f|x|r and House of Arts Veszprém are pleased to announce the LOOP² Video Art Festival 2026.
This year's theme: AFTERIMAGE

Some images do not end where they seem to disappear. They continue to exist behind the eye, within perception and memory, remaining with us as reflections, vibrations, and subtle traces. This year's LOOP theme, Afterimage, refers to this enduring visual experience. Marking the bicentenary of photography, it evokes a phenomenon that belongs simultaneously to light, time and the act of seeing: the moment when an image is no longer physically present, yet continues to exert its influence, returning and transforming itself.

The afterimage is one of photography's most delicate legacies, but it also lies at the very core of the moving image. Here, the captured moment does not come to an end; instead, it begins to repeat itself, shifting, dissolving and reorganising. In this sense, the 20-second loop is not merely a formal constraint but an idea in itself: a space of return, where the image does not occur only once, but again and again, each time slightly differently.

Afterimage is an open-ended concept. It may encompass the trace of light, the workings of memory, the disappearance and regeneration of images, or the meditative or unsettling experience of repetition. It welcomes abstract, experimental, narrative, photographic, animated and digitally generated works alike. Rather than defining a single subject, it proposes a particular sensibility: an attentiveness to what remains after the image has faded, and to what within it continues to move.

In connection with photography's bicentenary, Afterimage is not simply an invitation to look back, but a question directed towards the present: How does the image continue to exist today, when it is no longer merely recorded, but constantly circulating, repeating, being processed, distorted and recreating itself? What remains after the act of looking? What disappears—and what only then begins to reveal itself?

We invite submissions of original 20-second looping moving-image works, to be presented within a four-walled immersive projection environment. The space itself functions as a loop: it surrounds the viewer in 360 degrees while the projected content continuously returns to itself, creating the experience of a double loop.

The works selected by the professional jury will be presented in a 3-minute screening rotation at the House of Arts Veszprém – f|x|r gallery.

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