Playing with Fire

Director: Janire Najera and Matt Wright

Year: 2025

A fulldome dance film set amidst the rich and varied landscapes of Zimbabwe, where performers express the tension, resilience and interconnectedness between people and the natural world under the pressures of climate change. With their movements, the dancers explore the consequences of environmental disruption and the profound ways in which people and nature are intertwined. Through abstract choreography, symbolic imagery and an atmospheric score, the work reflects the planet’s vulnerability, the challenges posed by environmental shifts and the transformative potential of collective effort. As the dancers navigate these ever-changing locations, their movements evoke the escalating consequences of a warming world, capturing both its fragility and the urgent call for action.

Director: Lara Habib Kobeissi

Year: 2026

Nazar is a tender, intimate encounter in virtual reality between participant and performer. It unfolds as experiential poetry within evil eye protection sessions shared across decades by the artist and her mother, exploring embodied care, presence and vulnerability. Grand & Impact Prize, NewImages 2026 Official Selection, Embodied Realms 2025 Official Selection, Shubbak Festival 2025

Director: Playfool (Daniel Coppen, Saki Maruyama)

Year: 2026

Our online environment is increasingly shaped by automation. Politically charged bots are deployed at national scale, influencers and brands inflate metrics to game the algorithm, and AI-generated content spreads instantly and indistinguishably, distorting our social discourse. [OP]erator is an interactive sculpture that stages a functioning bot farm, exposing the hidden infrastructure that manipulates this system. While one might imagine these bots as purely digital, they often still rely on physical hardware controlled by a human conductor. Sophisticated bot farm services operate hundreds or thousands of physical phones in synchronised automation designed to circumvent social platforms' increasingly strict verification systems. In this installation, 100 phones are choreographed through a single master phone, mischievously unlocked for any visitor to orchestrate. The visitor is prompted to share a thought or opinion, which will be automatically amplified and posted by the 100 phones’ X accounts. “OP” refers to the terms “original poster” and "overpowered". For a brief moment, visitors will embody both, becoming digitally omnipotent and creating ripples of disruption in our algorithmic reality. Returning a degree of control to the user, the piece prompts reflection on how visibility, influence, and belief are constructed and manipulated online.