DAUMENKINO - Animation between the fingers
FLIPT! Avstrijski festival slikofrca @ StopTrik IFF
25. 9. - 25. 10. 2025, OBRAT
OPENING: Thursday, 25. 9. 2025 at 16.00
Patented under the name kineograph in 1868 by British lithograph printer John Barnes Linnett, the flipbook is an early device that creates motion by rapidly flipping sequential images. It emerged alongside 19th-century optical inventions like the phenakistiscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, and kinora, which all explored persistence of vision and paved the way for cinema developed later in the 19th century. While projected film became dominant, the flipbook remains a miniature, personal pocket cinema—a hands-on, intimate form of animation that continues to inspire creative exploration.
In honor of the art of Daumenkino — that poetic German term for flipbook we simply didn’t want to lose in translation — the exhibition invites you to rediscover the tactile joy of short animations in their most fundamental, cinematic form. It will activate your thumbs and guide you through a spectrum of creative methodologies, from mind-provoking narratives to conceptual experimentation. Beyond being a tribute to the flipbook, FLIPT! Austrian Flipbook Festival (FLIPT!), and consequently this exhibition, probes the boundaries of the medium itself — reminding us that even in a digital age, the flicker of frames between your fingers still holds the power to surprise.
This enduring charm of the flipbook is at the heart of the exhibition at OBRAT – Space for Art and Participation, which unfolds across two rooms, each presenting a distinct selection of flipbook works.
Room 1 features a curated selection of 40 flipbooks from the 2024 edition of FLIPT!, which received over 100 submissions from across Austria. It highlights the festival community’s commitment to experimentation, humour, and conceptual approaches within the flipbook form, bringing together works by professional artists, students, hobbyists, children, teenagers, and seniors alike. The flipbooks vary widely in content, technique, and material — from hand-drawn frame-by-frame animations to works using photography, collage, or even AI-generated imagery. Some are humorous or visually playful, while others address contemporary political or social issues. The range of used materials is equally diverse, with flipbooks made on restaurant notepads, matchboxes or delicate sanitary paper. Despite their differences, all the works share a defining feature: they come to life at the turn of a thumb — though not all of them do so gently, since one particularly memorable work is wired to deliver a small electric shock when flipped (Schocked! by Lino Brunnmayr).
Among the on-site featured works are the three award-winning flipbooks from the 2024 edition. In schtzngrmm - an experimental flipbook based on experimental poetry, Martin Bruner and Günther Kolar use photographs of soldiers to adapt a well known anti-war poem schtzngrm (1957) by Ernst Jandl. Interestingly enough, Bruner and Kolar submitted a schtzngrmm flipbook to one of the first editions of FLIPT! and nearly 20 years later they created a completely new work on the same subject with the same title and got rewarded with the 1st Audience award.
Among the awarded works, TOILET FliPbÖok by Die Herbert K.i. stands out as a provocative and darkly humorous response to Austria’s political climate. Created as a commentary on the right-wing FPÖ party, the flipbook is drawn on toilet paper — a material chosen as much for its symbolic charge as for its impracticality, being virtually “unflip-able.” The title plays on the party’s name, while the brown-toned visuals, painted using chocolate, add a layer of absurdity to the critique.
The exhibition also presents Athenes Transfer 1 and Athenes Transfer 2 by Renate Kordon, a two-part flipbook designed for left- and right-handed users, which was awarded with the 3rd audience award. The flipbook depicts Pallas Athena—the Greek goddess of the arts, handcrafts, and manual labour—gradually transforming into the Viennese Secession building. This iconic Art Nouveau architecture, emblematic of Viennese Modernism, houses the Association of visual artists in Vienna and serves as an exhibition venue for modern art. Kordon’s work weaves together mythology, architecture, and institutional history, reflecting on the shifting forms and meanings of artistic representation.
In Maribor, only a selection of flipbooks from FLIPT! 2024 will be presented on site, however a video overview of all submitted works will accompany the exhibition, offering at least a second-hand encounter with the full-grain landscape of Austrian flipbook creation from 2024.
The setup in Room 1 follows the exhibition design of the FLIPT! festival, which employs a large wooden, minimalistic cube structure that functions as a hanging frame for presenting the flipbooks of the Austrian authors. Resonating with that in Room 2 the cube structure is presented in the form of an anamorphic drawing on the walls and floor of the space. Here the line structure will frame the works received through the International Call for Entries 2025, developed in collaboration with StopTrik specifically for this exhibition in Maribor. Since all of the works will be featured in the 2026 edition of the FLIPT! competition programme in Linz, this implies a shift in the development of FLIPT! Austrian Flipbook Festival, suggesting that from the national platform of flipbook art the festival transforms into a festival that embraces international participation. The anamorphic cube drawing in Room 2 is visible only from one point of view in the space, as this projection of the development of FLIPT! can be speculated only from the point of view of StopTrik 2025.
About FLIPT! Austrian Flipbook Festival
The Austrian Flipbook Festival FLIPT! was launched in Linz, Austria in 2005 by media artist Reinhold Bidner and graphic designer Christian Korherr. From a modest concept, FLIPT! produced three successful festival editions (2005, 2007, 2010), attracting hundreds of flipbooks to Linz. The festival champions simplicity, diversity, and passion for animated storytelling through the analog “thumb cinema” (from the German “Daumenkino”). Its open call for submissions consistently inspired a wide array of innovative ideas, stories, and techniques, showcased in festival events and exhibitions. After a creative pause, it was Anima Plus—the association dedicated to promoting animation art in Upper Austria—that brought FLIPT! back to life. In close collaboration with the festival founders, gold extra, OK Linz, and the University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg, Anima Plus revived the festival in November 2024. The fourth edition once again celebrated animation, storytelling, and handcrafted creativity—this time with resounding success.
“It would be nice to bring this magical, yet antiquated, form of moving image creation to the attention of a city that is rather known for media art and technological innovation.”