Film Screening: «Night for Day» by Emily Wardill

Film Screening Night for Day by Emily Wardill (45 min.) followed by a Q&A with the artist (in English), in conjunction with the symposium Energetic Transfers, 22-24 October 2026, organized by Dr. Alena J. Williams, Professor for Theory and Mediation of Contemporary Art, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien and 2026 NOMIS-Feelow / eikones – Zentrum für die Theorie und Geschichte des Bildes.

British artist and filmmaker Emily Wardill's Night for Day (2020) is a video installation anchored by two sets of interviews. The first features Isabel do Carmo, an endocrinologist who co-founded the anti-fascist Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal; and second is with two young men who are in the midst of establishing a machine-learning startup company for recognizing moving images in 2019. Centering both subjectivity and the body, the film seeks to answer a hypothetical question: What if Carmo was the fictional mother of these two entrepreneurs, such that the utopia, which fueled her communist struggle in the 1970s, metastasized into their latter-day techno-utopianism? Night for Day was a commission for a solo show at Secession, Vienna and won Wardill the European Media Art Festival Award in 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Bergen Kunsthall; National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston among others. Wardill is Professor for Art and Film in the Institute of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.