The works in Katoenhuis expand the concept of cinema out into a three-dimensional space, and in doing so reveal both its possibilities and its limits.

Entering the Art Directions exhibition in Katoenhuis during the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam, the visitor is greeted by a screen displaying four figures: Alice, Bob, Carol, and David. Their names suggest individuality, yet signify archetypal cryptographic placeholders. Powered by the Unity game engine, the four move in a delineated but open gray field, improvising responses to narrated prompts and at times interacting with one another. The work by Viktor Timofeev, homonymously titled Alice, Bob, Carol and David, stimulates reflection on the nature of autonomy and control, exploring the boundaries of free will in both the characters and the viewer. 

It is a fitting introduction to the exhibition in Katoenhuis as well as to the role of Art Directions as a subsection of the film festival. Consisting of immersive media, performances, and installations, Art Directions “allows audiences to explore the possibilities of cinema and the moving image outside the bounds of a film theatre,” as IFFR Festival Director Vanja Kaludjercic explains. Yet if the language of cinema has long been defined by these same bounds- by the immobilization of the viewer and the complete control of their gaze within the black box- then what does it mean to release both subject and work into a three-dimensional space? 

Leaving the first room and entering the main corridor of Katoenhuis, the visitor is confronted with precisely this question. Curtained doors extend along either side of the hall, offering the opportunity for exploration without a suggested itinerary, and the visitor is made intensely aware of their own freedom of movement within the structure. Consequently, the works themselves are liberated from the temporal linearity of traditional moviegoing. Without a set beginning and end, subject to be viewed in their entirety or in pieces, they each experiment in their own way with the meanings that can be created by the audiovisual medium in the exhibition space. 

In Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape Are Often Migrating, Amsterdam-based artist Basir Mahmood collaborated with a Lahore-based film crew to reinterpret videos taken by migrants on their arduous journeys from South Asia to Europe. He conveys the fragmentation of these videos via the screen itself, folding it into three sections with three concurrent views. The dimensional triptych of landscapes, body parts, equipment, and screenshots challenges the illusion of spatiotemporal unity created by traditional cinematic forms; rather than portray a trajectory from point of departure to point of arrival, from beginning to end, Mahmood evokes the disorientation of the migrant experience by centering the physical discomfort, communication difficulties, and unforgiving landscapes that characterize these journeys.

Where Mahmood uses the freedom of the installation format to fragment geography, Ecuadorian artist Francisco Baquerizo Racines uses it to complicate linear chronology in his work La Quema (del Planeta “B”). The installation plays out on two screens, one placed in front of the other in the space. On the front screen, a papier-mâché model of a Dutch East India Company galleon is constructed in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil. On the back screen, the galleon is doused in gasoline and set alight in an adaptation of the mestizo tradition of burning año viejo dolls on New Year’s Eve. Both the building and the burning of the ship is a collective activity, with a small crowd of onlookers commenting and joking as the paper ship goes up in flames. 

The work refers to the colonial history of Guayaquil and the burning of the city by the Dutch Nassau fleet in the 17th century. Through the present-day application of a local tradition to this historical event, Racines collapses the distance between past and present. Yet by doubling the act of burning, he also creates ambiguity and tension between cyclical repetition and progression. The positioning of the parallel screens further confuses the linearity of time; while entering the installation, the visitor witnesses the building and destruction of the ship in chronological order. While leaving, the visitor again passes the building of the ship that they have already seen burn, turning the act of watching into re-watching, and construction into re-construction. 

The work Extramission: The Capture of Glowing Eyes by artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland likewise bridges time and place to investigate colonial practices in history and present-day. Yet in juxtaposition to Racines, her investigation operates via the act of care. 

Entering the space of the installation, the visitor weaves their way between boards displaying pages pulled from early 20th-century issues of National Geographic: all articles on the development of the nighttime camera-trap invented by George Shiras III. Overlooked in the history of this invention is its origins in the hunting practices of the Ojibwe people. At the far end of the room are two screens joined like pages of an open book. On the left, a thermal image camera captures the meticulous work of conservators of taxidermy at the Natural History Museum in London. Their body heat reflects off the cold metal of the institutional surroundings and lingers on the skin of the creatures as the conservators suture incisions back together, tweeze bits of antlers, and insert glass eyeballs. On the right, infrared camera footage captures the reintroduction of endangered animals from Europe back into their native habitat in Argentina.Rinland’s work is by far the quietest of the exhibition; the soft murmurs of the conservators are overlaid with the scuffling of the nocturnal animals as they explore their new habitat and nurture their young. Yet beneath the apparent calm of these actions lies the implicit violence of colonial extraction, forcing the viewer to ask how these practices and animals arrived to where they are today. Extramission directly examines not only what we see, but by what means we see.

Behind another curtained door, in a room bathed in neon, technologist and artist Mila Moleman steps beyond questioning the technologies of sight to controlling them in her VR piece Show Me The Light, a silent disco set to the pace of rapid societal development. After being fitted with a VR headset and headphones, the visitor is led onto a neon-lit dance floor. The VR world rises around them as an infinite metropolis of identical gray block buildings under a red sky, expanding at an unstoppable pace as the music of Brass Rave Unit fills their ears. The visitor stands on an anonymous platform, powerless to do anything but watch and dance along.

Advances in VR fulfill the dream of freedom from physical and visual constraints of moviegoing, inviting the viewer to become an actor within the fantasy world. But Moleman’s piece reveals the limits of this freedom. If the world is virtual, why does it feel impossible to step beyond the edges of the platform? Or to halt the breakneck ‘progress’ of history as it careens towards a seemingly apocalyptic end? In Show Me The Light, the visitor becomes Alice, Bob, Carol, and David: trapped within a pre-designed world, free only to respond to prompts from a greater power, and unable to look away. 

The works in Katoenhuis expand the concept of cinema out into a three-dimensional space, and in doing so reveal both its possibilities and its limits. Most importantly, they highlight the fragile conditions of control that keep dominant narratives in place, both in cinema and in history. The moment the languages and technologies of perception are changed, a whole world of stories and experiences is opened up.  

The 2025 edition of Art Directions was curated by Eva Langerak. Read our interview with her here.