stiff 2025 exhibition: mark

STIFF - Student International Film Festival - invites artists to apply to a call to participate in the exhibition that is a part of the side programme of this year’s festival.

The side programme of STIFF seeks to create a meeting space, an educational context, a space for critical thinking and dialogue with the audience. The exhibition gathers artists from all over the world whose art further analyses, questions, and emphasises the multitude of layers of the thematic focus of the festival.

When we talk about a mark, we delve on the process of leaving a mark, but just as well on the process of deleting or disappearing marks. The need to leave a mark in innate to living beings, and thus to humans, and we can trace marks throughout history, from cave drawings, through the entire art history, to present-day graffiti and digital marks in the technocene. But, do we really choose the mark we leave behind? Can we talk about hyper-production of “thoughtless marks” in the digital era, as opposed to earlier periods when leaving a mark was more difficult (due to technical, economic and other reasons)?

We can think of a mark from an ecological and environmental viewpoint as well. How does environment in which we live affect us, and how do we affect the environment? When we are leaving a mark by construction works, by modifying and adapting the environment to our needs, or perhaps by loitering and polluting the environment – can we still talk about the innate human “need to leave a mark”, or is it just human indifference and inertia?

By leaving a mark humans create culture as well, so perhaps we can define an individual’s identity as a collection of marks left by people and spaces of a society? What is the relationship between culture and environment (nature) in contemporary times? Do we still talk about the unity of humankind and culture with nature, or are humankind and culture autonomous, while the nature is just an object of their actions?

Besides leaving marks, history records many attempts to delete them as well – from antiquity’s damnatio memoriae to destroying cultural artefacts for various reasons. Can a collective identity be disputed by deleting the marks? Can tearing down the old to build the new be interpreted as deleting the marks, if we assume that cultural heritage is a material mark of an urban culture?

How does forceful deletion or gradual loss of cultural marks affect an individual’s personal identity? Likewise, are there elements of personal identity that we negate to adapt to a wider or different (foreign) social environment? Do we, sometimes, delete marks of our own origins to fit into the template of accelerationist society?