Josefin Andersson, born in 1987 in Sweden, is co-founder of INTÄKTEN online office. She is also member of the feminist comic collective Dotterbolaget, works with different mechanisms of attraction and social hierarchy such as economy and sex. She studies at the Kunstakademiet of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Ksenia Aksenova is an Oslo-based artist born in St. Petersburg (Russia) in 1983. She received a master's degree in linguistics in Moscow, studied art history and theory of photography. Among other projects, Ksenia has been involved in the Venice Biennial Central Asian Pavillion (2013) and The First Supper Symposium: Second Course (2014). Currently she is enrolled in a master program at the Kunstakademiet of the Oslo Natioanl Academy of the Arts and a co-organizer of Akademirommet at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo. aksenovaksenia.com
Burak Arikan is a New York and Istanbul based artist working with complex networks. He takes the obvious social, economical, and political issues as input and runs through an abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces, that result in performances, and procreates predictions to render inherent power relationships visible, thus discussable. Arikan’s software, prints, installations, and performances have been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally. Arikan is the founder of Graph Commons collaborative “network mapping” platform.
Arikan has presented his work internationally at institutions including MoMA in New York, Venice Architecture Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Berlin Biennial, Marrakech Biennial, Ars Electronica, Neuberger Museum of Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Borusan Contemporary, Cultural center DEPO, etc. and at independent venues such as Art Interactive Cambridge, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Hafriyat, Turbulence (online). He has given lectures and conducted workshops in the Importants University.
Alexey Asantcheeff is a Franco – British musician of Russian origin who takes his inspiration from classical and jazz music. Grand-son of Scottish composer and conductor, Jack Lockhart, Alexey Asantcheeff studies piano since he was 7 years old, under the supervision of Italian pianist Carla Segalini. He graduates from the American School of Modern Music in Paris (part of the Berklee College of Music in Boston) before continuing his studies with Pierre Bertrand (Paris Jazz Big Band, Nice Jazz Orchestra…), exploring the complex orchestrations of Big Band. Alexey Asantcheeff researches the modal harmonica language with the famous Hungarian professor Emil Spanyi. He also studies the classical orchestration courses of David Lampel, in order to master the use of strings in a bigger ensemble and therefore develops a taste for musical arrangements, and has multiple collaborations. And last but not least, he composes for piano and orchestra (of different sizes) a more personal music, mixing his different influences and origins, a music that mingles Slavic accents into the immense Nordic lochs.
Beirut is an art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo (EG) that considers institution building as a curatorial act. Its activities are centered around hosting artists, artworks, research projects and other institutions (locally, regionally, internationally) that wish to engage with shared questions concerning politics, economy, education, ecology and the arts. As institution, Beirut wishes to be mindful of the rapid changes Egypt and the region are experiencing. At this crucial time of transition, Beirut makes room to contemplate contemporary life from the position of art, and to provide a space of response. It acts as a forum through which the international community of artists, workers, poets, writers, filmmakers, activists, architects, thinkers and students can share their affinities and social sentiments, towards staking new grounds and taking up critical positions to reflect on this new and open situation. Beirut was founded in May 2012 by Jens Maier-Rothe and Sarah Rifky, Antonia Alampi joined in the same year.
Antonia Alampi is an art historian, curator and writer born to southern Italy and based in Cairo since 2012, where she is curator at Beirut, director of the Imaginary School Program and art history lecturer at Azza Fahmy Design Studio. She lectures curatorial studies and exhibition history at the M.A. program of Alchimia Jewelry School in Florence and is a member of the advisory board of Viafarini in Milan. When in Rome she co-founded and co-directed the art initiative Opera Rebis, a not-for-profit art initiative that didn’t endure in the absence of public funding for small initiatives in Italy. She has worked for more sustainable institutions such as Manifesta7, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento and Studio Stefania Miscetti. Her writings have appeared in various journals, magazines and art(ist) publications and independently she curates solo, group and other types of show.
Amelia Beavis-Harrison, born in 1986 in UK, is an artist working in Norway and the UK, using performance through exploring narratives and histories. Amelia is a graduating MA student at the Kunstakademiet of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, she graduated from her BA in the UK in 2007. In 2014, Amelia won the Ungkunststipend for Festspillene i Nord-Norge and will present her performance Of Fire and Ice at the festival in June. This June Amelia will also perform at Østlandsutstillingen in Oslo. In 2015, Amelia has exhibited and performed at Critical Costume, Aalto University, (Helsinki) and Silenced Histories Live Art Bistro (Leeds); Tempus Fugit in Syson Gallery (Nottingham); When Hostilities End Spikersuppa Lydgalleri (Oslo). Notable exhibitions and performances include Performance Art Oslo Festival (2014), Dimanche Rouge Festival, Helsinki Art Museum (2013), SPILL Festival (2012), World Event Young Artists (2012), to name a few. Amelia is also a freelance curator and has organized performance festivals, exhibitions and events in UK and Norway.
Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò founded and directed Motus since 1991. They have always sculpted their projects by action and reaction with regards to everyday facts large and small, like litmus paper, feeding on the contradictions of the contemporary world, translating them and making them active material for reflection and provocation. What characterizes Motus theatre practice is the continuous attempt to combine on stage classical texts, like Sophocles’s Antigone (rewritten by B. Brecht) or W. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with topics, conflicts and wounds, compelling needs from the socio-political reality of our time. They believe in a kind of theatre that impacts, raises issues and does not reassure.
DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency)
DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) is an architectural studio and art residency program based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. DAAR’s work combines conceptual speculations and pragmatic spatial interventions, discourse and collective learning. DAAR explores possibilities for the reuse, subversion and profanation of actual structure of domination: from evacuated military bases to the transformation of refugee camps, from uncompleted governmental structures to the remains of destroyed villages.
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are both architects and researchers in urbanism, founding members and co-directors of DAAR, an architectural office and an artistic residency program that combines conceptual speculations and architectural interventions. DAAR was awarded the Price Claus Prize for Architecture, won the foundation for Arts initiative Grant, was shortlisted for the Iakov Chernikhov Prize and has been showed in various biennales and museums around the world (www.decolonizing.ps). Alongside research and practice, Hilal and Petti are engaged in critical pedagogy. They established an experimental educational program in Dheisheh refugee camp Bethlehem in partnership with Al Quds University and hosted by the Phoenix Center (www.campusincamps.ps). More recently they co-authored the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.
Henning Erlandsson and David Torstensson are two friends who have shared engagements and dreams for over 10 years. They were collectively admitted to the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Kunstakademiet) and thereby assumed that they had secured a leeway to act in. Instead, they found themselves spending the last two years seeking sustainable strategies for how one can share active practices within a close relationship, when intimacy and potentiality are at constant risk of turning into exhausting work. Siggalycke is an old school building from 1907. It is a home for some, a summerhouse for others, a place for studying, building, collectivity, self-organized schools, study circles, cooking, celebrations, rituals. It is a space for discussion and understanding of radical politics, crisis, anxiety, friendship, depression, economy - a space for communing.
Thomas Hirschhorn was born in 1957 in Bern (Switzerland). He studied at the Schule für Gestaltung, Zürich from 1978 to 1983 and moved to Paris in 1984, where he has been living since. His work has been shown in numerous museums, galleries and exhibitions among which the Venice Biennale (1999), Documenta11 (2002), 27th Sao Paolo Biennale (2006), the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburg (2008), the Swiss Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), La Triennale at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012), Gladstone Gallery New York (2012), Manifesta 10 in Saint-Petersburg (2014). In 2013, Thomas Hirschhorn presented the "Gramsci Monument" in the Bronx, New York. “Flamme éternelle”, his most recent ‘Presence and Production’ project, took place at Palais de Tokyo, Paris from April 24. to June 23. 2014. A selection of his writings was published by MIT Press (October Books): Critical Laboratory: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn, and the book Gramsci Monument will be published by Koenig Books and Dia Art Foundation in 2015.
Mathias Jud and Christopher Wachter, were both born in Zurich and live and work in Berlin. They have participated in numerous international exhibitions and have been awarded many international prizes. In particular, the projects picidae (since 2007), New Nations (since 2009) and qaul.net (since 2012) have gained worldwide interest. As “open-source” projects these works uncover forms of censorship of the internet, undermine the concentration of political power and even resolve the dependency on infrastructure. The tools, provided by the artists, are used by communities in the USA, Europe, Australia and in countries like Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, India, China, Thailand, even in North Korea activists participate. In 2012, HOTEL GELEM with Roma families in Europe has been awarded by the Council of Europe. The PR China denied Wachter and Jud to entry the country since 2013.
Marie Lechner is a journalist specialized in media cultures. She held a weekly column in the national newspaper Libération and she is the creator of Ecrans, a weekly magazine lunched by the newspaper in 2006 and focused on the “civilisation of the screen”. She collaborates with Arte Creative and MCD (Musiques et cultures digitales – Music and digital culture). In 2011, she co-organized a Speed Show Volume 5 “Open internet” with Anne Roquigny and Adam Bartholl. In 2011-2012, she organized a set of lectures at the Gaité Lyrique in collaboration with Arte Creative, named Le Folklore du web. In 2014, she realized a lecture supertalk Le wi-fi, de l’Antiquité à nos jours. Since 2015, she is a researcher at PAMAL (Préservation & Art – Media Archaeology Lab) at the Art Academy of Avignon (Ecole Supérieure d’Art).
The Living Theatre was founded in 1947 as an imaginative alternative to the commercial theatre by Judith Malina (1926-2015) and Julian Beck (1925-1985). Julith Malina was a an avant-garde director and Julian Back an abstract expressionist painter of the New York School (he was exposed at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery) before turning to scenography and adaptation. Influenced by Antonin Artaud and the epical theatre, The Living Theatre revolutionized theatrical forms and produced a unique body of work that has influenced theatre all over the world from the 1950 onwards. In 1968 they make a huge scandal at the 22nd Avignon Festival. They are invited to present 3 works at the Cloître des Célestins : Antigone after a text by Brecht, Small Mysteries and Paradise Now. The 24th July, at the representation of the latter, Julian Beck advocated a theatre that has to “leave its prison” and get out on the streets. After the show, there is an improvised procession in the city and the crowds shout :“theatre is in the streets”. The day after, the mayor and the police department ask the Living Theatre to replace Paradise Now with one of the other plays on the programme due to complaints from the inhabitants. Paradise Now becomes a legend. In 1970, after 2 years of touring around Europe with Paradise Now, the Living Theatre breaks up. Julien Beck and Judith Malina take 2 different paths for their formal research.
Born in 1971, Renata Lucas is a bresilian artist who lives and works in São Paulo. Renata Lucas graduated a Master of Art plastic at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in 1999 and then a Ph.D. University of São Paulo. In 2001, in collaboration with a group of artists, she
opened a non-commercial gallery "x 10.20 3.60 ", where she presented her first personal exhibition. Her work has been shown, among others, at the São Paulo Biennial (2006), the Tate Modern in London (2007), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2008), and at the Biennale of Sydney (2008). In 2009, her work was shown in the exhibition "Fare Mondi / / Making Worlds "at the 53th Biennale Venice. Renata Lucas usually works with already existing situations. Based on fictions, she intervenes into found landscapes and architectures making the background become the main character. Her displacements cause spaces to become the main focus of attention revealing their deeper structures and proposing meaningful transformations. She is in residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers since May 2015 for a first while of residency.
Line Møller Lyhne was born in Aarhus (DK) in 1989. She is a first year MA student at the the Kunstakademiet of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Interested in the dialectic conversation between art and design, she collects and works with a lot of different types of material and objects. She sees her work as an exploration in our tactile, physical and associative relation to sculpture, its placement and interaction with the space, the poetry of choosing, combining and composing material, as a celebration of a certain aesthetic and an experimental approach to new materials and all their potentials.
Nathalie Magnan teaches at the National School of Art in Bourges. She edited La video entre art et communication (ENSBA, 1997) and Connection, art, réseaux, média (ENSBA, 2002) in collaboration with Annick Bureaud. Some other publications are « Hacktivisme : pour une pratique politique du code » in Arts Numériques, tendance, artistes, lieux & festival (ed. M21 2008) and Donna Haraway, Manifeste cyborg et autres essais, science-fiction-féminisme edited by Laurence Allard, Delphine Gardey, Nathalie Magnan. She has been teaching at Paris 8 and the California University in Santa Cruz.
Jasmina Metwaly et Philip Rizk are an artist and a film director. Together they made the film Out on the streets in 2014, about a group of workers from one of Egypt’s working class neighborhoods, Helwan. In the film ten working-class men participate in an acting workshop. Through the rehearsals, numerous stories emerge: of factory injustice, police brutality, courts that fabricate criminal charges, and countless tales of corruption and exploitation by their capitalist employers. On a rooftop studio overlooking the heart of Cairo – presented as a space between fact and fiction – the participants move in and out of character as they shape the performance that engages their daily realities. Out in the street scenes from the workshop, fictional performances, and mobile phone footage shot by a worker intended as evidence for the courts to stop the destruction of his workplace are interweaved. This hybrid approach aims to engage a collective imaginary, situating the participants and spectators within a broader social struggle.
Marc Partouche PhD in art history and aesthetics, contemporary art critic and historian, is the director of the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris. Parallel to his administrative duties, Marc Partouche has a vide variety of activities on the contemporary cultural scene : he organises exhibitions, creates and diffuses magazines, creates and directs books’ collections. He is also a researcher and writer, having published numerous articles, catalogues and artists books, as Marcel Duchamp. Sa vie même (al dante éd.), La lignée oubliée. Bohèmes, avant-gardes et art contemporain, de 1860 à nos jours (al dante éd.), Une vie de banlieue. Sur les photographies d’Alain Leloup (Hazan éd.), Les Déchargeurs. Manifeste de l’individualisme Solidaire (FRAC éd.), Mauvais œil et peinture abstraite (Sgraffite éd.), Orlan (Jéricho éd.). He is the editor of Isou. Contre l’Internationale Situationniste (H.C. éd.) and W. Flusser. Les gestes (H.C. éd., réédition Les cahiers du Midi).
Nathalie Quintane, born in 1964, publishes her first texts in poetry magazines and then at P.O.L. publishing house : two novels and other texts difficult to classify, at the frontier between autobiography, essay and poetry. She participates in numerous public lectures in France and the rest of the world and she works regularly with artists such as Stéphane Bérard, Xavier Boussiron, Stephen Loye, Alain Rivière. Her latest publications are Descente de médiums (P.O.L., 2014) and Les années 10 (la Fabrique, 2014).
Diane Scott worked for many years as a stage director and director of the theatre company “Les corps secrets”. She participated in the Villa Médicis Hors les murs programme in 2011. Parallel to her artistic practice, she developed her work as a critic and researcher. She is now completing her PhD on the relationship between theatre and the political modernity in Amiens. He wrote Carnet critique, Avignon 2009 (L’Harmattan, 2010) and she is the chef editor of Revue Incise, the theatre magazine of Studio-Théâtre de Vitry.
Marinella Senatore, born in 1977 in Italy, lives and works in London and Paris. Her practice is characterized by public participation. The idea is to foster the creative power of a crowd, initiating a dialogue between history, culture and social structures. Senatore’s work is to be experienced by everyone, inviting us to create a participative work in which everybody can play a role. She works with video, installations, performance, photographs and drawings. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Italy and abroad, including solo exhibitions: Mendes Wood, São Paulo, Brazil (upcoming); Mot International, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Kunsthalle, Sankt Gallen; Peres Projects, Berlin; Matadero, Madrid; Macro Museum, Rome. Among the group exhibitions: 13e Biennale de Lyon, La Vie Moderne; Thessaloniki Biennále 5 of Contemporary Art; Maxxi Museum, Rome; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Whitechapel, London; Bozar, Bruxelles; Liverpool Biennial, UK; Tikva Mueseum of Art, Tel Aviv; Göteborg Biennial, Sweden; Visible Award, Serpentine Gallery, London; 54th Venice Biennal, ILLUMINATIONS; ISCP, New York; Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Sophie Wahnich, PhD is a historian. She is a research director at CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) within the IIAC (Interdisciplinary Contemporary Institute) and the director of the TRAM (Radical transformations of the contemporary world) team. Her work deals with the French Revolution and the contemporary world. Her PhD work was on the notion of “foreigner” in the discourse of the French Revolution and her HDR (postdoc) on the history of emotion in politics : Histoire des émotions et présents de l'histoire, une approche politique et anthropologique du sensible en politique. She is a member of the editing team of the Vacarme magazine and the director of the collection “L'histoire rejouée” at Prairies ordinaires publishing house. Among her books : L’Intelligence politique de la Révolution française (Textuel, 2013), Mondes méditerranéens, l’émeute au cœur du politique, L'homme et la société (nos 187-188, October 2013, Éditions Harmattan), La Longue Patience du peuple, 1792, naissance de la République (Payot, 2008), Les Émotions, la Révolution française et le présent : Exercices pratiques de conscience historique (CNRS Éditions, 2009).
Hannah Wiker was born in Stockholm in 1990. She currently lives and works in Oslo, studying at the Kunstakademiet of the Oslo National Acandemy of the Arts. She works in different mediums but mostly in film and video connected to a documentary research. She has a past in contemporary circus and performing arts, as she studied at the Cirkus Cirkör in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. Working actively within the network “No Human Is Illegal”, she is focusing on their child and youth group. To enlighten the rights of people without papers, encouraging no nations and eventual practical needs for life.