Art and the Politics of Individuation
SFSIA 2016 | Berlin

Import Projects
July 4 – 29, 2016

Faculty Bios


Marie-Luise Angerer is professor of Media Studies at the Department for Art and Media, University of Potsdam. Before that she was professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Visiting fellow and guest professor in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Member of the European Network How Matter comes to Matter (2014-2018), and of the Research Network Affective and Psychotechnology Studies(DFG 2015-2017) The focus of her research is on media technology, affect and neuroscientific reformulations of desire, sexuality, and the body. Her most recent publications include Desire After Affect (2014), Timing of Affect (with Bernd Bösel and Michaela Ott, 2014), Choreography, Media, Gender (with Yvonne Hardt and Anna-Carolin Weber, 2013), numerous articles in books and journals on the topic of affect, art, and media theory. 

Julieta Aranda. Central to Aranda’s practice are her involvement with circulation mechanisms and the idea of a “poetics of circulation”; her interest on science-fiction, space travel and zones of friction; the possibility of a politicized subjectivity through the perception and use of time, and the notion of power over the imaginary. Julieta Aranda’s work spans installation, video, and print media, with a special interest in the creation and manipulation of artistic exchange and the subversion of traditional notions of commerce through art making. As a co-director of the online platform e-flux together with Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda has developed the projects Time/Bank, Pawnshop, and e-flux video rental, all of which started in the e-flux storefront in New York, and have travelled to many venues worldwide. Aranda’s work has been exhibited internationally, in venues such as the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Guggenheim Museum (2015, 2009), Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2015), Espace Verney – Carron, Lyon (2015), Mana Comtemporary, Jersey City (2015), 8th Berlin Biennale (2014), Berardo Museum, Lisbon (2014), Witte de With (2013 and 2010), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genova (2013), MACRO Roma (2012) Documenta 13 (2012), N.B.K. (2012), Gwangju Biennial (2012), 54th Venice Biennial (2011), Istanbul Biennial (2011), Portikus, Frankfurt (2011), New Museum NY (2010), Kunstverein Arnsberg (2010), MOCA Miami (2009), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007), 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007) MUSAC, Spain (2010 and 2006), and VII Havanna Biennial; amongst many others.

Archive is a platform for cultural research and debate. It brings together activists and cultural practitioners in an adaptable and non-hierarchal structure with the aim to foster a unique space for discussion and exchange. Archive is engaged in a wide range of activities including publishing and exhibition making. Archive Books produces readers, monographs and artists’ books as well as journals focusing on contemporary cultural production. Located in Berlin, Archive Kabinett is both a library and a bookshop showcasing a selected range of printed matters, and simultaneously a space for lectures, screenings and exhibitions. Archive Journal is a biannual cross-disciplinary journal. As its name suggests, it is primarily concerned with the notion of documentation but also with contemporary uses of translation and recirculation. Archive Appendix is the design department that brings a conceptual approach to the relation between text and image.

Artsy

Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris. After completing his dissertation in literature, he worked at the Free University Berlin from 2007-2014 . He has previously been a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and in the German Department at Yale University and visiting professor at various art academies in Europe and the US. He is editor in chief at Merve Verlag Berlin. In 2012 he founded a bilingual research platform on Speculative Poetics, including a series of events, translations and publications: www.spekulative-poetik.de

Elena Bajo’s practice explores the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology, and metaphysics. Her concept-generated and research based practice is concerned with the ecological, social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. She works individually and collectively across installation, sculpture, performance, painting, film, text and writing.

After obtaining a degree in Science from Complutense University in Madrid, (Spain) she received an MA in Architecture from ESARQ, School of Architecture at International University of Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain) in 2002 and a MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, University of Arts, London (UK) in 2005.
She was a co-founder of EXHIBITION, NY (2009). She is co-initiator of the Los Angeles, CA collective D’CLUB (Divestment Club) engaged in fossil fuel divestment activities, and climate action. She has taught and lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield among other institutions. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, Brazil, Annex14, Zurich and D+T Project, Brussels, and group shows Mardin Biennial, Turkey and “Trust” at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. Forthcoming exhibits for 2016 include a solo exhibition at Garcia Galeria, Madrid, ‘Aun: Yet, Still” the 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Pereira, Colombia, and “Take Up your Space”, at Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf.

She is a 2016-2017 recipient of the Botin Foundation Visual Arts Grant, for her project Urania’s Mirror, an interdisciplinary project that investigates environmental and social impact that economies of exploitation have on the land and communities, in several parts of Latin America. Her artist’s publication Isle of Innocence (After Fordlandia) will soon be released, published by KSP Kunsthale Sao Paulo, Brazil. Bajo lives in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi was born in Bologna, Italy in 1949, Franco Berardi Bifo is a writer, media-theorist, and media-activist. As a young militant he took part in the experience of Potere operaio in the years 1967-19073, then he founded the magazine A/traverso (1975–81) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976–78). Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. He has been involved in many media-projects, like Telestreet, and Recombinant.org. Bifo published the books The Uprising (1912) After the future (2011) The Soul at Work (2010), Felix (2001), Cibernauti (1994), Mutazione e Cyberpunk (1993). He contributed to the magazines Semiotext(e), Chimères, Metropoli, and Musica 80 and is currently collaborating to e-flux.journal. Coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI) he has been teaching at Ashkal Alwan in Beirouth, PEI-Macba in Barcelona, Accademia di Brera in Milano, and has been lecturing in social centers and Universities worldwide. His last book, published in December 2015 by Semiotexte is And Phenomenology of the End.

Michael Birchall is Curator of Public Practice at Tate Liverpool, and Senior Lecturer in Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores Univeristy. His PhD research has focused on socially engaged art since the 1990s, and the curatorial role in this process as a producer in Europe and North America. He has held curatorial appointments at The Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada, and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; and was previously a lecturer in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Frieze d/e, thisistomorrow, Modern Painters and C-Magazine as well as various catalogues and journals.

French art critic, theoretician and curator, Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) was co-founder and co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2000-2006), and Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain. He was the director of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 2011 to 2015. He is the artistic director of La Panacée, artistic center of Montpellier.

Peter Brugger, born 1957 in Zurich, Switzerland. Acquired a teacher’s Diploma for Elementary and High School levels before studying biology at Zurich University. Dissertation on Subjective Randomness: Implications for Neuropsychology andParapsychology. Postdoctoral training at UCSD San Diego and University of Victoria (Canada). Currently head of Neuropsychology Unit of University Hospital Zurich. Main research interests: neuropsychology of paranormal beliefs and “schizotypy”; representation of body and space (Pfizer Prize for Medical Research in 2001 for work on phantoms of congenitally missing limbs); convergence of space, time and number in the human brain, simulation of randomness by living organisms. Overarching is the interest in the overlaps between brain and culture.

Federico Campagna is a Sicilian philosopher based in London. His current work revolves mainly around the ontological and ethical challenges posed by contemporary nihilism, and the possibility of a fundamental philosophical architecture of emancipation. His latest book ‘The Last Night: antiwork, atheism, adventure’, was published by Zero Books in 2013. He is currently co-editing with Prof. Saul Newman a series of forgotten classics of non-anglophone heterodox political theory, titled ‘Xenopolitics’ (forthcoming in 2017 for Zed Books). He has discussed his work at institutions such as Serpentine Gallery (London), Documenta 13 (Kassel), MACBA (Barcelona), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), Goldsmiths College (London), Chelsea College of Arts (London), Royal College of Arts (London), and on publications such as The White Review, E.R.O.S. Journal, Anarchist Studies Journal, Adbusters, The New Humanist, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, Alfabeta2. He currently works as rights manager at Verso Books and is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Arts, London. http://federicocampagna.eu/  

Juli Carson received her PhD from M.I.T. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Art Program in the Department of Architecture. Currently, she is Professor of Art History in the Art Department at UC Irvine, where she directs the Critical and Curatorial MFA Program and the University Art Galleries. She is author of Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007) and curator of the archival exhibition of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1998). Her essays on conceptual art and psychoanalysis have been published in Art Journal, Documents, October, Texte Zur Kunstand X-Tra, as well as in numerous international anthologies and catalogues. Her most recent book is The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011). Her forthcoming book is The Conceptual Unconscious: A Poetics of Critique. She is currently preparing a monograph on the work of Daniel Joseph Martinez.

Mathieu Copeland (b. 1977, lives in London) has been developing a practice seeking to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and to renew our perceptions of these. Amongst many others, he co-curated the exhibition ‘VOIDS, A Retrospective’ at the Centre Pompidou—Paris and the Kunsthalle—Bern, and edited the anthology ‘VOIDS’. He curated ‘A Choreographed Exhibition’ at the Kunsthalle—St Gallen & La Ferme du Buisson, ‘Soundtrack for an Exhibition’, ‘Alan Vega’ and ‘Gustav Metzger’ at the Musee d’Art Contemporain—Lyon. He initiated and curated the series ‘A Spoken Word Exhibitions’, ‘Reprise’ and ‘the Exhibitions to Hear Read’. A professor at the HEAD – Geneva, he lectures in numerous art school and universities throughout the world. Invited curator at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2012-2013, and guest-curator at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile-de-France Paris, 2014-2015, he recently edited ‘Choreographing Exhibitions’, and realized ‘The exhibition of a film’ – an exhibition as a feature film for cinemas.

Jeremiah Day is re-examining political conflicts and resistances through unfolding their subjective traces and contexts through photography, speech and body language. His performances draw upon post-modern dance, in particular Simone Forti’s improvisational research-moving-talking method, in which content appears not didactically, but rather through unfolding questioning. Day graduated from the art department of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997 and lived and worked in Los Angeles until moving to Holland in 2003 to attend the Rijksakademie. From 2000 to 2002 Day was artist-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles where he organized such events as “The Great Silence: 10 Years After the Burning,” commemorating the 1992 riots.  Day’s performances, photographs and installations have been presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum and last year’s Thessaloniki Biennial.  He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Arcade, London.  He is presently completing his PHD titled: “A Kind of Imagination that has Nothing To Do with Fiction – Allan Kaprow and Hannah Arendt and a Practice for a New Publicness of Art.” 

Joshua Decter is a New York-based writer, curator, art historian, and theorist who has contributed to ArtforumAfterallMousseThe Exhibitionist, Rhizome, Texte zur KunstFlash Art, and other international publications. He has curated exhibitions at institutions such as PS1, The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Apex Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Kunsthalle Vienna, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. His exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York TimesArtforumThe Village VoiceArt MonthlyThe Los Angeles TimesArt NewsLe Monde, and elsewhere. He has authored essays for numerous exhibition catalogues since the late 1980s, and was editor of Acme Journal in the 1990s. Decter’s 2013 book, Art Is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986-2012), published by JRP|Ringier, reconsiders art’s definitions, functions, ethical entanglements, societal aspirations, and cultural contradictions. He coauthored the 2014 book, Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993, volume 5 of Afterall Books (London) Exhibition Histories series. Decter is a faculty member in the School of Visual Art’s M.A. Curatorial Practice program, and at The Cooper Union in New York. He has also taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The School of Visual Arts in New York, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, UCLA, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and Bennington College. From 2007 to 2011, Decter was Director of the Master of Public Art Studies Program at the USC’s Roski School in Los Angeles, where he founded the M.A. Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere program. He has organized many conferences, including: The Architecture of Display: new approaches to exhibition designThe Question of the CityThe Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement; and Participation and Friction: Rethinking Art and Architecture as Public Culture.

Oriol Fontdevila is a curator, writer, researcher, focusing on art practices and education based in Barcelona. Currently he is researching from a performative approach on the interweave between art and mediation granted by MNCARS, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia. Also in 2015 he has been awarded ex aequo by the Cultural Innovation International Prize of CCCB, Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona for the project Becoming Public. He is artistic co-director of Sala d’Art Jove de la Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government Youth Art Space) and currently he is co-curating Performing the Museum, an artistic research platform lead by Antoni Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Koroska Galery of Fine Arts (Slovenj Gradec) and Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad). Formerly he has curated several projects at Joan Miró Foundation, Antoni Tàpies Foundation, A*DESK Platform, Idensitat, Santa Mònica Arts Center, amongst other art institutions and independent spaces in Barcelona. He is a guest lecturer in several universities and study programs and writes regularly in art magazines and exhibition catalogues. www.oriolfontdevila.net.

Frieze Magazine

Poet and translator Johannes Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia. He is the author of several books, includingHaute Surveillance (2013),Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), and Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches)(2008). He has translated Aase Berg’s Dark Matter (2012), Transfer Fat (2012), andRemainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg (2005) as well as Henry Parland’s Ideals Clearance (2007). Göransson’s critical and creative work explores genre, aesthetics, and the limits of the autonomous text. He has written on subjects ranging from gurlesque poetry to Sylvia Plath to translation theory. In an interview with 3AM Magazine, Göransson noted that when he writes, he starts from a “micro-level,” adding, “I have a sensation or sentence in mind and then I try to exhaust everything using that kernel (and with everything I primarily mean myself, but also our entire culture, it’s a futile idea no doubt).” Less than “innovative” poetry, he noted, “I’m far more interested in the degraded and anachronistic, the trashy and the melancholic. Even ‘the poetic.’” With his wife, poet Joyelle McSweeney, Göransson coedits Action Books, and with John Woods he publishes the online journal Action, Yes. He is an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame. In August 2013, Göransson was a featured writer for Harriet.

Krist Gruijthuijsen (1980, NL) is the director of Kunst-Werke Berlin. He was the artistic director of the Grazer Kunstverein (2012 – 2016) and course director of the MA fine arts department at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (2011 – 2016). He is the co-founding director of Kunstverein in Amsterdam (2009 – 2012) and has organized over the past decade a numerous amount of exhibitions and projects at amongst others Manifesta 7 (Italy), Platform Garanti (Istanbul) , Artistsspace (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), Swiss Institute (New York), Galeria Vermelho (Sao Paulo), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Arnolfini (Bristol), Project Art Centre (Dublin), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City) and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane).

Gruijthuijsen has produced, edited and published extensively in close collaboration with JRP|Ringier, Sternberg Press, Mousse Publishing Printed Matter Inc. Verlag Walther König and Kunstverein Publishing. Recent publications are amongst others ‘Mierle Laderman Ukeles – Seven Work Ballets’ (Sternberg Press), ‘Vincent Fecteau’ (Sternberg Press), ‘The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists + The Addition’ (JRP Ringier), ‘Selected Writings by Doug Ashford’ (Mousse Publishing), ‘Lisa Oppenheim: Works 2003 – 2013’ (Sternberg Press) and several others under the umbrella of ‘Kunstverein Publishing’.

Helen Hester is Head of Film and Media at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. She is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Ashgate, 2015) and Dea ex Machina (Merve, 2015), and the editor of Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series.

Cathérine Hug (born 1976 in Basel) studied computer science, journalism and art history at the University of Zurich. From 2000 to 2007 she was a curatorial assistant at the Kunsthaus Zürich. As an independent curator at the Kunsthaus she curated In den Alpen, 2006, with Tobia Bezzola; and Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Moderne, 2007; as well as Bunker: Unloaded (2003) with Giovanni Carmine. From 2005 to 2008 she was Assistant Art Unlimited at Art Basel. From 2008 to 2013 Cathérine Hug was a curator at the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), where she curated, among others, Thomas Ruff: Surfaces, Depths, 2009; 1989. The End of History or the Beginning of the Future? (2009) with Gerald Matt and Thomas Miessgang; Space. The Art and a Dream (2011) with Walter Famler; WWTBD—What Would Thomas Bernhard Do, as well as Salon der Angst, both 2013, with Nicolaus Schafhausen. Since 2013 she has been curator at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where she co-curated, among others, Expressionism in Germany and France (2014) with Timothy Benson, Europe. The Future of History with Robert Menasse (2015), Dadaglobe Reconstructed (2016) with Adrian Sudhalter, and Francis Picabia. A Retrospective (2016) with Anne Umland in collaboration with MoMA, New York.

Yuk Hui is currently research associate of the DFG Project Technoecology of Participation at the Leuphana University Lüneburg; previous to that, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He published on philosophy of technology and media in periodicals such as MetaphilosophyParrhesiaCahiers SimondonJahrbuch TechnikphilosophieIntellecticaNew FormationsZeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, etc. He is co-editor of the anthology 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author ofOn the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, 2016). He is also the series editor of “Media Philosophy” with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, and series editor of “After Simondon” with Meson Press.

Anelis Kaiser, Ph.D., a co-founder of the international research network, NeuroGenderings, is a Marie Heim-Vögtlin Fellow at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she is working on the classification and registration of sex/gender in fMRI human science. Anelis Kaiser has examined sex/gender in the brain as it relates to exploring the existence of paradigmatic, methodological, and statistical defaults that interfere with assessing the presence or absence of sex/gender differences. For over ten years, she has also examining the question of „sex in the brain“ from a science studies perspective. She studied psychology and received her Ph.D. from University of Basel, Switzerland.

Sharon Kivland has exhibited widely in Europe and North America. Her publications include A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999, a work that led to many other books.  Filigrane Editions, France, published a small book on her work Le bonheur des femmes, which began in the perfume departments of the grands magasins of Paris, where she retreated after walking the streets in pursuit of Marx and Freud, in the shadow of Lacan. It is a practice of stupid refinement, trapped in archives, libraries, the arcades, and the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity. She continues to follow Sigmund Freud on holiday, and to date she has dreamt of Rome, been melancholy in Trieste, had a disturbance of memory in Athens, forgot a foreign name, and took a cavernous defile, which can be traced in four volumes.  Recent works have followed the revolutionary movements in France (those moments of communal luxury), taking up fashion and fashioning (the shaping of bodies) and education, and include on-going rewritings of Marx’s footnotes toCapital and Emile Zola’s novel Nana. Reading and politics are evoked and feminised, draped in silk or satin, befurred, charmed and charming. Exhibitions include: Crazy about their bodies / Folles de leur corps (CGP, London, 2104); Natürliche Formen – Von Frauen, Füchsen und Lesern (Dieselkraftwerkmuseum, Cottbus, 2015); and The Natural Forms, Part II: The Readers. The Foxes. The Tracts. Some Coquetteries (Kunstverein-Tiergarten Berlin, 2015-16).

Christian Kobald (*1969) is a curator, editor at Spike Art Quarterly, and runs the non-profit exhibition space Yvonne Lambert in Berlin. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and the history of art, culture and ideas at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, where he also teaches in the fine arts program.

Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lash obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Michigan, an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a PhD from the London School of Economics (1980). Lash began his teaching career as a lecturer at Lancaster University and became a professor in 1993. He moved to London in 1998 to take up his present post as Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College. Lash’s work has been influential in sociology and cultural studies, he has been interviewed by numerous media outlets and other academics, including the BBC Radio’s Essay and in Design and Culture. He has been an editor of the journal Theory, Culture and Society since 1989. His work with co-author John Urry has received a great deal of attention in cultural geography and Gibson Burrell stated their work “their book (The End of Organised Capitalism) was a huge achievement in the ‘assemblage’ of material, and 25 years of ‘events’ have not been too unkind to it.” His works have been translated to 15 languages, and he has directed research projects in the domain of technology and media since 1996.

Isabell Lorey, professor for transnational gender politics at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Kassel (https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb05/fachgruppen/politikwissenschaft/geschlechterpolitik.html); political theorist at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp) in Berlin and member of the editorial board of the publishing platform transversal texts (transversal.at). Her recent book is State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen Derieg, London/New York: Verso, 2015. See more here: http://transversal.at/bio/lorey

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the director of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (bitcoins, crowdfunding & internet revenue models) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2013 he was also associate prof. at Mediastudies (new media), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he is professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) where he supervises PhD students.

Raimundas Malašauskas, born in Vilnius, is a curator and writer. From 1995 to 2006, he worked at the  Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, where he produced the first two seasons of the weekly television show CAC TV, an experimental merger of commercial television and contemporary art that ran under the slogan “Every program is a pilot, every program is the final episode.” He curated “Black Market Worlds,” the IX Baltic Triennial, at CAC Vilnius in 2005.

From 2007 to 2008, he was a visiting curator at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and, until recently, a curator-at-large of Artists Space, New York. In 2007, he co-wrote the libretto of Cellar Door, an opera by Loris Gréaud produced in Paris. Malašauskas curated the exhibitions “Sculpture of the Space Age,” David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009); “Into the Belly of a Dove,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2010), and “Repetition Island,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2010). His other recent projects, Hypnotic Showand Clifford Irving Show, are ongoing.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight books of poetry, prose, plays, and criticism, most recently the play Dead Youth, or, The Leaks, winner of the first Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Writers, and the critical book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, published by the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series in 2015. With Johannes Göransson, she edits Action Books, an international press dedicated to politically and aesthetically urgent writing; Action Books has published Chilean poet and activist Raúl Zurita, Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, Swedish poet Aase Berg, and Japanese poet Itō Hiromi among many other titles over ten years. She is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and lives in the small Rust Belt city of South Bend, Indiana.

Warren Neidich is an internationally recognized artist whose work has been exhibited in over one hundred and fifty museums and galleries world wide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS 1 MOMA, The Kunsthaus Zurich, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, The Ludwig Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  He studied photography, video, cognitive neuroscience, medicine and architecture. International awards include the Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale, Berlin, 2010,The Fulbright Scholarship, 2011 and 2013 and the AHRB/ACE Arts and Research Fellowship, UK, 2004. He is founding director of the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art. Forthcoming exhibitions include The Artist’s Library, LAXART, Los Angeles, The Palinopsic Field, LACE, Los Angeles and The Right to Be Unhappy, Bar Projects and the Tapies Foundation. His books The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 3, Archive Press and Resistance is Fertile, Merve Verlag are forthcoming in 2016.

Matteo Pasquinelli (MA, Bologna; PhD, London) is a philosopher and Assistant Professor in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, New York. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and edited the anthologies Gli algoritmi del capitale (2014) and Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas (2015) among others. He lectures frequently at the intersection of political philosophy, media theory and cognitive sciences in universities and art institutions. His texts have been translated in many languages and he has contributed to academic and non-academic journals and newspapers such as Springerin, Multitudes, Fibreculture, Theory Culture & Society, Parrhesia, Leonardo, Lugar Comum, Rethinking Marxism, e-flux, Open!, DIS magazine, Libération, Il manifesto, Der Freitag. Together with Wietske Maas he wrote the Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism. In 2014 at NGBK Berlin he co-curated the exhibition The Ultimate Capital is the Sun and the symposium The Metabolism of the Social Brain.

Mai-Thu Perret is an artist and writer who lives in Geneva, Switzerland. She is known for her multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, painting, video and installation. Perret has created a complex oeuvre which combines radical feminist politics with literary texts, homemade crafts and 20th century avant-garde aesthetics.

Her recent solo shows include the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); Le Magasin, Grenoble (2011); MAMCO, Geneva (2011); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2011); Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (2011); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (2010); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2008); The Kitchen, New York (2008); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2006).

Susan Philipsz was born in 1965 in Glasgow. She completed a BA in Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (1989-93) and an MA in Fine Art at The University of Ulster, Belfast (1993-94). In 2000 she was awarded the P.S.1 studio residency programme and in 2001 she took up residency at Kunst-Werke e.V. artist residency programme in Berlin where she has lived since. In 2010 she won the Turner Prize and in 2014 she was awarded an OBE. She is currently in residence at Villa Aurora artist residency programme, Los Angeles.

My work deals with the spatial properties of sound and with the relationships between sound and architecture. I am particularly interested in the emotive and psychological properties of sound and how it can be used as a device to alter individual consciousness. I have used sound as a medium in public spaces to trigger an awareness in the listener, to temporarily alter their perception of themselves in a particular place and time.

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a lecturer at UdK (Universität der Kunste) Berlin and her writings have appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, Art agenda, Mousse, Frieze/de, Domus, Inaethetics, Manifesta Journal, or Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of The Reluctant Narrator, published by Sternberg Press (2014) and more  recently contributed to Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas, edited by Matteo Pasquinelli and published by Meson Press (2015)

Susanne Prinz is a curator and writer based in Berlin. She has had several years of experience in the commercial art world serving as Director of Galleries Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich and Christian Nagel in Berlin. In 2008 she became head curator the Berlin Art Fair and moved on into the international museum scene. Currently she is the director of L40-Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin). Since its relocation in 2009, Prinz has presented a program of more than 70 exhibitions and events. Her special focus is on art in the public realm where she worked with well known artists like Christian-Phillip Müller, Clegg & Guttmann, Michael Sailstorfer and Michael Beutler. In addition to her curatorial work she has taught at the art academies in Kassel, Salzburg, Linz and Montpellier.

Prof Dr. Dorothee Richter, is since 2005 head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (MAS/CAS)  www,curating.org at the University of the Arts Zurich (ZHdK). She also co-founded with Susanne Clausen the “Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme” a cooperation of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Reading. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues, urban situations, power relation issues, institutional critique. She worked as a curator ever since. Since 1998, Richter has held lecturing posts at the University of Bremen, the Merzakademie Stuttgart, the École des Beaux Arts in Geneva, and the Universität Lüneburg alongside the traveling Exhibition / Archive “Curating Degree Zero Archive”. She co-curated numours Symposia like “Re-Visions of the Display” 2009, coop. Jennifer Johns, Sigrid Schade, Migros Museum in Zurich. 2010 “Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?” coop. with Rein Wolfs, in 2013 the symposium “Who is afraid of the public?” at the ICA London, coop. with Elke Krasny, Silvia Simoncelli and the University  of Reading, also the symposium with the Manifesta Journal and the Institute of Contemporary Art of the ZHdk “ Third, fourth and fifth spaces: Curatorial practices in new public and social (digital) spaces” at the Migros Museum 2013. Her most recent publication is her PHD Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft and the new Internet platform www.on-curating.org which presents current approaches to critical curatorial practice. In 2013 she published a film together with Ronald Kolb: „Flux Us Now! Fluxus explored with a camera.“ which was screened for  the first time at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in April 2013, Migros  Museum in Zürich and different European art academies In September 2013 she was appointed as mentor for POOL, (Collection of Hoffmann and Ringier) Zürich. In 2014 the Cultural Department of the city of Zurich appointed her as the curator/ programmer of half of  Gasthaus zum Baeren / Museum Baerengasse, where she did run a programme together with young curators under the title “Curating Your Context”, see gasthauszumbaeren.ch for 15 months. She is working with Ronald Kolb on a video archive of Curatorial Practice and Theory, a collaboration with the ZKM Karlsruhe. 2016 Richter was additionally appointed as Professor of Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, Department of Art.

Nadim Julien Samman read Philosophy at University College London before completing a PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He curated the Antarctic Pavilion at the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014) and Art (2015). Other projects have included the 4th Marrakech Biennale (2014), Cycle Art and Music Festival (Iceland, 2015), Rare Earth (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna 2015) and Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition – a unique site-specific exhibition on the remote Pacific island of Isla del Coco. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and, currently, Director of Import Projects (Berlin). In 2016 he curates the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. www.nadimsamman.com

Tomás Saraceno was born in Argentina in 1973, and is currently based in Berlin, Germany. Saraceno’s oeuvre could be seen as an ongoing research, influenced by the world of art, architecture, natural science and engineering; his floating sculptures and interactive installations propose and explore new, mindful ways of inhabiting and perceiving the environment. He attended the International Space Studies Program in 2009 at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley, California. The same year, Saraceno presented a major installation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and was later on awarded the prestigious Calder Prize. Saraceno’s work has been shown internationally, in solo and group exhibitions such as Aerocene at Solutions COP21, Grand Palais, Paris, Arachnid Orchestra.Jam Sessions at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Le Bordes du Monde, at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015), In orbit at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen K21 in Düsseldorf (2013–16) and On Space Time Foam at Hangar Bicocca in Milan (2012–13), amongst others. Since 2012, he is Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). His work has also been exhibited in public museums like Museum for Contemporary Art Villa Croce, in Genoa (2014), The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2012), and Hamburger Bahnhof, in Berlin (2011–12).

Aaron Schuster is a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, Rijeka (Croatia) and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin. He is a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. His research concerns the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and he has written on such subjects as the history of levitation, the politics of laziness, corruption, complaining, sexuality and thought, Kafka’s philosopher dog, the comedy of Ernst Lubitsch, and the philosophy of tickling. He has participated in and lectured at the Venice Biennial, Manifesta, Performa, the Berlin Biennial, the Baltic Triennial, and the Lofoten International Art Festival. His book, The Trouble With Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, was published by MIT Press in February 2016.

Barry Schwabsky is the art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. He has published several books of art criticism, includingWords for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice (Sternberg Press, 2013) and The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016), as well as of poetry—most recently, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015). Forthcoming is the third volume in the Vitamin P series from Phaidon Press.

Starship is an art magazine published in Berlin since 1998. It is conceived for the last 100 years of mankind. Its last issue is to be expected in 2098. Starship is published in German and English.

Hito Steyerl (born 1966) is a documentary filmmaker and writer who, often through documentary photography and video, thinks through media circulation. Her work, which examines issues such as globalization, feminism, and postcolonial critique, comprises film, essays, and installations. She has lectured at Goldsmith’s College, London and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, among other institutions. A collection of her essays is recently published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012). Recent exhibitions include Hito Steyerl, e-flux, New York, 2011 and focus: Hito Steyerl, The Art Institute Chicago, 2012−2013. Steyerl lives and works in Berlin.

Jennifer Teets is a contemporary art curator, writer, researcher and performer born in Houston, Texas, 1978, living and working from Paris. She is known for her research on cheese, mud, and terra-sigillata – their transitioning towards materiality and entity and their ability to become something else when put in an exhibition or an essay. Her research and writing combines inquiry, sciences studies, philosophy, and ficto-critique, and performs as an interrogative springboard for her curatorial practice.
She co-hosts (w/ Margarida Mendes) The World in Which We Occur –  an event series taking place over the telephone, and formulated around questions addressed by speakers across the world.The World in Which We Occur is loosely inspired by, and set in the legacy of hybrids that have emerged out of artist James Lee Byars’ 1969 performance work World Question Centre in the art historical canon. The World in Which We Occur underlines the necessity for inquiry over an assertiveness of responses.  It unveils both incentives and/or queries so as to generate further questions to build upon and aims to open up other areas of knowledge and speculation stemming from the core exercise of explicating one’s relationship within the current state of nature, in an era of erratic climatic behaviors. Rather than taking on an “aestheticized” art form, the format was conceived to expand the epistemological canon and directly embrace critical, political, scientific, and social issues without forgetting the neoliberal system we are beholden to in the face of facile conservatism under its regime. It also takes root in the history of materiality. To date, The World in Which We Occurhas hosted sessions on the core debates of the Anthropocene, pharmakons (the body and the earth as a remedy and a poison), molecular colonialism in the reign of microorganisms, grief and climate change, and states of reserve and the legality of invisible regimes, water politics, and earth metabolisms.

Teets holds a Master in Experimentation in Arts and Politics from Sciences Po, Paris (under the direction of Bruno Latour). From 2003-2007, she spearheaded the contemporary art program at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, the former home/studio of Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. She has curated for a number of institutions and organizations across the world and writes extensively on art and curating in international art magazines and other publications.

She recently presented Elusive Earths III (w/ Lorenzo Cirrincione) at Parallel, Oaxaca from April 29 to June 7, 2016. More information is available here: http://www.paralleloaxaca.com/elusive-earths-iii.html

Marion von Osten (born 1963) is an artist and cultural researcher. She works with curatorial, artistic, and theoretical approaches that converge through the medium of exhibitions, installations, video, and text productions. Her main research interests concern cultural production in postcolonial societies, technologies of the self, and the governance of mobility. She is a founding member of Labor k3000 in Zürich and of kleines post-fordistisches Drama (kpD) and the Center for Post-colonial Knowledge and Culture in Berlin. Between 2006 and 2012 she was Professor of Art and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna. From 1999 through 2006 she was Professor of Artistic Practice and researcher at the Institute for the Theory of Art and Design (ith), Zürich University of the Arts, Zürich. She has also lectured at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York and the Critical Studies Program, Malmö Art Academy, Malmö. Prior to that she was curator at Shedhalle Zürich from 1996 to 1999. Recent research and exhibition projects include: Model House—Mapping Transcultural Modernisms, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, 2010–2013; Architectures of Decolonization, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, 2011–2012; In the Desert of Modernity—Colonial Planning and After, Les Abattoirs de Casablanca, Casablanca, 2009 and House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2008; Projekt Migration, Cologne, 2002–2006; andTRANSIT MIGRATION, Zürich, Frankfurt, and Cologne, 2003–2005. Von Osten lives and works in Berlin.

Bruce E. Wexler is Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, studied psychiatry at Anna Freud’s Hampstead Clinic, neurology at Queen’s Square Institute of Neurology, and received his psychiatry training at Yale. Dr. Wexler received an NIH Director’s award for high innovation potentially paradigm changing medical research. Author of over 100 scientific articles, Professor Wexler is a world leader in harnessing neuroplasticity to improve cognition through brain exercises. He and colleagues developed the first program that integrates computerized brain exercises and physical exercises to improve executive function in young children. The program is being used by thousands of children in schools across the U.S. For those who have had limited cognitive stimulation before coming to school, the program is a “school lunch” program for the brain. Dr. Wexler has also developed programs that are effective non-pharmacologic treatments for ADHD and geriatric depression. Dr. Wexler’s book “Brain and Culture; Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change” presents new ideas about neuroplasticity and the relationship between people and their social and cultural environments (MIT Press, 2006). Oliver Sacks called it “a major achievement, touching the deepest biological and human issues…a very powerful and very important book.” Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard University called it “A pioneering and bold effort to construct a bridge between scientific findings about the brain and the diversity, strengths, and fragilities of human cultures.” Dr. Wexler founded the non-profit organization A Different Future to reclaim the public idea space from extremists by amplifying voices of moderation in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As a consultant for the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, Dr. Wexler conducted a U.S. State Department funded study of how the “other” is portrayed in Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks. Dr. Wexler received the Kempf Fund Award from the American Psychiatric Association for contributions as a researcher and mentor. He has served as a member of the Kennedy Foundation Forum on Technology and Mental Health Innovations, the GE Brain Trust and a consultant for the Gates Foundation.

Michaela Wünsch, Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin, studied Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at Humboldt-University Berlin and received there her PhD with a dissertation on the serial killer as a medium of the unconscious of white masculinity. She was a Research Fellow at the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique at the Jan-van-Eyck-Academie Maastricht with a project on anxiety. She taught Media Theory as a Visiting Professor at the University Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Brauschweig and Merz Academy beside different universities in California and Germany. Until recently she conducted a research project in Potsdam and at the University of California, Los Angeles on transnational television. Her further research interests include psychoanalysis and media philosophy. Her edited books on Lacan’s seminar on anxiety, the politics of queer space and the political of mediality have been published in German. She is part of the b_books collective and president of the psychoanalytic library Berlin.

Octavio Zaya is a curator, writer and editor living in the US since 1978. He is Director/Executive Editor of AtlánticaJournal of Art and Thought. a bilingual publication from Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, CAAM (Las Palmas, Canary Islands). From 2005 to 2013 he was Curator at Large of MUSAC (Leon, Spain) and since 2010 is Guest Curator at CAAM. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Performa (New York), and is on the Editorial Board of Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University); a Contributing Editor of Flash Art, and a contributor to art-agenda/e-flux (New York), Art IT (Tokyo), Arte Al Dia (Miami) and El Pais (Madrid). He was a curator in Okwui Enwezor’s team at Documenta 11 (Kassel, 1998-2002). He was also a curator at the 1st and 2nd Johannesburg Biennials (1995 and 1997). He has curated more than 30 museum exhibitions worldwide ((including those at Guggenheim Museum, NY, 1996; Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1999 and 2000; Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, 1997 y 1998, etc.), and he has authored more than 20 books on young and contemporary artists, and contributed to numerous artists’ books and catalogues. In 2013 he was the curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, exhibiting the work of Lara Almarcegui. He is currently organizing a large retrospective exhibition of the works of Luis Camnitzer for MNCARS, Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, traveling later to other museums in Europe and the Americas (2018-2019). He is the curator of a large selection of the Hochschild Collection for Comunidad de Madrid (2017). He is also preparing an exhibition on the works of Fernando Bryce.