CYFEST is one of the biggest international festivals of media art, founded by a group of independent artists and curators in Saint Petersburg in 2007. CYFEST unites art professionals, programmers, engineers and media activists all over the world, expands territories and possibilities of contemporary art, intertwining it with various disciplines of science and technology.
Festival was a recipient of the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award 2018 in the Best Festival of Contemporary Art category.
CYFEST is an exceptional international project which promotes national media art abroad, and international art in Russia. In 2019, the festival projects were presented at the leading cultural institutions in New York, Rome, Venice and Moscow. CYFEST 12 will be held in Saint Petersburg from 13th to 24th November 2019.
The festival’s main project called ID is shaped around identification as a phenomenon with a wide range of meaning, from a term in psychoanalysis to personal identification documents. CYFEST 12 will familiarize the general public with projects in the fields of new media, VR, robotics, video art, sound art and web-based art.
“In a profane world the humankind has seemingly solved the identification issue. We have passports and birth certificates, leave the fingerprints, multiply selfies, fill in the authorization sheets etc. Our machines and mechanisms, gadgets and coffee machines hold numbers and barcodes. Everything is covered and everything is under control. However, it is most probably that exactly artists keep on asking themselves and society the perennial questions "Where are we from? What we are? Where are we going?"“
— Elena Gubanova, CYFEST co-curator
More than 60 artists from 12 countries will participate at CYFEST 12. Those include world-renowned Italian experimental collective MASBEDO; the Lumen Prize recipient, pioneer in the field of generative art Mario Klingemann; independent artist and cinema researcher from Switzerland Max Philipp Schmid; multidisciplinary architect-designer Eduard Khaiman; House of Electronic Arts Basel curator Boris Magrini; Japanese artist, prestigious Prix Ars Electronica winner Nelo Akamatsu; American composer and pioneer in the use of neurofeedback and compositional algorithms in arts David Rosenboom; composer, the Golden Mask Prize laureate Vladimir Rannev, among many others.
Saint Petersburg CYFEST will engage seven largest city’s art spaces, including Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Annenkirche (Lutheran Church of Saint Ann), the State Hermitage Youth Educational Center, the Time Travel Centre COD, Marina Gisich Gallery, a newly opened Luda Gallery, and Changing Room Gallery (Xassa-Nivet- Carzon Project).
As a part of the festival, a round table “Contemporary Art in Academic Environment: Mechanisms, Strategies and Perspectives of Integration“ will take place on November 16 at Stieglitz Academy with participation of leading local and international art professionals.
CYFEST 12 also includes a broad video (curated by Victoria Ilyushkina), sound (curated by Sergei Komarov) and educational (curated by Sofia Kudryavtseva) programs.
Festival curators: Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova, Lydia Gryaznova, Sofia Kudryavtseva, Victoria Ilyushkina, Sergei Komarov, Varvara Egorova, Valentino Catricala, Isabella Indolfi, William Latham, Patricia Olynik, Carla Gannis, Jack Addis, Jerome Nivet-Carzon.
Festival board: Silvia Burini, professor at the Ca' Foscari University, Director of the Center for the Studies of Russian Art CSAR (Venice, Italy) Giuseppe Barbieri, professor, head of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari University (Venice, Italy) Sofia Kudryavtseva, head of the Youth Educational Center at the State Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Press contact:
Alexander Ivanov
+7 (911) 839 0777
mail@cyland.org
