Max Hattler once made a music video for Basement Jaxx. His film ended up on Adult Swim’s cult Off the Air. The German Pavilion at Expo 2017 showed an hour-long retrospective of his work. Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal did the same. Punto y Raya, Annecy, Ars Electronica, Animafest Zagreb: the list of festivals that have shown his abstract animations reads like a world tour that never quite stops. He is based between Hong Kong and Berlin, teaches at City University of Hong Kong, and has been making abstract audiovisual work for over 25 years. He also runs Relentless Melt, a screening series dedicated to experimental animation from Hong Kong, now in its 46th edition. His work doesn’t tell stories. It does something harder: it makes you feel things you don’t have words for, through rhythm, pattern, colour and sound pushed to their limits. Come and see what that looks like on the walls of Wrocław.
At Kinomural, he’s showing two works, and both are exactly what their titles promise. Matter and Motion, created with composer Lux Prima and a group of Hong Kong animators, is pure kinetic energy: simple forms, a restrained colour palette, synthetic sound and movement pushed to combustion. The jury of the London International Animation Festival called it “relentlessly powerful” and awarded it Best Abstract Film.
➕ is precisely what it looks like: a plus sign that begins to multiply. A symmetrical grid expands, breathes and pulses at shifting frequencies until it stops feeling like geometry and starts behaving like a living organism.
