An old man and his granddaughter are sitting in a quiet square in the middle of the city. Suddenly he has a heart attack, falls to the ground – and time freezes. This could be the famous second where you see your life flash before your inner eye. But in which direction is it moving? Forward into the past, backward into the future or sideways into the now?

A naked body liquifies and becomes weightless. What’s left is its skin envelope which expands endlessly, longing for the tiniest touch. The increasingly shapeless figure vibrates in colours, fragments flashing, until the video track fails. The sensual piece by FKA twigs asks in slow motion what lust feels like. Jesse Kanda answers with enchanting computer-generated images.

This insight into an international subculture shows that the ballroom scene is more than just extravagant competitions. Five ballroom dancers describe a reality in which white-dominated, heteronormative patterns have no place. They talk about ideas of cultural appropriation, about safe spaces, community and mutual support, about identity and self-expression.

An eerily beautiful bedtime story with lots of loose ends. Featuring: a princess and her toy mouse, a mother who advises the girl to always be suspicious of strangers, and a bizarre grandfather who secretly munches dogfood. It’s possible that the sleepy child is taking in only a quarter of this absurd and morbid tale, but that’s probably a good thing.

There is a house hanging from heavy ropes, firmly anchored to the rocks. Up there in the cliffs, far above the town below, a father lives with his son in the cold. In his 2D frame-by-frame animation, director João Gonzalez uses few colours, which makes the harsh shadows and extreme camera angles of his drawings all the more atmospheric. He has realised a metaphorical tale that can do without dialogue, relying on sound and images alone.

Stunning panoramic shots of natural landscapes are cut through by swathes of traffic. People appear like little dots in the depths and at the periphery. Only gradually do we realise that they are fleeing. Great dramas grow out of this micro world, the colossal landscape becomes increasingly merciless and begins to resemble an infinite space of fear.

Inspired by ritual practices from different cultures, the VR experience addresses the loss of a sense of community and empathy, combining modern dance and VR technology to re-examine old rites and reveal their meaningful potential for future societies. The title of the work refers to what legend has it is an “enlightening” potion from ancient Greece.

Since 1865, no cab driver in London has been able to omit “The Knowledge”. It requires the memorisation of 320 routes, an achievement that takes years, but has been made into a joke by the robot cars of the future. A flesh-and-blood cabby “interacts with people from all walks of life”, according to a brochure by Transport for London, and that’s “a lot more than just taking people from A to B”. Visually fascinating, Colson traces his interviewees’ mind maps of the city using the mapping technology of robot cars.

Beatriz Ferreyra enters a room and already stops with excitement in the doorway: “Look at all the sounds it makes, nieaowowowa!” The Argentinean composer and pioneer of musique concrète collects sounds made by everyday objects. Aura Satz’s minimalist portrait follows the sound hunter at work, shows her gestures and her still undiminished joy of discovery when arranging the sounds.

Wang Xilin does not enter the stage in a suite, as the title might suggest, but completely naked. He stretches and bends, appears to familiarise himself with his surroundings, does some vocal exercises, sits down at the piano. Wang Xilin is one of China’s most important composers of contemporary music, having written his first symphonies in his youth. Wang Bing gives the 86-year-old more than a little space. For his portrait, he presents him with the entire Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

This is where Wang Xilin reviews his life of torture and oppression, recapitulates the tribulations in communist China, reports knocked-out teeth and nightmares, suicides among intellectuals. His testimony is frequently underlaid, sometimes even drowned out by grandiose musical arrangements. When an orchestra thunders from offscreen, Wang Xilin’s body rears up – “Man in Black” is also an exorcistic oral history. The composer turns himself into his own instrument, into the medium of a violent epoch, sharing his emotions literally unveiled.

In 1974, the mathematician Penrose discovered pairs of tiles that form an infinite plane without repeating patterns. Inspired by this, Max Cooper uses a rhythm fragment of one instrument to compose a percussion ensemble without a single identical loop. Jessica In contributes animated tile ornaments without symmetries that are reminiscent of a mandala and visualise the idea of infinity.

The peace of the superpowers is based on “mutual assured destruction”. States can annihilate each other completely with their arsenals. On 13 January 2018, 1.4 million people on Hawaii got a taste of this: A false missile alert text message brought their lives to a standstill that lasted 38 minutes, panic broke out and the nuclear threat suddenly became real.

A ghostly voice sings about transience while the camera glides past closed curtains, capturing the expressive, lived-in face of a dozing Val Kilmer. Rick Alverson’s disconcerting stroboscopic video editing makes the dozing body twitch. The inner turmoil of a troubled soul and restless memories rise to the surface.

An app that assigns a sound and a connected graphic element to every letter of the computer keyboard forms the basis of this live improvisation by CFM. The game of patterns and breaks uses different sound-form combinations from Jono Brandel’s kit to create rhythms, loops and music as well as a video to accompany them.

When puffins on Vestmannaeyjar leave their nest, they often get lost in the village, irritated by all the lights. Birta and Selma live on this small island a few kilometres off the coast of Iceland. Together with other young people, they have made it their mission to find the little fledglings and bring them back to the cliff the next day, where they will take their first flight.

A distant idyll featuring well-behaved children at play: a prettily illustrated and well-labelled world. An unsuspecting rabbit scampers there which may be cute but can also be tortured and slaughtered. And when a goblin who can turn insects into flashing diamonds springs from the dead body, one would have to be a stupid child indeed not to smell a business opportunity. Good children! Bad children!