Infinite Cycle. Kinomural gazes into the void

Kinomural will bring this year's summer festival season to a close. This event transforms the perspective of the city, showcases new media art on a grand scale, and sparks and experiments with the imagination. The theme of this year's edition is Infinite Cycle, and the headline act is Extraweg, whose title sequence for Severance became one of the most celebrated examples of contemporary motion design. On 18 and 19 September in Wrocław, we will see a selection of his works on one of Kinomural's walls.

Here, the walls of buildings become a pulsing, living screen, and the audience can quite literally immerse itself in the images. This time, the programme will revolve around the theme of repetition. We are not looking for endings or resolutions. We are interested in the rhythm that returns, and the meaning that emerges along the way. New media art has long thrived on recurrence: loops, glitches, trance, and images that ask nothing of interpretation. Kinomural has a natural affinity with this, because it does not itself operate like a classic screening with a single beginning and end. Works appear several times throughout the evening; separate programmes unfold simultaneously on different walls, and the viewer wanders between them along their own route. Everyone assembles their own screening — partly by choice, partly by chance. Kinomural 2026 engages with repetition as a hidden mechanism of reality. The loop here is not merely a motif used by artists, but part of the very act of watching and experiencing. Infinite Cycle thus names something that is already at work within Kinomural, says Bartek Bartos on behalf of the curators. This year's programme comprises seven sections, each approaching the theme from a different perspective.

He holds two Emmy Awards to his name, along with the title sequence for Severance (Apple TV), collaborations with Valentino and MTV, and numerous exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale. At the Wrocław festival, we will see a selection of his works entitled Human Patterns, inspired by everyday observations of contemporary life. Using surrealist visual metaphors and processed human bodies, the works explore recurring behaviours, social structures, relationships, desires, fears, and contradictions. They invite viewers to find themselves within these patterns, and perhaps to look at them from a different perspective.

Then there is Boris Labbé. In his works, the image never stands still, even when it appears to be an ornament. Everything multiplies, disintegrates, and transforms into something else: figures, lines, patterns, bodies, landscapes, and entire cosmologies. The French artist combines drawing, digital animation, and collage, treating the loop as the driving force of the image. He holds over fifty awards and accolades, including the Grand Prix of the Japan Media Arts Festival and a selection in the Critics' Week at Cannes. At Kinomural, his Orogenesis will transform mountains into an organism that remembers its own previous forms. The artist takes the Pyrenees and passes them through the imagination of a geologist, an animator, and someone who suspects that a landscape never truly stands still. Satellite photographs and 3D models are transformed into a black-and-white vision of mountains that crack, fold, erode, collapse, and rebuild before our very eyes. What ordinarily takes millions of years is compressed into a matter of minutes. 

Apple, Google, Hermès, Balenciaga, Burberry, BMW - that is a shorthand from Conner Griffith's portfolio, but his own work begins where the brief disappears and only the material remains: advertising, catalogues, coupons, feeds, visual waste that someone once designed with complete seriousness. He works across video art, animation, and moving image, stretching time, space, and perspective until familiar things cease to be obvious. Kinomural will present A Sense of Getting Closer, his collaboration with Max Cooper — one of the most recognised figures in electronic music, blending club pulse, science, and audiovisual metaphysics. The work is part of Cooper's *On Being* project and examines how advertising, social media, and the daily overload of stimuli shape us before we have the chance to notice.

He has no need for a protagonist, dialogue, or plot. Rhythm, pattern, colour, and sound brought to such an intensity that abstraction begins to act upon the body — that is enough. We are speaking of Max Hattler. The German artist has been creating films, installations, and audiovisual performances for over two decades. Along the way, he made a music video for Basement Jaxx, featured in the cult Off the Air series on Adult Swim, and held a retrospective at the German Pavilion at Expo. He also runs Relentless Melt, a screening series dedicated to experimental animation. Two of his works feature in the Kinomural programme. One of them is Matter and Motion, an abstract machine for transmitting energy. Simple shapes, a limited palette of colours, and synthetic sounds that do not so much illustrate the image as set it in motion. Everything functions here like a precise system of tensions: shape responds to sound, rhythm drives the image, the image returns the impulse to the music.

Yoriko Mizushiri is a Japanese animator who makes films so delicate that it is easy to overlook how precisely they work. The artist works with body parts, everyday objects, and the textures of ordinary sensations: coffee, a soft carpet, the warmth of a duvet, the prick of a touch. She deliberately avoids faces and eyes, as though wishing to cut off the most direct route to emotion and discover what remains when the body feels without our narration. Her animations are fluid, corporeal, erotic, meditative, melancholic — yet none of these words suffices. This is cinema of small impulses: the trembling of skin, the softness of fabric, the tension between pleasure and mild pain. Rather than telling us about feelings, Mizushiri leads us through surfaces, touch, and the rhythm of ordinary actions. The programme will feature her acclaimed, award-winning work Ordinary Life, which received the Silver Bear at Berlinale 2025. 

Patrick Bergeron is difficult to place in any single category. Engineer, VFX artist, experimental filmmaker — for years he worked on digital effects for films that have themselves become part of the collective memory of cinema: The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit. But in his own works, spectacle is broken down into something quieter and more suspect: speed, detail, memory, an image that returns because memory cannot leave it in peace. Bergeron manipulates image and sound at the level of the most minute shifts. He combines animation, experimental film, and documentary, but is most compelling where categories cease to matter and the mechanism of looking takes over. In LoopLoop, which will be screened at Kinomural, a thousand images taken from a train travelling to Hanoi are stitched together into a single panorama that runs forwards and backwards like a memory attempting to recover a lost detail.