In 2026, our Festival is organising the Oberhausen Seminar for the twelvth time.
Professionals frim all over the world can apply now for the five-day seminar as part of the 72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. The Oberhausen Seminar is an experimental course designed to explore contemporary artists' moving image practice in the context of a renowned international film festival.
The seminar is addressing primarily international artists, filmmakers, curators and researchers and will be held in English. Only 25 applicants will be selected to meet daily during the festival to discuss the programmes they have seen with each other and with guests.
The Oberhausen Seminar 2026 will be lead by Linda Chiu-han Lai.
Seminar leader Linda Chiu-han Lai
Known for her work in intermedia arts and media archaeology, Hong Kong-based transdisciplinary artist, curator and scholar Linda Chiu-han Lai brings her videography, experimental arts and pedagogy to the Oberhausen Seminar. Central to Lai’s works is her historiographic experiments, especially the moving image’s power to work against grand narratives and “central conflict” assumptions.
Lai’s works have been presented in Oberhausen’s International Competition in 2005, 2010 and 2011. Solo retrospective-screenings of her short videos were presented at the Experimental Film/Video Festival Macao (2015), Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul (2017), Centro de Creación Contemporanea de Andalucia (Cordoba, 2021) and the LSK School of Creativity (Hong Kong, 2025). Her large-scale installation works began in the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012-13); since then, she has had three solo shows of her site-specific installations. Lai is also the founder of the new media art group Writing Machine Collective (2004) and the participatory art initiative The Floating Projects (2015). Until 2023, she taught at the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong.
She was awarded Artist of the Year (Media Art) 2017 by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, her project D-Normal/V-Essay (on-line video zine) with the Floating Projects Collective was a winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the Art(ists)” 2022.
The Oberhausen Seminar
The Oberhausen Seminar is an experimental course designed to explore contemporary artists' moving image practice in the context of a renowned international film festival. International practitioners from various fields - artists and filmmakers, curators and researchers - will use our Festival as a laboratory to discuss ideas in the curation of contemporary moving image media, the infrastructures which allow them to circulate, and the critical frames used to analyse them.
Seminars of the last years
Seminar 2025 – Galit Eilat
Seminar 2024 – Leon Kahane
Seminar 2023 – Salla Tykkä
Seminar 2022 – Ruth Noack
Seminar 2021 – Jörg Heiser
Seminar 2019 – Branka Bencić und Aleksandra Sekulić
Seminar 2018 – Roee Rosen
Seminar 2017 – Michele Pierson and Mike Zryd
Seminar 2016 – Erika Balsom
Contact
Susannah Pollheim
seminar(at)kurzfilmtage.de