‘Adventures in Sound and Image’ is the tagline for Dutch arts organisation Impakt. The breadth of work shown at the recent Impakt Festival (7 - 11 December) supports this assertion. The phrase suitably describes the many facets of this festival which takes place at various locations throughout the city of Utrecht in Holland.

The city is a brilliant location as its winding streets and twisting alleys lead you unexpectedly to a variety of places, including a cinema, several galleries and large a music venue. The festival presents a serpentine programme of retrospectives, artist talks, performances of electronic and experimental music, as well as a wide selection of new international work in its panorama competition section.

One of the key strands in the festival was curator Florian Wüst’s expansive historical project composed from short works held by the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek in Berlin. The programme provides a welcome international airing for this fascinating collection of works encompassing classics of the avant-garde, as well as documentaries, essay films and many features.

The programme, which will come to London next year, is called Touching Politics and carves a path through the 20th century exploring the various political stances adopted by a great variety of films. Politics in this programme can be seen in the way work is produced as well as its content.

The works touch upon many themes from the depiction of homosexuality in Tom Chomont’s mesmerising Oblivion (USA, 1969), to key works of feminist confrontation like Near the Big Chakra (Anne Severson, USA, 1971) as well as works of collective social critique like Wilmington (Newsreel, USA, 1968) which exposes the local dominance of the DuPont family and their manipulative control the city of Wilmington and its inhabitants.

One of the most recent works featured in Touching Politics was Alpsee (Germany, 1994) Matthias Müller’s fictionalisation of his suffocating childhood in a bland suburbia dressed to resemble 1950s melodrama. German artist Matthias Müller was also the subject of a three programme retrospective focusing on his work from the late 80s till the present. The retrospective opened with his deeply personal and lyrical super8 film Aus Der Ferne – The Memo Book (Germany, 1989), and moved into his brilliant reworking of appropriated material Home Stories (Germany, 1990).

His later works included the collaborative series The Phoenix Tapes (Germany, 1999) where he reworked Hitchcock’s films with multi-media artists Christoph Giradet, Vacancy (Germany, 1998) a mediation on place made in the deserted utopian 1960s city of Brasilia in South American and his most recent work Album (Germany, 2005) an exploration of travel and alienation.

His control of composition and editing was best exhibited by the intricate and overwhelming Mirror (with Christoph Giradet, Germany, 2003) which masterfully reworks motifs from Italian cinema in atmospheric cinemascope tableaux’s. This overview was accompanied by a bilingual publication The Memo Book: Films, Videos and Installations by Matthias Müller (Edited by Stefanie Schulte Strathaus) which is available though LUX who will also organise a UK tour of Müllers works in 2006.

Contemporary work featured in the festival included the videoDictionary a project initiated by Manual Saiz and Jorge Bravo. It is an expanding exhibition with the aim of creating “a collection of video pieces of less than one minute each, associated to a word (their title) so that they visually express it or conceptually define it.” The exhibition has so far been shown in London, Barcelona and Madrid and includes over 50 works by many artists including Pierre Bismuth, Johan Grimonprez, Ian Halliwell and Antoni Muntadas among others.

Finally, one of the highlights of the recent work was the elusive installations of Victor Alimpiev a leading contemporary Russian artist. His installation Summer Lightnings (Russia, 2004) features an enraptured class of girls who tap on their table top and pause, intercut with storm clouds brewing in the distance. His work at first appears directly observational but they are highly staged and constructed moments, fragments of actions with an enigmatic purpose. The festival provided a glimpse into the various facets of contemporary and historic artists’ practice, an adventure in sound and image in other words.

As well as the festival, Impakt organise a range of events throughout the year. For more information on their activities see their website.