opened the door. What you see is what you get. There’s just a whole lot stacked beneath that.

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.

Insights on the current development: New technologies, new consumption patterns, new expectations, new ambitions and new generations. Everything impacts the future media landscape, and therefore becomes important for the industry producing content from fact to fiction, and advertisement for the digital platforms. The goal is to learn about both the challenges and the opportunities the industry faces today.

Program

13.00 Welcome
By Mads Schmidt Haagensen, Media College Denmark

13.10 The media landscape of the future
Sofie Hvitved and Bugge Holm Hansen, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, who give their take on how the media landscape will change over the coming years. How does the media consumer of the future behave? What kind of content will dominate? What will AI mean? And what about democracy, representation and public service?

14.00 The ballad about ‘Kolonihaven’
‘Everything is complete; whimsically and elegantly delivered.’ That’s what the film magazine EKKO writes in its review of probably the most talked about documentary series, Kolonihaven, at the moment. Meet producer Majbrit Oddershede Pedersen and photographer Frederik Thyberg in a Q&A, which, supplemented with selected clips, examines the grip of the series and, not least, perspectives for future Public Service TV.

15.00 Coffee break

15.15 AI – is already here!
Artificial intelligence takes up a lot of space in the debate, both in relation to future media production and how we can best educate for the future.
Hear how Media College Denmark uses AI and see examples of how far we are in relation to programming and image processing.

15.45 Debate: Implications for education
What should we prioritize when training future employees in the media industries? Panel debate and three points on the way forward for the school, the industry and the programmes.

16.30 Screening and Q&A (TBC)

Phenomenal Viborg proudly presents its very own Virtual Museum – a social VR experience that allows you to explore a variety of virtual worlds, together with friends and family. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality and motion tracking technology, the Virtual Museum allows you to explore different magical experiences, in the same physical space. Each floor in the experience has something new to offer, so stay tuned for information on the different experiences that are showcased in this year’s Virtual Museum!

Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR, so the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and makes it more like being in a physical exhibition.

Museum-scale VR
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.

Easy to Use
No experience or special skills required: all you have to do is move around and explore. We don’t use controllers or special interfaces, so anyone (ages 13 and up) can try the experience.

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday: kl 14:00 – 20:00

Age limit: 13 years

Body Time is an animation project for kids and families made in collaboration with the Belgian artist Katrien Oosterlinck. An animation film and a hoodie with coloured shapes guide your hands to make contact, to create contact. Come and try a different experience of calmness, presence and togetherness.

Program: 

Wednesday 27/9

• kl 16.00 – 16.45

Thursday 28/9

• kl 16.00 – 16.45

Saturday 30/9

• kl 10.00 – 10-45
• kl 11.00 – 11.45
• kl 13.00 – 13.45
• kl 14.00 – 14.45

Come experience the future of Viborg district Houlkær as seen through the eyes of local students and pupils! Students at Viborg Gymnasium contribute architectural models, while middle/high school pupils focus on interactive representations. During the vernissage, you can voice your opinion and vote for the models and elements you feel are the best fit for Houlkær

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

Viborg UNESCO Creative City invites all of Denmark and the rest of the world to join in an annual drawing campaign!

Drawing is absolutely fundamental to humankind, regardless of background and origin. The earliest traces of our species are drawings in caves, and most of us draw before we speak.
In Viborg, we have a special and long-standing position of strength in drawing, animation, children’s culture and creativity. We know the value of drawing for children, for young people and adults. Unfortunately, most Danish children stop drawing from the third grade and onwards. This is a problem as we are losing creativity. We strive to change that.

For the last two years Viborg UNESCO Creative City has therefore invited children and young people from all over the world to draw through the global drawing campaign TegnHåb, circling around corona and trust. The ambition is to strengthen our understanding of the value and importance drawing has for children and young people’s creativity and development. Because we have to nourish the passion for drawing.

In the same period, Viborg Municipality created Grønne Sammen (Green Together) – together for a sustainable future – with focus on green transition and sustainability. In this year’s edition, we link the two initiatives, inviting Denmark and the rest of the world to join DrawHope – Green Together 2023 – based on 20 drawing challenges.

This year, we received approx. 1200 drawings from 15 countries spread over five continents, once again making the campaign a global event, and animators in Viborg, Columbia and Georgia are currently working on creating series of animated films based on the drawings. Two animated films are being produced by Multara Al-Ameri, who graduated from The Animation Workshop, and a Colombian animator based on drawings from a 7th grade team in visual arts from Vestre Skole in Viborg and a corresponding team from school in Cali, Columbia. Drawings and animations are shown and projected during VAF in the Music School’s large windows and later in the year in Cali Columbia, York England and in Tbilisi Georgia.

Exhibited in the windows at the Kulturskolen foyer in Gravene, 8800 Viborg

Get a beer at the coolest place in town while you watch amazing animation. You can drop by anytime and watch selected programs from this year’s nominated short films in casual surroundings.

Ølluminati has closed of half of the bar to act as an alternative cinema venue during VAF. During the festival week you can drop by and watch amazing short films while you get a drink. Each night you can experience different programs. Make sure to try one of the annual VAF Beers with labels decorated by VAF Artist Niki Linroth von Bahr, and brewed by Ølluminati super-brewer and owner, Theis Bach Nielsen

• Tuesday – Screening VAF Best Short Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Short Film Award
• Wednesday –  Screening VAF Best Graduation Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Graduation Film. Plus, meet VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, in interview at 8.30 pm
• Thurday  – Screening VAF Best Experimental Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Experimental Short Film Award
• Friday – VAF Artist Short Film – A selection of short films by the VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr

What does a …
proud but good-natured and loyal warthog sounds like, a daydreaming prince, who falls in love with a woman’s voice, a very insecure and afraid little piglet, a boy in a secret laboratory, a dog chasing ghosts or a musclehead with pointy blonde hair all sound like? Lars Thiesgaard knows. The man behind several Danish voices in cartoons. He can do between 20 and 30 different voices and also directs the Danish dubbed versions of famous cartoons and films in animation.

Join an exciting and interesting talk with perhaps the most famous voice in Denmark. You will see clips from the studio, showing Lars at work as a dubber as well as actors being directed by Lars. You will also experience Lars dubbing a cartoon with different voices live on stage.

The event is in Danish

What happens when conditions and circumstances push our will to fight for what’s right for our communities and our world to the breaking point? Mikkel Hørlycks photo series cover migration to Europe, long-running addiction, an orphanage for vulnerable children, the consequences of corona virus, eating disorder and soldiers from Denmark and our allied nations. The common denominator of Hørlyck’s photos is an exploration of the human will to survive, universal emotions connecting the stories of vastly different subjects.

Starting week 40, the exhibition will be shown at Viborg main library, where Mikkel Hørlyck will speak October 11 at 18:30 (more info at viborgbib.dk)

11.-29. september weekdays 08.00-16.00
NB: 27. september 08.00-21.00 & 28. september kl. 08.00-20.00.

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

At the tail end of the Summer of 2023, photography students from Media College Denmark invited citizens of Houlkær to drop by the school’s studio and have their picture taken – lit, composed, and edited as professional photos are. During the VAF events in Houlkær, large scale reproductions of the portraits are exhibited in the city, inviting visitors to reflect on the diversity of the local community as well as what we have in common.

27.-29. september hele døgnet / all hours

Media College Denmark & Viborg Gymnasium, Skaldehøjvej 2-12, 8800 Viborg
Udendørs areal / Outdoors area

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

Kick off your VAF friday in style and Join us for a casual networking event! meet the creative forces of viborg, mingle with the vaf guests, jury and speakers and enjoy a croissant & a glass of bubbles.

For VAF 2023 Visuel HF’s 1st year will be animating in colored sand during a five-day workshop with interdisciplinary artist Signe Klejs.

Workshop at seven public locations in the center of Viborg – Mon-Fri at 9 – 15. The works can be experienced around the clock – also after the workshop.

Many people might know Signe Klejs’s light installations on the bridges in Bjerringbro and Aarhus, but at the same time Klejs has over the years created a number of ephemeral works in colored sand – among others for the art museum Brandts in Odense and in the coming six months for the art museum ARoS in Aarhus. See Signe’s previous installations and screen-based works here: www.signeklejs.dk.

Based on the same technique, Visuel HF’s young talents now have the opportunity to make their mark in colored sand and thus add a changing narrative to the selected locations. Common to the works by the students is that they undergo change over time, because even though the material is heavy and sturdy, the patterns in which the young people arrange it are fragile to influences by weather and people passing by. Exactly these entropic, random conditions in the system are investigated in the workshop during VAF.

The Fury

For VAF 2023 Viborg Kunsthal proudly presents the European premiere of The Fury – an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video installation and a never-before-seen 360 video by highly acclaimed Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

International video artist Shirin Neshat has roots in two cultures: the Iranian, which she left at a very young age, and the American, having formed the physical framework of her life. Her new work, The Fury, consists of a Virtual Reality work produced for Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Khora Contemporary and The Animation Workshop. The work is presented as part of the Viborg Animation Festival 2023.

The Fury is a chaotic and fantastic mix of cinematic real time, flashbacks and dream visions, where Neshat uses music and dance to process and convey the trauma of the protagonist. The work depicts an Iranian woman obsessively dancing an erotic dance to beautiful Persian music in the privacy of her small apartment and out onto the streets of New York. The more she dances, the more she falls into a trance, as if there were nothing between her body and the music.

The work explores how VR can expand and amplify the characteristically exotic, breathtaking, and at the same time completely unfreezing imagery characterizing Neshat’s works. Neshat’s cinematic works often contain a desire to involve the viewer both physically and emotionally, and the new VR work further contributes to this.

For additional opening times, see https://viborgkunsthal.viborg.dk/besoeg/aabningstider-og-entre/

Read more about the artist
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/shirin-neshat/

Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly is a journey where we follow a butterfly through a contemporary mask of happiness.

This mask is shiny and golden, plastic and metal – but behind it is a world where nature is decaying, climate is drastically changing, the fever of revolution is boiling and the planet we live on is reinventing itself. The experience invites you to rediscover this world and plant seeds from the past, in order to contribute to a hopeful future. Abner Preis is an artist and storyteller who conveys a hopeful message with his colourful, humorous and critical installations. He combines simple drawings and cheerful, collage-like backgrounds with experience and interaction in digital worlds.

For Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly, Abner developed an Augmented Reality installation where the participant is lead by an augmented butterfly through a world that is influenced by humans, but eventually gets taken over by technological butterflies, bees and low poly flowers. The AR installation provides access to a world where urgent issues such as climate change, the refugee crisis, economic recession and consumerism become almost tangible.

Abner Preis is a story-teller whose work is rooted in personal aspirations to give one hope in a situation that seems hopeless, to transfer the ability to laugh at sadness, and to seduce viewers into seeing beauty in bleak objects by offering compositions that play to emotion before aesthetics. What his extensive research, sensitivity and awareness provide is the simple and extremely difficult ability to tell a story with visuals that can be felt before they are understood. You can take it in at first glance, but generally don’t bargain for what happens once you’ve opened the door. What you see is what you get. There’s just a whole lot stacked beneath that.

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.

Phenomenal Viborg proudly presents its very own Virtual Museum – a social VR experience that allows you to explore a variety of virtual worlds, together with friends and family. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality and motion tracking technology, the Virtual Museum allows you to explore different magical experiences, in the same physical space. Each floor in the experience has something new to offer, so stay tuned for information on the different experiences that are showcased in this year’s Virtual Museum!

Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR, so the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and makes it more like being in a physical exhibition.

Museum-scale VR
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.

Easy to Use
No experience or special skills required: all you have to do is move around and explore. We don’t use controllers or special interfaces, so anyone (ages 13 and up) can try the experience.

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday: kl 14:00 – 20:00

Age limit: 13 years

We round off festival events in Houlkær with a cozy Friday café for everyone interested, where you can bring new life to tattered clothes and broken electronics while enjoying a lovely beverage.

Coffee is brewing and delicacies are ready for consumption when we celebrate three days of VAF events centered around creativity and visual expression in Houlkær. In collaboration with Aktivitetshuset, Bæredygtigt Viborg, and Naturambassaden, we have set up a small repair and redesign department in the café area – so bring electronics, clothes, and textiles in need of a new lease on life; we’ll be standing by with help and inspiration.

Coop365discount in Houlkær provides coffee, squash, and cake.

Outdoor area at Media College Denmark og Viborg Gymnasium, Skaldehøjvej 2-12, 8800 Viborg

Houlkær by Heart is organized as part of and in collaboration with Viborg Animation Festival. During the festival a special venue has been established in the Houlkær district, which, based on Media College Denmark and Viborg Gymnasium, embraces visual creativity in the broadest sense.

Viborg UNESCO Creative City invites all of Denmark and the rest of the world to join in an annual drawing campaign!

Drawing is absolutely fundamental to humankind, regardless of background and origin. The earliest traces of our species are drawings in caves, and most of us draw before we speak.
In Viborg, we have a special and long-standing position of strength in drawing, animation, children’s culture and creativity. We know the value of drawing for children, for young people and adults. Unfortunately, most Danish children stop drawing from the third grade and onwards. This is a problem as we are losing creativity. We strive to change that.

For the last two years Viborg UNESCO Creative City has therefore invited children and young people from all over the world to draw through the global drawing campaign TegnHåb, circling around corona and trust. The ambition is to strengthen our understanding of the value and importance drawing has for children and young people’s creativity and development. Because we have to nourish the passion for drawing.

In the same period, Viborg Municipality created Grønne Sammen (Green Together) – together for a sustainable future – with focus on green transition and sustainability. In this year’s edition, we link the two initiatives, inviting Denmark and the rest of the world to join DrawHope – Green Together 2023 – based on 20 drawing challenges.

This year, we received approx. 1200 drawings from 15 countries spread over five continents, once again making the campaign a global event, and animators in Viborg, Columbia and Georgia are currently working on creating series of animated films based on the drawings. Two animated films are being produced by Multara Al-Ameri, who graduated from The Animation Workshop, and a Colombian animator based on drawings from a 7th grade team in visual arts from Vestre Skole in Viborg and a corresponding team from school in Cali, Columbia. Drawings and animations are shown and projected during VAF in the Music School’s large windows and later in the year in Cali Columbia, York England and in Tbilisi Georgia.

Exhibited in the windows at the Kulturskolen foyer in Gravene, 8800 Viborg

Get a beer at the coolest place in town while you watch amazing animation. You can drop by anytime and watch selected programs from this year’s nominated short films in casual surroundings.

Ølluminati has closed of half of the bar to act as an alternative cinema venue during VAF. During the festival week you can drop by and watch amazing short films while you get a drink. Each night you can experience different programs. Make sure to try one of the annual VAF Beers with labels decorated by VAF Artist Niki Linroth von Bahr, and brewed by Ølluminati super-brewer and owner, Theis Bach Nielsen

• Tuesday – Screening VAF Best Short Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Short Film Award
• Wednesday –  Screening VAF Best Graduation Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Graduation Film. Plus, meet VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, in interview at 8.30 pm
• Thurday  – Screening VAF Best Experimental Film – All the nominated titles for this year’s VAF Best Experimental Short Film Award
• Friday – VAF Artist Short Film – A selection of short films by the VAF Artist 2023, Niki Lindroth von Bahr

VAF wants to give thanks to all the creators of the festival and celebrate the courage they show by sharing their work with the festival audience. The nominated films will be judged by the professional juries of 2023, who will also be announcing the winners. 
 
VAF receives animated films from filmmakers from all over the world with strong messages and stories that illuminate current themes, trends and challenges. These are films that you would not necessarily be able to see in the cinema or on various streaming services. That’s why the VAF Award nominees need to be celebrated as unique film experiences, whether it’s short films or feature films. We are always deeply grateful for the filmmaker’s courage and creative urge to create such amazing, animated experiences. 
 
The awards of 2023 is: 
 
VAF Best Feature 
VAF Best Short 
VAF Best Experimental 
VAF Best Graduation Film 
VAF Best Commissioned Work  
Open Workshop Best Danish Animated Short 
ANIMOK Youth Jury 
VAF Diversity Film 
ANIDOX:VR Award 

Read more about the awards and jury here

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

Body Time is an animation project for kids and families made in collaboration with the Belgian artist Katrien Oosterlinck. An animation film and a hoodie with coloured shapes guide your hands to make contact, to create contact. Come and try a different experience of calmness, presence and togetherness.

Program: 

Wednesday 27/9

• kl 16.00 – 16.45

Thursday 28/9

• kl 16.00 – 16.45

Saturday 30/9

• kl 10.00 – 10-45
• kl 11.00 – 11.45
• kl 13.00 – 13.45
• kl 14.00 – 14.45

The Fury

For VAF 2023 Viborg Kunsthal proudly presents the European premiere of The Fury – an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video installation and a never-before-seen 360 video by highly acclaimed Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

International video artist Shirin Neshat has roots in two cultures: the Iranian, which she left at a very young age, and the American, having formed the physical framework of her life. Her new work, The Fury, consists of a Virtual Reality work produced for Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Khora Contemporary and The Animation Workshop. The work is presented as part of the Viborg Animation Festival 2023.

The Fury is a chaotic and fantastic mix of cinematic real time, flashbacks and dream visions, where Neshat uses music and dance to process and convey the trauma of the protagonist. The work depicts an Iranian woman obsessively dancing an erotic dance to beautiful Persian music in the privacy of her small apartment and out onto the streets of New York. The more she dances, the more she falls into a trance, as if there were nothing between her body and the music.

The work explores how VR can expand and amplify the characteristically exotic, breathtaking, and at the same time completely unfreezing imagery characterizing Neshat’s works. Neshat’s cinematic works often contain a desire to involve the viewer both physically and emotionally, and the new VR work further contributes to this.

For additional opening times, see https://viborgkunsthal.viborg.dk/besoeg/aabningstider-og-entre/

Read more about the artist
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/shirin-neshat/

Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly is a journey where we follow a butterfly through a contemporary mask of happiness.

This mask is shiny and golden, plastic and metal – but behind it is a world where nature is decaying, climate is drastically changing, the fever of revolution is boiling and the planet we live on is reinventing itself. The experience invites you to rediscover this world and plant seeds from the past, in order to contribute to a hopeful future. Abner Preis is an artist and storyteller who conveys a hopeful message with his colourful, humorous and critical installations. He combines simple drawings and cheerful, collage-like backgrounds with experience and interaction in digital worlds.

For Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly, Abner developed an Augmented Reality installation where the participant is lead by an augmented butterfly through a world that is influenced by humans, but eventually gets taken over by technological butterflies, bees and low poly flowers. The AR installation provides access to a world where urgent issues such as climate change, the refugee crisis, economic recession and consumerism become almost tangible.

Abner Preis is a story-teller whose work is rooted in personal aspirations to give one hope in a situation that seems hopeless, to transfer the ability to laugh at sadness, and to seduce viewers into seeing beauty in bleak objects by offering compositions that play to emotion before aesthetics. What his extensive research, sensitivity and awareness provide is the simple and extremely difficult ability to tell a story with visuals that can be felt before they are understood. You can take it in at first glance, but generally don’t bargain for what happens once you’ve opened the door. What you see is what you get. There’s just a whole lot stacked beneath that.

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.

Phenomenal Viborg proudly presents its very own Virtual Museum – a social VR experience that allows you to explore a variety of virtual worlds, together with friends and family. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality and motion tracking technology, the Virtual Museum allows you to explore different magical experiences, in the same physical space. Each floor in the experience has something new to offer, so stay tuned for information on the different experiences that are showcased in this year’s Virtual Museum!

Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR, so the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and makes it more like being in a physical exhibition.

Museum-scale VR
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.

Easy to Use
No experience or special skills required: all you have to do is move around and explore. We don’t use controllers or special interfaces, so anyone (ages 13 and up) can try the experience.

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday: kl 14:00 – 20:00

Age limit: 13 years

Viborg UNESCO Creative City invites all of Denmark and the rest of the world to join in an annual drawing campaign!

Drawing is absolutely fundamental to humankind, regardless of background and origin. The earliest traces of our species are drawings in caves, and most of us draw before we speak.
In Viborg, we have a special and long-standing position of strength in drawing, animation, children’s culture and creativity. We know the value of drawing for children, for young people and adults. Unfortunately, most Danish children stop drawing from the third grade and onwards. This is a problem as we are losing creativity. We strive to change that.

For the last two years Viborg UNESCO Creative City has therefore invited children and young people from all over the world to draw through the global drawing campaign TegnHåb, circling around corona and trust. The ambition is to strengthen our understanding of the value and importance drawing has for children and young people’s creativity and development. Because we have to nourish the passion for drawing.

In the same period, Viborg Municipality created Grønne Sammen (Green Together) – together for a sustainable future – with focus on green transition and sustainability. In this year’s edition, we link the two initiatives, inviting Denmark and the rest of the world to join DrawHope – Green Together 2023 – based on 20 drawing challenges.

This year, we received approx. 1200 drawings from 15 countries spread over five continents, once again making the campaign a global event, and animators in Viborg, Columbia and Georgia are currently working on creating series of animated films based on the drawings. Two animated films are being produced by Multara Al-Ameri, who graduated from The Animation Workshop, and a Colombian animator based on drawings from a 7th grade team in visual arts from Vestre Skole in Viborg and a corresponding team from school in Cali, Columbia. Drawings and animations are shown and projected during VAF in the Music School’s large windows and later in the year in Cali Columbia, York England and in Tbilisi Georgia.

Exhibited in the windows at the Kulturskolen foyer in Gravene, 8800 Viborg

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.

This year from week 39 up to and including 42, Viborg Animation Festival holds a Treasure Hunt for the entire family. Around Viborg’s center you can find pictures of animal-human like creatures who are visiting from their stop-motion universe made by this year’s VAF Artist: Niki Lindroth von Bahr.
Come along on a breezy walk and try to find the different animals around on the streets and the shops.

Keep a cool mind and have a sharp eye for the details because it is exactly the details you should be looking for to answer the questions for each picture. When you have answered all the questions a VAF prize awaits!

Do you want to create animation yourselves? Visit VAF in week 39 and go for the ANIMNOK childrens creative workshop in Student House or dive down in to marvelous Animanimals-univers in the Tinghallen foyer.

Where do I get the Scavenger map?

Get a physical copy of the Scavenger map at Tinghallen during the festival OR save the online version above.

THE GARDEN – ceramic mythologies in the open

Exhibition in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard – free access around the clock.

Vernissage Thursday 21 September at 14 in the museum’s courtyard.

During late summer Visuel HF’s 3rd year students have shaped, fired and glazed ceramic sculptures based on a staged mythology in the space between what exists and what does not exist…
Under the guidance of ceramicist Christel Bækgaard and teacher at Visuel HF, Iben Lindebjerg, the young people create an outdoor, mythological universe, which can be experienced in the Skovgaard Museum courtyard during VAF.

About VISUAL HF
Visuel HF is a 3-year combined youth education at The Animation Workshop/
VIA University College and Viborg Gymnasium, where the young people get a high school diploma over the course of three years
HF education combined with a basic visual education in e.g. visual arts, graphic storytelling, animation and photography. Read more at www.visuelhf.dk.

The Fury

For VAF 2023 Viborg Kunsthal proudly presents the European premiere of The Fury – an exhibition consisting of a two-channel video installation and a never-before-seen 360 video by highly acclaimed Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

International video artist Shirin Neshat has roots in two cultures: the Iranian, which she left at a very young age, and the American, having formed the physical framework of her life. Her new work, The Fury, consists of a Virtual Reality work produced for Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Khora Contemporary and The Animation Workshop. The work is presented as part of the Viborg Animation Festival 2023.

The Fury is a chaotic and fantastic mix of cinematic real time, flashbacks and dream visions, where Neshat uses music and dance to process and convey the trauma of the protagonist. The work depicts an Iranian woman obsessively dancing an erotic dance to beautiful Persian music in the privacy of her small apartment and out onto the streets of New York. The more she dances, the more she falls into a trance, as if there were nothing between her body and the music.

The work explores how VR can expand and amplify the characteristically exotic, breathtaking, and at the same time completely unfreezing imagery characterizing Neshat’s works. Neshat’s cinematic works often contain a desire to involve the viewer both physically and emotionally, and the new VR work further contributes to this.

For additional opening times, see https://viborgkunsthal.viborg.dk/besoeg/aabningstider-og-entre/

Read more about the artist
https://nmwa.org/art/artists/shirin-neshat/

Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly is a journey where we follow a butterfly through a contemporary mask of happiness.

This mask is shiny and golden, plastic and metal – but behind it is a world where nature is decaying, climate is drastically changing, the fever of revolution is boiling and the planet we live on is reinventing itself. The experience invites you to rediscover this world and plant seeds from the past, in order to contribute to a hopeful future. Abner Preis is an artist and storyteller who conveys a hopeful message with his colourful, humorous and critical installations. He combines simple drawings and cheerful, collage-like backgrounds with experience and interaction in digital worlds.

For Underneath the Wings of a Butterfly, Abner developed an Augmented Reality installation where the participant is lead by an augmented butterfly through a world that is influenced by humans, but eventually gets taken over by technological butterflies, bees and low poly flowers. The AR installation provides access to a world where urgent issues such as climate change, the refugee crisis, economic recession and consumerism become almost tangible.

Abner Preis is a story-teller whose work is rooted in personal aspirations to give one hope in a situation that seems hopeless, to transfer the ability to laugh at sadness, and to seduce viewers into seeing beauty in bleak objects by offering compositions that play to emotion before aesthetics. What his extensive research, sensitivity and awareness provide is the simple and extremely difficult ability to tell a story with visuals that can be felt before they are understood. You can take it in at first glance, but generally don’t bargain for what happens once you’ve opened the door. What you see is what you get. There’s just a whole lot stacked beneath that.

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.

How do you look when you look at someone you love?

This is explored in the installation People We Love, created by British artist Kit Monkman. The work shows a series of moving and intense video portraits of people looking at a picture of someone they love. A picture that we as viewers will never see.

As audience, we become co-creators of the work, as our interpretation of the facial expressions of those portrayed becomes part of the experience. The artwork is created between the viewer, the visible portrait and the invisible image reflected in the gaze and facial expression.

In portrait art, the artists often desire to show not only the exterior, but also the interior and the personality of the person being portrayed. This ambition becomes very clear in People We Love. The work invites us to look with empathy and read the emotions of the portrayed through the micro-expressions of the face. How is love reflected in looks and facial expressions? And what kind of love is it? Are the loving feelings linked to joy, sadness, tenderness, infatuation or desire? At the same time, the work gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we ourselves look when we look at someone we love. Or how our loved ones look when they think of us.

On five floor-mounted, beautifully lit high-resolution screens, installed in the crypt in Viborg Cathedral, People We Love presents portraits of local residents. Each person gazing at a image of someone they love or loved. An image the viewers never see. We feel untold stories as the faces tell the story of someone the participants love and care about. This community-inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA), has toured internationally (York, England and Pittsburgh, USA) and has been shown in a smaller version at Viborg Kunsthal with people filmed in England.

In the version presented in Viborg Cathedral, residents from Viborg participate in this global work of art. The work presents a contemporary and modern take on portraits and, not least, celebrates the greatest treasure of human life, love. The participants were filmed during Snapsting in Viborg, June 2023. The work will have its world premiere in connection with Viborg Animation Festival 2023, week 39 2023.