Zoom: Total Refusal (lecture + screening with Q&A)

5 PM lecture (small hall, free entrance)
7 PM screening (large hall, pre-sale here)

Total Refusal is a pseudo-marxist media guerrilla collective focused on artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. They upcycle video games to expose the political apparatus behind the medium’s glossy and hyperreal textures.

Since its founding in 2018, the collective has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the Diagonale Film Prize for Best Short Documentary, the Province of Styria Prize for Contemporary Visual Art, and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Total Refusal has screened at over 130 film and video festivals such as Berlinale (2020), Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York and IDFA Amsterdam (2018), and have been exhibited at various exhibition spaces such as the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, HEK Basel (2020) and Ars Electronica Linz (2019). Their short film Hardly Working won European Short Film 2023 at the 36th European Film Awards.

Kino inak will present a lecture, a selection of their films, including their latest, The World at Stake (2025), which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A in English with members of the collective.

The event is financially supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum in Bratislava. The event was supported from public funds by the Bratislava City Foundation and the Bratislava-Staré Mesto Municipality. The digitisation of Kino inak was financially supported by the Slovak Audiovisual Fund.