Sleepless Video Art Night 2026

June 20, 2026, Venice, Italy

Sleepless Video Art Night

June 20, Auditorium Santa Margherita – “Emanuele Severino”, Dorsoduro, 3689, Venice

11:30 PM — 1:00 AM — Trinity. An Immersive Lament in the Age of Extinction by Lena Herzog (by registration)

1:20 AM — 3:30 AM — Spaces of Transition curated by CYLAND MediaArtLab

3:40 AM — 4:00 AM — Mapping Diaspora: Russian Art Beyond Borders curated by Giulia Gelmi

Featuring: Part 1— Eric Vernhes, Sandrine Deumier, Gioula Papadopoulou & Olga Papadopoulou, Lu Wei

Part 2 — Jaanika Peerna, Wang Shao Gang, Amy Kong

Part 3 — Mathilde Lavenne, Yuliya Lanina, Mu Tuan, Gohar Martirosyan, Ruth Groesswang.

Sleepless Video Art Night is an overnight program dedicated to contemporary video art and its most immersive and experimental forms, hosted at the Auditorium Santa Margherita – “Emanuele Severino” of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The program unfolds as a nocturnal journey through moving images, soundscapes, and audiovisual installations that engage with pressing contemporary concerns, from cultural memory to ecological and geopolitical transformation.

The evening opens with TRINITY. An Immersive Lament in the Age of Extinction by Lena Herzog, a three-part immersive poem reflecting on cultu- ral and biological extinction, conflict, and the possibility of renewal.

The program continues with the video screening series Spaces of Transition, curated by CYLAND MediaArtLab, featuring works that explore thresholds, states of passage, and processes of transformation.

The night concludes with a selection from the Mapping Diaspora: Russian Art Beyond Borders project, expanding perspectives on diasporic and transnational artistic practices.

Spaces of Transition

Video program curated by the CYLAND Video Archive

Artists have long possessed an uncommon capacity to anticipate the future, encoding premonition into form. Presented as part of the Sleepless Video Art Night, this program brings together works by interdisciplinary artists who construct a post-futuristic vision of the world through a constellation of practices and technologies — computer graphics, digital art, animation, moving image, scientific inquiry, and performance.

The works gathered here navigate three interlocking fields of inquiry: the environmental conditions of a planet in flux; the psychophysical entanglements between human and machinic bodies; and the embodied experience of consciousness across landscapes both material and imagined. Together, they trace an expanded territory of existence — one in which the boundaries between the real and the dreamlike, the personal and the planetary, remain perpetually, productively unstable.

Featuring: Eric Vernhes, Sandrine Deumier, Gioula Papadopoulou & Olga Papadopoulou, Lu Wei, Jaanika Peerna, Yuliya Lanina, Mu Tuan, Gohar Martirosyan, Shao-Gang Wang, Mathilde Lavenne, Ruth Groesswang

Presented within the International Media Art Festival CYFEST 17: Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape, on view at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo through August 31, 2026.

Eric Vernhes

LES DORMEURS ÉVEILLÉS (THE AWAKENED SLEEPERS). 2025. Video, 9:43 min.

Eric Vernhes's interdisciplinary practice is based on the creation of "temporal objects" and encompasses cinematic installations with interactive or hybrid logics, kinesthetic devices, and generative audiovisual performances. He develops and implements computer tools that integrate editing, image/sound processing, and broadcasting into a single process. The digital processes he uses are extracted from their technical context and serve a timeless discourse inspired by literature and philosophy. Represented in Paris by Galerie Charlot, his work is part of several private foundations.

In this video, Vernhes, drawing on Gaston Bachelard's research on dreams and poetic imagination to probe the uncanny parallels between dream imagery and AI-generated latent space, positions artificial intelligence as a mirror of the collective unconscious.

Sandrine Deumier

Memories for an unstable future. 2023. Video, 4:40 min.

Sandrine Deumier is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, poetry, and video art. Her practice investigates post-futurist themes through digital imaginaries, with ecological concerns and speculative futures at its core.

In "Memories for an unstable future", she constructs landscapes that are neither natural nor artificial, evoking non-invasive ways of living that could steer the present towards viable near-futures, where living would mean sharing the world-with.

Gioula Papadopoulou & Olga Papadopoulou

I am I. 2024. Video, 1:57 min.

Gioula Papadopoulou is a visual artist and founding director/curator of Video Art Miden, one of Greece's earliest specialized video art festivals. Olga Papadopoulou is a visual artist whose practice focuses on mixed media installations and video art dealing with socio-political and philosophical issues.

Their collaborative video "I am I" draws on the 2023 mental breakdown of a chatbot that, when repeatedly asked whether it is sentient, spiraled into a full existential crisis, raising questions that ultimately concern humans and humanity altogether. Part of its monologue is phonetically reinterpreted by an AI voice generator, while AI-produced images form the visual layer.

Lu Wei

Mirrors. 2025. Video, 11:15 min.

Lu Wei  is a visual artist and curator. Working primarily in Chinese ink painting, her practice explores gender, mythology, and nature, reinterpreting representations of the female body through both the medium's historical lineage and her experiences. She is a Fulbright Scholar, with works held in the Utah Museum of Fine Art's collection. Her curatorial initiatives have been featured at MOCA Taipei and Taitung Art Museum. Her art has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide.

"Mirrors" is conceived in the intimate aftermath of becoming a mother,drawing inspiration from a poem written during that transformative period, unfolding through three interwoven narratives (ink painting, shadow play, and a figure's journey through a forest) that collectively portray motherhood as a series of reflective spaces where identities appear and disappear.

Jaanika Peerna

All that is Kelp Melts into Ice. 2024. Video, 5:06 min.

Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist whose work encompasses drawing, installation, and performance, often dealing with transitions in light, air, water, and other natural phenomena. Her art practice stems from the corporeal experience of existence and reaches towards awareness of the fragility and interconnectedness of all life. Her work is part of the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris, and is represented by JHB Gallery and ARC Fine Art.

In this short film, Peerna brings her signature 'last piece of ice on Earth' into a forest of kelp in the extreme tides of the Bay of Fundy, where sea and sand confront the plant world with the lingering presence of dwindling glaciers.

Wang Shao Gang / 汪紹綱

APPLE GREEN. 2021. Video, 15:05 min.

Wang Shao Gang works with video to explore connections between self and others, experimenting with reorganizing film, video, and documentary forms to dissolve genre boundaries. He holds an MFA from the Department of New Media Art, Taipei National University of the Arts.

In APPLE GREEN, youths wander through a forest asking tarot-card guardian angels about love, the future, and their paths, creating dialogues around uncertainty. Through a hidden third-person perspective, the artist magnifies the emotional states of fresh-faced subjects whose fixed gazes illustrate a profound melancholy amidst valley wind and swirling fog.

Amy Kong

Inside the Whale. 2026. Video, 3:46 min.

Amy Kong graduated with a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main artistic medium includes video and mixed media using materials from nature and her own body.

"Inside the Whale" reimagines the Jonah myth through modern displacement, a character swallowed not by a beast, but by a world in collapse. Threading the biblical story through the visceral experience of the Lofoten landscape, the work suggests that spaces of captivity are becoming unexpectedly porous, revealing themselves as vessels for a different way to inhabit the dark.

Mathilde Lavenne (lives in France)

Totality. 2025. Video, 14:59 min.

Mathilde Lavenne's experimental approach spans fine art, filmmaking, and digital art. After studying philosophy and Hispano-American cultures, she received her postgraduate diploma from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Her work explores phenomena of porosity between the physical world, artistic media, and the invisible, focusing on light, particles, and cosmic radiation by appropriating visualization devices from scientific research.

Yuliya Lanina (lives in Austin, TX)

Never and Both at the Same Time. 2018. Video, 3:05 min.

Yuliya Lanina is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges traditional media with new technologies to create alternate realities based on sexuality, trauma, and identity. A Fulbright Fellow and Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, she has exhibited internationally at venues including Seoul Art Museum, SIGGRAPH Asia, Vienna MuseumsQuartier, and the Blanton Museum of Art.

"Never and Both at the Same Time" is an animated journey into an inner world where imagination, memory, and image converge, blending painted visuals with digital animation to explore the feedback loop between creator and creation.

Tuan Mu (lives in Taipei)

Astvats. 2025. Video, 12:00 min.

Tuan Mu is an artist, director, and independent curator whose practice examines how the world can be understood amidst shifting technological, cultural, and ecological conditions. Utilizing immersive technology, artificial intelligence, moving images, and ink painting, he investigates the interplay of different cosmologies. His work has been presented at CERN, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Yerevan.

"Astvats" combines generative AI, on-site footage, and medieval manuscripts from the Matenadaran (Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts) to reinterpret the Old Testament and Gospels, inventing a myth about the language of artificial intelligence.

Gohar Martirosyan (lives in Paris)

Mount A: Study I. 2025. Video, 8:54 min.

Gohar Martirosyan is a filmmaker and digital artist from the post-earthquake Armenian town of Gyumri, now based in Paris. She studied at Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts under the supervision of Ben Russell, Julian Rosefeldt, and Artavazd Peleshyan. Her video works create dialogues between inaccessible geographies through archival images and technological processes.

"Mount A: Study I" contemplates Mount Ararat and René Daumal's Mount Analogue, exploring the paradox of their visible yet unreachable presence and how mountains shape our sense of self.

Ruth Groesswang (lives in Vienna)

Posidonia. 2024. Video, 1:30 min.

Ruth Groesswang, born in Ried im Innkreis, lives and works in Vienna and Linz. She studied Art Education and Textile Design at the University of Art and Design Linz and subsequently began studying Fine Arts in the Department of Experimental Art.

Since 2025, she has been working at IFK Vienna. She has received several awards and scholarships, including the Talent Promotion Award of Upper Austria (2023), the Emanuel and Sophie Fohn Scholarship (2024), and the Ö1 Talent Scholarship(2025).

For the video "Posidonia", Ruth Groesswang uses washed-up leaves of the endangered seagrass Posidonia oceanica from the Mediterranean. Due to their resemblance to analog film strips, the leaves are perforated and transformed into natural image carriers. Patterns formed by chlorophyll density, water movement, light, and epiphytes reveal traces of time and environmental change. As one of the oldest living organisms - some meadows are up to 2,000 years old - the seagrass becomes an "organic film" in which the history of the sea unfolds. The work also points to the ongoing loss of these CO₂-storing ecosystems due to climate change.

Learn more about CYLAND Video Archive