Firpal Jawanda, header image 3hd, 2025
© Courtesy of the ArtistAs part of their festival “3hd 2025: Vertigo”, Creamcake presents the film programme “Hostile Atmospheres” at Berlinische Galerie. The festival centers on perceptual, embodied, and phenomenological experiences of disorientation. It explores strategies of self-preservation and resilience amid the sensory overload of complex and oppressive realities. Human beings are in constant negotiation with the invisible forces that surround them. Even the weight and pressure of air can exert profound effects—a barometric shift may disrupt the fluid balance of the inner ear, triggering dizziness, nausea, and disequilibrium. 3hd’s “Hostile Atmospheres” moving image programme responds to this world in vertigo, where imbalance invites a heightened receptivity to care.
To care means recognizing the bonds that we inhabit, acknowledging their vulnerability, and responding with attention and responsibility. It asks us to examine our relationships and the structures that shape them through sensitivity and openness. In practicing towards social transformation, the “Hostile Atmospheres” program asks: How can we live moments of vulnerability to create a sense of social power rooted in trust and cares. The programme features four intimate works that share personal experiences of how illness, disability, and trauma intersect with systemic oppression—framing the body as a site of vulnerability, repair, and healing.
Billy Klotsa’s “Scaffold” (11 min.) follows a lesbian couple whose relationship fractures as the terminal illness of one partner’s mother unfolds, blurring boundaries between the maternal and the romantic, the real and the fantastical, against a shifting coastal landscape.
JJJJJerome Ellis’s music video/poem “Evensong” (18 min.) meditates on stuttering, where the pauses between words and music become moments of liberation, while rhythm and interruption reconnects us to a shared, collective narrative.
Sophie Hoyle’s “Hyperacusis (Part 1)” (7 min.) situates nature metaphors within political narratives about the body, unfolding through biohacking experiments to examine mental health, trauma, access to healthcare, and the intergenerational legacies of racism, colonialism, and socioeconomic inequality.
Holly Márie Parnell’s “Cabbage” (21 min.) documents her family’s navigation of an ableist system, centering her brother’s rhythmic,
eye-tracked writings and her mother’s reflections on being forced to prove her son’s humanity – while moving between lived experience and the violence of bureaucracy.
Creamcake (CC) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary platform, navigating the point of convergence in electronic music, contemporary art, and digital technologies. Distanced from normative social structures, it operates in fluid processes of thought and action, engaging with the social issues of the present through diverse projects. CC organizes exhibitions, performances, concerts, symposia, DJ sets, digital commissions, publishing projects, and workshops. These include the annual 3hd festival, Is it cold in the water?, Paradise Found, Europool, <Interrupted = “Cyfem and Queer>, and the Chronologies of Creamcake anthology, among many others. As a queer-feminist nomadic space, CC has collaborated with a variety of clubs, community spaces, and institutions, including but not limited to Berghain, Berlinische Galerie, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Klosterruine, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, OHM, RSO, and Südblock.
Further information: 3hd-festival.com and 3hd.tv.
Since 2011 the IBB Video Space has been screening artists who work with time-based media. The programme features not only established names in contemporary video art but also up-and-coming artists rarely seen in museums to date. For these, the Berlinische Galerie seeks to facilitate an institutional début. Each screening brings a new encounter with work that raises questions about the medium and about social or political issues. Importance is attached to including marginalised perspectives and to shedding light on the impact of power structures.