Screentime/s : Offscreen

As part of the group exhibition Screentime/s.., which explores contemporary regimes of the moving image and the role of the screen as an interface for perception, projection, and relation, Offscreen proposes a sensitive and experiential shift in perspective. It marks a turning point within Screentime/s: a transition from digital and virtual worlds (the screen) toward a return to lived, embodied, and shared reality. This return, however, is not a simple re-grounding in the real, but is accompanied by an exploration of altered states of consciousness, where inner experience nuances and enriches our perception of the world.

At a time when screens structure our modes of attention, communication, and imagination, the projects within the Offscreen programme invite us to question their thresholds. From a mere surface of display, the screen here becomes a mental, intimate, and shared space.

Time spent in front of a screen is very often an individual, even solitary experience. While certain practices introduce forms of collectivity—such as online gaming or shared viewing—they remain mediated by the interface and structured by a distance between participants.

Offscreen invites us to rethink our relationship to images in an age of their omnipresence, by reintroducing forms of slowness, attention, and subjectivity. These experiences also open up a unique space of encounter, where the boundaries between individual and collective, between reality and fiction, become porous—a shared space of projection that is both introspective and communal.

Photo courtesy of Alexandre Quaranta