VAF Culture

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 Mullah Redux

The exhibition The Mullah Redux by Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket is the second exhibition in the newly established collaboration between the three institutions Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg Animation Festival and Art Hub Copenhagen. The project has been initiated based on a common desire to create visibility and expand knowledge of current visual artists among new target audiences across the country.

The exhibition is part of a larger collaboration between Art Hub Copenhagen, Viborg Animation Festival and Viborg Kunsthal.

Download press release here

In collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen and Viborg Animation Festival, Viborg Kunsthal facilitates a conversation and dissemination event called Free Lunch on Tuesday 27 September.
Here you can meet Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket in a conversation about the exhibition.

Read more about ticket booking on Viborg Kunsthal’s website

About the artists:

Masar Sohail (1982) is a Danish-Iraqi visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Copenhagen. He is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and is has created a number of art films being screened at Kunsthalle Mannheim (DE), ARKEN (DK), Øregaard Museum (DK), the 13th Dubai International Film Festival (AE) and the Gothenburg International Film Festival ( SEE) to name a few.
In 2018, Sohail’s work The Republic of T.M. (2016) was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), where it won the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award. In 2020, The National Galley of Denmark purchased a work by Sohail, now part of their permanent collection.

Masar Sohail works with video, painting and graphics concerning questions of identity and alienation. The focal point is often social, cultural and ideological communities set against religion and nature. Using video and film as the primary media, Sohail challenges the prevailing political discourse and seeks to suspend the fixed and alienating positions we create when categorizing each other. His works often have a humorous and satirical nature and challenge the relationship between fiction and reality. They also draw on recognizable references from popular culture and subcultures hence mirroring the film industry’s representations of masculinity, power and desire.

Read more about Masar Sohail here

Halfdan Pisket (b.1985) is a trained visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. He primarily works with comics and illustration. Pisket has received a large number of awards for his graphic work, including the groundbreaking Fauve de la Série at the comics festival in Angoulême in 2019. In 2015, he received a three-year work grant from the Danish arts Foundation for his work with the Dansker trilogy.

Read more about Halfdan Pisket here

Opening:
The exhibition is presented in Trappegalleriet at Viborg Kunsthal 24.08.-22.10.2023 as part of Viborg Animation Festival and opens Wednesday 23 August 2023, at 15.00-17.00 with an opening speech by Bodil Johanne Monrad, head of exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, and Marie Braad Larsen, curator at Art Hub Copenhagen.

Discover the miniature sets and characters made by internationally recognized stop – motion filmmaker and artist Niki Lindroth Von Bahr in VAF Artist exhibition taking place at Tinghallen foyer during the entire festival duration.

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!

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 Mullah Redux

The exhibition The Mullah Redux by Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket is the second exhibition in the newly established collaboration between the three institutions Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg Animation Festival and Art Hub Copenhagen. The project has been initiated based on a common desire to create visibility and expand knowledge of current visual artists among new target audiences across the country.

The exhibition is part of a larger collaboration between Art Hub Copenhagen, Viborg Animation Festival and Viborg Kunsthal.

Download press release here

In collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen and Viborg Animation Festival, Viborg Kunsthal facilitates a conversation and dissemination event called Free Lunch on Tuesday 27 September.
Here you can meet Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket in a conversation about the exhibition.

Read more about ticket booking on Viborg Kunsthal’s website

About the artists:

Masar Sohail (1982) is a Danish-Iraqi visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Copenhagen. He is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and is has created a number of art films being screened at Kunsthalle Mannheim (DE), ARKEN (DK), Øregaard Museum (DK), the 13th Dubai International Film Festival (AE) and the Gothenburg International Film Festival ( SEE) to name a few.
In 2018, Sohail’s work The Republic of T.M. (2016) was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), where it won the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award. In 2020, The National Galley of Denmark purchased a work by Sohail, now part of their permanent collection.

Masar Sohail works with video, painting and graphics concerning questions of identity and alienation. The focal point is often social, cultural and ideological communities set against religion and nature. Using video and film as the primary media, Sohail challenges the prevailing political discourse and seeks to suspend the fixed and alienating positions we create when categorizing each other. His works often have a humorous and satirical nature and challenge the relationship between fiction and reality. They also draw on recognizable references from popular culture and subcultures hence mirroring the film industry’s representations of masculinity, power and desire.

Read more about Masar Sohail here

Halfdan Pisket (b.1985) is a trained visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. He primarily works with comics and illustration. Pisket has received a large number of awards for his graphic work, including the groundbreaking Fauve de la Série at the comics festival in Angoulême in 2019. In 2015, he received a three-year work grant from the Danish arts Foundation for his work with the Dansker trilogy.

Read more about Halfdan Pisket here

Opening:
The exhibition is presented in Trappegalleriet at Viborg Kunsthal 24.08.-22.10.2023 as part of Viborg Animation Festival and opens Wednesday 23 August 2023, at 15.00-17.00 with an opening speech by Bodil Johanne Monrad, head of exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, and Marie Braad Larsen, curator at Art Hub Copenhagen.

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

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 Mullah Redux

The exhibition The Mullah Redux by Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket is the second exhibition in the newly established collaboration between the three institutions Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg Animation Festival and Art Hub Copenhagen. The project has been initiated based on a common desire to create visibility and expand knowledge of current visual artists among new target audiences across the country.

The exhibition is part of a larger collaboration between Art Hub Copenhagen, Viborg Animation Festival and Viborg Kunsthal.

Download press release here

In collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen and Viborg Animation Festival, Viborg Kunsthal facilitates a conversation and dissemination event called Free Lunch on Tuesday 27 September.
Here you can meet Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket in a conversation about the exhibition.

Read more about ticket booking on Viborg Kunsthal’s website

About the artists:

Masar Sohail (1982) is a Danish-Iraqi visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Copenhagen. He is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and is has created a number of art films being screened at Kunsthalle Mannheim (DE), ARKEN (DK), Øregaard Museum (DK), the 13th Dubai International Film Festival (AE) and the Gothenburg International Film Festival ( SEE) to name a few.
In 2018, Sohail’s work The Republic of T.M. (2016) was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), where it won the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award. In 2020, The National Galley of Denmark purchased a work by Sohail, now part of their permanent collection.

Masar Sohail works with video, painting and graphics concerning questions of identity and alienation. The focal point is often social, cultural and ideological communities set against religion and nature. Using video and film as the primary media, Sohail challenges the prevailing political discourse and seeks to suspend the fixed and alienating positions we create when categorizing each other. His works often have a humorous and satirical nature and challenge the relationship between fiction and reality. They also draw on recognizable references from popular culture and subcultures hence mirroring the film industry’s representations of masculinity, power and desire.

Read more about Masar Sohail here

Halfdan Pisket (b.1985) is a trained visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. He primarily works with comics and illustration. Pisket has received a large number of awards for his graphic work, including the groundbreaking Fauve de la Série at the comics festival in Angoulême in 2019. In 2015, he received a three-year work grant from the Danish arts Foundation for his work with the Dansker trilogy.

Read more about Halfdan Pisket here

Opening:
The exhibition is presented in Trappegalleriet at Viborg Kunsthal 24.08.-22.10.2023 as part of Viborg Animation Festival and opens Wednesday 23 August 2023, at 15.00-17.00 with an opening speech by Bodil Johanne Monrad, head of exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, and Marie Braad Larsen, curator at Art Hub Copenhagen.

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

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

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

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 Mullah Redux

The exhibition The Mullah Redux by Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket is the second exhibition in the newly established collaboration between the three institutions Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg Animation Festival and Art Hub Copenhagen. The project has been initiated based on a common desire to create visibility and expand knowledge of current visual artists among new target audiences across the country.

The exhibition is part of a larger collaboration between Art Hub Copenhagen, Viborg Animation Festival and Viborg Kunsthal.

Download press release here

In collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen and Viborg Animation Festival, Viborg Kunsthal facilitates a conversation and dissemination event called Free Lunch on Tuesday 27 September.
Here you can meet Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket in a conversation about the exhibition.

Read more about ticket booking on Viborg Kunsthal’s website

About the artists:

Masar Sohail (1982) is a Danish-Iraqi visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Copenhagen. He is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and is has created a number of art films being screened at Kunsthalle Mannheim (DE), ARKEN (DK), Øregaard Museum (DK), the 13th Dubai International Film Festival (AE) and the Gothenburg International Film Festival ( SEE) to name a few.
In 2018, Sohail’s work The Republic of T.M. (2016) was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), where it won the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award. In 2020, The National Galley of Denmark purchased a work by Sohail, now part of their permanent collection.

Masar Sohail works with video, painting and graphics concerning questions of identity and alienation. The focal point is often social, cultural and ideological communities set against religion and nature. Using video and film as the primary media, Sohail challenges the prevailing political discourse and seeks to suspend the fixed and alienating positions we create when categorizing each other. His works often have a humorous and satirical nature and challenge the relationship between fiction and reality. They also draw on recognizable references from popular culture and subcultures hence mirroring the film industry’s representations of masculinity, power and desire.

Read more about Masar Sohail here

Halfdan Pisket (b.1985) is a trained visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. He primarily works with comics and illustration. Pisket has received a large number of awards for his graphic work, including the groundbreaking Fauve de la Série at the comics festival in Angoulême in 2019. In 2015, he received a three-year work grant from the Danish arts Foundation for his work with the Dansker trilogy.

Read more about Halfdan Pisket here

Opening:
The exhibition is presented in Trappegalleriet at Viborg Kunsthal 24.08.-22.10.2023 as part of Viborg Animation Festival and opens Wednesday 23 August 2023, at 15.00-17.00 with an opening speech by Bodil Johanne Monrad, head of exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, and Marie Braad Larsen, curator at Art Hub Copenhagen.

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

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.

ANIDOX is a creative platform for the development, production and exhibition of animated documentary projects. Returning with a special exhibition at Gallery NB: Viborg Animation Festival celebrates factual, animated stories in emerging media / Virtual Reality. Presenting a selection of contemporary works focused on outstanding storytelling and craftsmanship.
Exhibition

Selection

House of Moiré
By Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Matthew Edwards (CA)
House of Moiré invites users into a void-like realm, where one’s experience is defined by the curiosity of their eyes and ears. In self-directed exploration, the viewer advances through a succession of rooms dressed in optical patterns, audio-visual programming, and minimalist spatial design.

All unsaved progress will be lost
By Mélanie Courtinat (FR)
All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is a melancholic journey through a ghost town made of concrete and fog, based on the testimony of a woman who refused to evacuate her hometown village after a terrible disaster.

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats
By Darren Emerson (UK)
A euphoric, interactive VR adventure that transports you into the heart of the Acid House movement, where finding the party is the only thing that matters.

MLK: Now is the time
By Limbert Fabian (USA)
An immersive journey that explores key themes of Dr. King’s speech and highlights systemic inequities that persist in our society.

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

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.

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.

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.

VIBORG GAME EXPO is a celebration of games culture; developing them, playing them, and being part of a big and diverse community of gamers!

VIBORG GAME EXPO 2023 presents a number of expo-areas all focusing on different aspects of the game media and culture. Creative souls can visit the CREATE-area where game development is the focus. Here you can meet a Coding Pirate, ANIMOK, Mercantec and many others. The ARCADE-area is filled with old school arcade games, a recurring popular part of VGE. No talk of gaming without mentioning E-Sport, which is also represented this year!

Meet YouTube sensation Morten Münster, and the popular “Out of Milk/Ikke mere Mælk”-boys Mika & Tobias.

The Mullah Redux

The exhibition The Mullah Redux by Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket is the second exhibition in the newly established collaboration between the three institutions Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg Animation Festival and Art Hub Copenhagen. The project has been initiated based on a common desire to create visibility and expand knowledge of current visual artists among new target audiences across the country.

The exhibition is part of a larger collaboration between Art Hub Copenhagen, Viborg Animation Festival and Viborg Kunsthal.

Download press release here

In collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen and Viborg Animation Festival, Viborg Kunsthal facilitates a conversation and dissemination event called Free Lunch on Tuesday 27 September.
Here you can meet Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket in a conversation about the exhibition.

Read more about ticket booking on Viborg Kunsthal’s website

About the artists:

Masar Sohail (1982) is a Danish-Iraqi visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Copenhagen. He is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and is has created a number of art films being screened at Kunsthalle Mannheim (DE), ARKEN (DK), Øregaard Museum (DK), the 13th Dubai International Film Festival (AE) and the Gothenburg International Film Festival ( SEE) to name a few.
In 2018, Sohail’s work The Republic of T.M. (2016) was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), where it won the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award. In 2020, The National Galley of Denmark purchased a work by Sohail, now part of their permanent collection.

Masar Sohail works with video, painting and graphics concerning questions of identity and alienation. The focal point is often social, cultural and ideological communities set against religion and nature. Using video and film as the primary media, Sohail challenges the prevailing political discourse and seeks to suspend the fixed and alienating positions we create when categorizing each other. His works often have a humorous and satirical nature and challenge the relationship between fiction and reality. They also draw on recognizable references from popular culture and subcultures hence mirroring the film industry’s representations of masculinity, power and desire.

Read more about Masar Sohail here

Halfdan Pisket (b.1985) is a trained visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. He primarily works with comics and illustration. Pisket has received a large number of awards for his graphic work, including the groundbreaking Fauve de la Série at the comics festival in Angoulême in 2019. In 2015, he received a three-year work grant from the Danish arts Foundation for his work with the Dansker trilogy.

Read more about Halfdan Pisket here

Opening:
The exhibition is presented in Trappegalleriet at Viborg Kunsthal 24.08.-22.10.2023 as part of Viborg Animation Festival and opens Wednesday 23 August 2023, at 15.00-17.00 with an opening speech by Bodil Johanne Monrad, head of exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, and Marie Braad Larsen, curator at Art Hub Copenhagen.

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.

ANIDOX is a creative platform for the development, production and exhibition of animated documentary projects. Returning with a special exhibition at Gallery NB: Viborg Animation Festival celebrates factual, animated stories in emerging media / Virtual Reality. Presenting a selection of contemporary works focused on outstanding storytelling and craftsmanship.
Exhibition

Selection

House of Moiré
By Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Matthew Edwards (CA)
House of Moiré invites users into a void-like realm, where one’s experience is defined by the curiosity of their eyes and ears. In self-directed exploration, the viewer advances through a succession of rooms dressed in optical patterns, audio-visual programming, and minimalist spatial design.

All unsaved progress will be lost
By Mélanie Courtinat (FR)
All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is a melancholic journey through a ghost town made of concrete and fog, based on the testimony of a woman who refused to evacuate her hometown village after a terrible disaster.

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats
By Darren Emerson (UK)
A euphoric, interactive VR adventure that transports you into the heart of the Acid House movement, where finding the party is the only thing that matters.

MLK: Now is the time
By Limbert Fabian (USA)
An immersive journey that explores key themes of Dr. King’s speech and highlights systemic inequities that persist in our society.

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.

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.

VIBORG GAME EXPO is a celebration of games culture; developing them, playing them, and being part of a big and diverse community of gamers!

VIBORG GAME EXPO 2023 presents a number of expo-areas all focusing on different aspects of the game media and culture. Creative souls can visit the CREATE-area where game development is the focus. Here you can meet a Coding Pirate, ANIMOK, Mercantec and many others. The ARCADE-area is filled with old school arcade games, a recurring popular part of VGE. No talk of gaming without mentioning E-Sport, which is also represented this year!

Meet YouTube sensation Morten Münster, and the popular “Out of Milk/Ikke mere Mælk”-boys Mika & Tobias.

The Mullah Redux

The exhibition The Mullah Redux by Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket is the second exhibition in the newly established collaboration between the three institutions Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg Animation Festival and Art Hub Copenhagen. The project has been initiated based on a common desire to create visibility and expand knowledge of current visual artists among new target audiences across the country.

The exhibition is part of a larger collaboration between Art Hub Copenhagen, Viborg Animation Festival and Viborg Kunsthal.

Download press release here

In collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen and Viborg Animation Festival, Viborg Kunsthal facilitates a conversation and dissemination event called Free Lunch on Tuesday 27 September.
Here you can meet Masar Sohail & Halfdan Pisket in a conversation about the exhibition.

Read more about ticket booking on Viborg Kunsthal’s website

About the artists:

Masar Sohail (1982) is a Danish-Iraqi visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Copenhagen. He is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and is has created a number of art films being screened at Kunsthalle Mannheim (DE), ARKEN (DK), Øregaard Museum (DK), the 13th Dubai International Film Festival (AE) and the Gothenburg International Film Festival ( SEE) to name a few.
In 2018, Sohail’s work The Republic of T.M. (2016) was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), where it won the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award. In 2020, The National Galley of Denmark purchased a work by Sohail, now part of their permanent collection.

Masar Sohail works with video, painting and graphics concerning questions of identity and alienation. The focal point is often social, cultural and ideological communities set against religion and nature. Using video and film as the primary media, Sohail challenges the prevailing political discourse and seeks to suspend the fixed and alienating positions we create when categorizing each other. His works often have a humorous and satirical nature and challenge the relationship between fiction and reality. They also draw on recognizable references from popular culture and subcultures hence mirroring the film industry’s representations of masculinity, power and desire.

Read more about Masar Sohail here

Halfdan Pisket (b.1985) is a trained visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. He primarily works with comics and illustration. Pisket has received a large number of awards for his graphic work, including the groundbreaking Fauve de la Série at the comics festival in Angoulême in 2019. In 2015, he received a three-year work grant from the Danish arts Foundation for his work with the Dansker trilogy.

Read more about Halfdan Pisket here

Opening:
The exhibition is presented in Trappegalleriet at Viborg Kunsthal 24.08.-22.10.2023 as part of Viborg Animation Festival and opens Wednesday 23 August 2023, at 15.00-17.00 with an opening speech by Bodil Johanne Monrad, head of exhibitions at Viborg Kunsthal, and Marie Braad Larsen, curator at Art Hub Copenhagen.

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.

ANIDOX is a creative platform for the development, production and exhibition of animated documentary projects. Returning with a special exhibition at Gallery NB: Viborg Animation Festival celebrates factual, animated stories in emerging media / Virtual Reality. Presenting a selection of contemporary works focused on outstanding storytelling and craftsmanship.
Exhibition

Selection

House of Moiré
By Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Matthew Edwards (CA)
House of Moiré invites users into a void-like realm, where one’s experience is defined by the curiosity of their eyes and ears. In self-directed exploration, the viewer advances through a succession of rooms dressed in optical patterns, audio-visual programming, and minimalist spatial design.

All unsaved progress will be lost
By Mélanie Courtinat (FR)
All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is a melancholic journey through a ghost town made of concrete and fog, based on the testimony of a woman who refused to evacuate her hometown village after a terrible disaster.

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats
By Darren Emerson (UK)
A euphoric, interactive VR adventure that transports you into the heart of the Acid House movement, where finding the party is the only thing that matters.

MLK: Now is the time
By Limbert Fabian (USA)
An immersive journey that explores key themes of Dr. King’s speech and highlights systemic inequities that persist in our society.

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

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.

Discover the miniature sets and characters made by internationally recognized stop – motion filmmaker and artist Niki Lindroth Von Bahr in VAF Artist exhibition taking place at Tinghallen foyer during the entire festival duration.

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.

ANIDOX is a creative platform for the development, production and exhibition of animated documentary projects. Returning with a special exhibition at Gallery NB: Viborg Animation Festival celebrates factual, animated stories in emerging media / Virtual Reality. Presenting a selection of contemporary works focused on outstanding storytelling and craftsmanship.
Exhibition

Selection

House of Moiré
By Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Matthew Edwards (CA)
House of Moiré invites users into a void-like realm, where one’s experience is defined by the curiosity of their eyes and ears. In self-directed exploration, the viewer advances through a succession of rooms dressed in optical patterns, audio-visual programming, and minimalist spatial design.

All unsaved progress will be lost
By Mélanie Courtinat (FR)
All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is a melancholic journey through a ghost town made of concrete and fog, based on the testimony of a woman who refused to evacuate her hometown village after a terrible disaster.

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats
By Darren Emerson (UK)
A euphoric, interactive VR adventure that transports you into the heart of the Acid House movement, where finding the party is the only thing that matters.

MLK: Now is the time
By Limbert Fabian (USA)
An immersive journey that explores key themes of Dr. King’s speech and highlights systemic inequities that persist in our society.