Loop Barcelona presents a two-day Symposium entitled “IMAGES THAT MOVE US FORWARD” curated by Filipa Ramos

Artists’ videos and films represent the most vital, dynamic, committed, and challenging area within contemporary art. Bridging art and cinema, increasingly complex productions pose a challenge for artists, galleries, museums, collectors, and audiences alike. Therefore, this edition of Loop Barcelona presents the Loop Symposium: Images that Move Us Forward. Commissioning, Producing, Exhibiting and Collecting Artists’ Cinema, directed by Filipa Ramos.

Artists’ cinema defies definitions and labels. It is an in-between creature that lives across the movie theatre and the exhibition space. It embraces and challenges the languages of cinema, while not conforming to the rules of other art objects, playing with genres and conventions, and refusing to be reduced to mere entertainment. Due to its connection with reality and its willingness to explore our present-future through imagination, artists’ cinema leads art towards its transformation and anticipates what is yet to come.

Over two days, the Loop Symposium will gather artists, collectors, curators, gallery owners, programmers, producers, distributors, and scholars to discuss how to generate, produce, exhibit, and collect artist’s cinema, inviting us to imagine ways to continue creating those images that, as its title suggests, “move us forward.

Panelists and moderators include:

Gabriel Abrantes (Artist, Filmmaker)
Guilherme Blanc (Batalha Centro de Cinema)
Hoor Al-Qasimi (Sharjah Art Foundation)
Julian Ross (Amsterdam Eye Filmmuseum)
Kostas Stasinopoulos (Serpentine Gallery)
Leonardo Bigazzi (Fondazione In Between Art Film)
Lisa Long (Julia Stoschek Foundation)
Paolo Moretti (Fondazione Prada)
Sabel Gavaldon (MACBA)
Sinazo China (Stevenson Gallery)
Tarini Malik (John Akomfrah’s British Pavilion at 60th Venice Biennale)
(more to be confirmed soon)

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a writer and curator. She is Lecturer at the Arts Institute of the HGK/FHNW, Basel. Her research focuses on how contemporary art engages with nature and ecology. Ramos has been curator of the Art Basel Film sector (2020-24) and a founding curator of the online artists’ cinema Vdrome (since 2013). Current projects include BESTIARI, the Catalan representation at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024) and the arts, humanities and science festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (since 2018, with Lucia Pietroiusti). In 2024, she curated Songs for the Changing Seasons for the 1. Klima Biennale Wien (with Lucia Pietroiusti) and in 2022, Persons Persone Personen, the 8th Biennale Gherdëina (with Lucia Pietroiusti). In 2021, she co-curated Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale (with Andrés Jaque, Lucia Pietroiusti, Marina Otero Verzier and Mi You). Ramos was Editor-in-Chief of e-flux criticism (2013-20), Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal (2009-11) and contributed for Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She authored Lost and Found (Silvana Editoriale, 2009) and edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2016). Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist, will be published by Lund Humphries in 2025.

More info about Loop Symposium here.