Viktoria Schmid & Johann Lurf
Thursday 22 January, 2026 6:00 pm
Austria
2007-2025, ~72 min
16mm, 35mm, DCP

Viktoria Schmid & Johann Lurf will join us for a Q&A following the screening.

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Viktoria Schmid

Rojo Žalia Blau
2025, 10 min, DCP

NYC RGB
2023, 7 min, 16mm

A Proposal to project in Scope
2020, 8 min, 35mm scope

W O W (Kodak)
2018, 2 min, 35mm

A Proposal to project in 4:3
2016, 2 min, 16mm

ACHTUNG / HALLO 35
2010, 2’30 min, 35mm

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Johann Lurf

Revolving Rounds (with Christina Jauernik)
2024, 11 min, 35mm

Cavalcade
2019, 5 min, 35mm

RECONNAISSANCE
2012, 5 min, 2K DCP

Vertigo Rush
2007, 19 min, 2K DCP

Sonic Cinema

Viktoria Schmid & Johann Lurf

Thursday 22 January, 2026 6:00 pm
Cost: ££
Address:
ICA Cinema,
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

A programme of ten short films bringing together the practices of Vienna based filmmakers Viktoria Schmid & Johann Lurf for the first time.

Viktoria Schmid and Johann Lurf work at the intersection of the cinema and exhibition space, exploring shared interests in cinematic technologies, landscape, and human perception. Each working with a wide variety of mediums and formats including 35mm CinemaScope, 16mm, stereoscopic 3D, video, photography, and installation their works are characterised by their thoughtful exploration of concepts and surprising reconfigurations of the world around us. Though sharing similarities in subject matter and concepts, Schmid and Lurf’s differing approaches to their individual practices results in the distinctive bodies of work this presentation seeks to compare and contrast.

In her most recent films NYC RGB (2023) and Rojo Žalia Blau (2025), Viktoria Schmid presents sublime vistas of New York and European countryside through a specially devised shooting technique that reconstructs historical colour systems of analogue film to gently play with our perceptions of landscape and time. Likewise Johann Lurf’s RECONNAISSANCE (2012) trains a formal eye on a US military torpedo testing site’s ominous topography in a shifting play of light and framing that subtly upends our sense of space.

Intervening into the landscape, Schmid’s A Proposal to project in 4:3 (2016) and A Proposal to project in Scope (2020) bring cinema out of the dark and into nature to explore the sculptural qualities of the cinema screen whilst foregrounding light and shadow play. Lurf also intervenes in the natural landscape, with his most recent films Cavalcade (2019) and Revolving Rounds (2024) taking cinematic technologies of the phenakistoscope (early animation) and cyclostéréoscope (early 3D device) as their lifting off points to explore our sense of what’s real and what’s perceived. Lurf’s earlier work Vertigo Rush (2007) takes to the woods to push the dolly zoom film technique to its limits, recalling not only its establishment by Hitchcock in Vertigo (1958) but also the formal and mechanical studies of Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr.

Perhaps somewhat appearing as outliers in this programme, W O W (Kodak) (2018) manipulates video footage from YouTube to resurrect Kodak’s Rochester facility in a tribute to colour sensitive analogue film whilst ACHTUNG / HALLO 35 (2010) is a city symphony of sorts that fetishes both analogue film and Vienna whilst drawing attention to cinema’s essential makeup as sequences of still images.

Programmed by Oliver Dickens. Generously supported by Austrian Cultural Forum London and Sixpackfilm Vienna

Viktoria Schmid & Johann Lurf