As one of the longest-running international media art festivals, CYFEST brings together artists, curators, engineers, and media thinkers from around the world. It serves as a platform for both emerging and established practitioners working across time-based installations, sound, video art, algorithmic composition, and hybrid forms. A nomadic exhibition series, CYFEST 17 began in Thessaloniki and continues in Venice, opening to the public on May 8, 2026 at 6 pm.

The exhibition’s title invokes the philosophical concept of Natura Naturans—nature understood as generative force, as process rather than product. Within this framework, art is conceived as an active principle: a field in which light, time, and matter emerge. The exhibition places works from the Frants Family Collection in dialogue with over 20 contemporary media artists, tracing a continuous trajectory of artistic becoming from the 20th century to the present. The early 20th century marked a decisive shift from representation toward construction—from depicting the visible world to articulating its underlying forces. Color became autonomous, light structural, form dynamic. The avant-garde sought not to imitate nature but to participate in its generative logic. This impulse persisted in the unofficial art of postwar Leningrad, where artists working outside Socialist Realism sustained experimental approaches to structure and perception, affirming art as an independent and evolving system grounded in process.

If early modernism explored movement and temporality through pigment and composition, today’s artists engage these forces through automation, kinetics, atmospheric systems, and digital code. Within this expanded field, art reveals its most delicate states—its intervals, hesitations, and vulnerabilities—making visible the subtle thresholds where form emerges, shifts, and recedes. Media becomes not a layer added to the work, but a sensitive field in which it exists: exposed, contingent, and quietly in flux. In her automated kineographs, Anna Frants explores the evolving relationship between light and time, reanimating humanity’s enduring desire to capture movement through illumination — from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary digital animation. Jaanika Peerna’s installation evokes the fluidity and atmospheric memory of glaciers. Its title expresses a poignant paradox: we must love glaciers deeply, yet keep that love cold enough to prevent their disappearance.

Tuula Närhinen revisits avian evolution through speculative hybrid bird species designed to survive on plastic detritus. Through this ecological fiction, she reflects on environmental transformation and the shifting relationship between wildlife and urban landscapes. Mariateresa Sartori exposes an anemometer to the wind, allowing it to produce circular drawings that hover between mechanical objectivity and subtle human intervention. Meanwhile, the futurist-inflected kinetic mobiles of Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov revisit the experimental energy of the early avant-garde, translating its dynamism into a contemporary idiom. The collective AES+F explores themes of corporeality, depression, and altered perception through digitally mediated aesthetics, oscillating between the fairytale-like and the disturbing.

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The exhibition opens with a live performance by Mexican artist Hugo Solis featuring a sound-based intervention, alongside a participatory performance by Jaanika Peerna. In her performance, Peerna employs a sculpted piece of ice as a totemic emblem of strength, beauty, and environmental fragility-inviting audiences to witness and take part in the ephemeral balance between creation and dissolution.

On May 9, at Auditorium S. Margherita – Emanuele Severino, the video program What’s in a Story?, conceived by internationally renowned curator Barbara London, will be presented. Featuring works by Wendi Yan, Shi Zheng, Maitha Abdalla, Tamar Zohara Ettun, Tadasu Takamine, Carla Gannis, Eva Papamargariti, Jane Bustin, Andro Eradze, Sky Hopinka, and Dana Kavelina, the screening brings together media artworks by artists across generations and geographies, made with contemporary tools—from camera to computer software. 

Preceding the screening, a sculptural performance by Andy Barrt will serve as a counterpoint to the program. The evening will continue with the presentation of the book Afterwards. Art in the Time of Change, produced by CYLAND Foundation and published by CURA. The discussion, moderated by Prof. Silvia Burini, will feature contributors Valentino Catricalà, Barbara London, and Li Zhenhua.