Openings !!!

‘Yourself’, the protagonist of Petra Szemán’s Openings !!! (2022) rides local trains through intermedial landscapes. Fragments of different worlds segue into view, signalling perceptual ruptures that seemingly force subjectivity outside of itself, into strange new relationships of interdependency and intoxication with the moving image. ‘There’s a world I can only see when I’m turned away from it’, they observe. Part of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the radical potential of animation and fandom, Openings !!! rejects its own filmic boundaries, surrendering instead to the free play of a multi-planar and ultimately elusive meta-worldview. Referencing anime credit sequences, video game loading screens and regional train journeys, Szemán’s film intensifies the gaps between the layers of animated imagery in an attempt to grasp the kinds of experience that may lie beyond human perceptual boundaries.