States of Consciousness in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2019 | Berlin

Spike
July 4 – 23, 2019

Faculty Bios


Fia Backström is an artist born in Sweden, based in New York. Her work focuses on larger imaginary and real systems that form collective subjectivity, as articulated through the social fields of images and language use. We turn social situations into operative displays where method and media shift according to situation, while fluidly reworking the terms of engagement. I often use pedagogical methods, destabilizing authorship by including works or participation by other artists, visitors, and institutional staff alike. Therefore, the work unfolds in a wide range of material media including photography, writing, typography, objects, social exchange, and performance. Backström represented Sweden in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and was the subject of a survey at the Artist’s Institute (2015-16). She participated in Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2015), and The Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2008). The work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010, 2019); MAMAN, Recife (2016); MUSAC, Spain (2013); MoMA (2010); Tranzit, Prague (2008); and Serpentine Gallery, London (2007). Recent projects include: A Vaudeville on Mankind in Time and Space, Callicoon gallery (2018), Woe men – keep going, Mary Boone gallery (2017), The Shape of Co- to Come, ABF, Stockholm (2016), and ME have to be turned upside down to become WE, Zinc Bar, New York (2014). Their writings have been published in COOP A-Script, by Primary Information, (2016) and in magazines such as Artforum, Art on Paper, and North Drive Press.

Simon Denny (*1982 Auckland/New Zealand) lives and works in Berlin. He makes exhibitions that unpack the social and political implications of the technology industry and the rise of social media, startup culture, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, using a variety of media including installation, sculpture, print and video. He studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, graduating with a BFA in 2005 and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, with a Meisterschule in 2009. Denny’s work has been exhibited recently in solo exhibitions at MOCA, Cleveland (2018); OCAT, Shenzhen (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014) MUMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich (2013). He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Denny co-founded the Berlin Program for Artists, an artist mentoring program in 2016 with Willem de Rooij and Angela Bulloch. Since 2018, he is a professor for Time Based Media at the HFBK, Hamburg.

Bracha L. Ettinger, PhD, is artist-painter and artist-theorist, writer, philosopher and psychoanalyst working between Paris and Tel Aviv, author of The Matrixial Gaze and The Matrixial Borderspace as well as many articles on copoiesis, transgenerational and personal trauma, memory, witnessing and the Unconscious, feminine subjectivity, maternality, sexual difference, painting, ethics and aesthetics. A selection of her papers in 2 volumes edited by Griselda Pollock, Matrixial Subjectivity, is in print in Pelgrave Macmillan. Her recent shows include: Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018-19; Heart of Darkness. Castello di Rivoli at OGR, Turin 2019; UB Anderson Gallery, Buffalo 2018 (solo); Muzeum Śląskie, Katowice 2017 (solo); Colori, GAM, Turin, The Image of War, Bonnier Konsthall, Stockholm, Encounters, MAS/KMSKA Museums, Antwerpen; Lyric on a Battelfield, Gladstone Gallery, NY; The Haunted House / The Human Condition, Ekaterina Ins. of Contemporary Art, Moscow (all in 2017). The 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Monogrpahs on Bracha L.E. include: Art as Compassion edited by G. Pollock and C. de Zegher, and And My Heart Wound-Space, Istanbul Biennale, 2015. Bracha L. Ettinger is Chair and Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis, EGS, Saas-Fee; Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, GCAS, Dublin; Supervising Psychoanalyst, TAICP, NLS, AMP.

Joerg Fingerhut is a philosopher at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where he is a principal investigator of the interdisciplinary research group “Consciousness, Emotions, Values” that – among other things – works on theories of embellished perception and empirical approaches to the arts. His background is in 4E (embedded, embodied, extended, enactive) theories of the mind that aim to lay the grounds for a broader cognitive science of the human existence with a focus on how we interface with cultural artifacts and what constitutes our evaluative engagements with such artifacts. He is  also interested in what constitutes an aesthetic identity, within and outside the art world. Fingerhut was a PhD researcher in the “Collegium Picture Act & Embodiment,” a joint project of art historians and philosophers. During that time, he was also a member of the “Functions of Consciousness” research group at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. Next he was an “Art & Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellow” at Columbia University (2013) and assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart (2013-2015) before starting his current position in Berlin. He is also the co-director of the Berlin based Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN) that fosters interactions between the arts and neuroscience.

Andrea Fumagalli is professor of economics in the Department of Economics and Management at University of Pavia. He teaches also Theory of Firm at University of Bologna. He is member of Effimera Network, founder member of Bin-Italy (Basic Income Network, Italy. His research activity deals with the structural changes of accumulation process, labour precarity, monetary theory of production and basic income.Among his recent publications, see The crisis of the Global Economy. Financial markets, social struggles and new political scenarios, Semiotext(e), Mit Press, 2010 (with S.Mezzadra), “Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism)”, in Angelaki. The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Volume 16, Issue 3, 2011, “Life put to work: towards a theory of life-value”. Ephemera, vol. 10, p. 234-252, 2011 (with C. Morini), “Finance, Austerity and Commonfare”, in Theory, Culture and Society, vol.32, n. 7-8, 2015; La vie mise au travail. Nouvelles formes du capitalisme cognitif, Etherotopie France, Paris, 2015. Economia politica del comune, Derive Approdi, Roma, 2017. Forthcoming (2019): Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare, Labour,  Routledge, London (with A. Giuliani, S, Lucarelli, C. Vercellone).

Stefano Harney teaches at Singapore Management University in Singapore.  With Fred Moten he wrote The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and the forthcoming All Incomplete, both published by Autonomedia/Minor Compositions.  With Tonika Sealy Thompson he recently published ‘Ground Provisions’ in the journal Afterall, a description of the eponymous art and education project.  He is also co-founder of Immeasure, an anti-consultancy with Emma Dowling.  He is a member of the freethought collective, and curated ‘Shipping and the Shipped’ at the 2016 Bergen Assembly triennial as part of the Infrastructure platform.  He also helped start School of Study, an ensemble project for university teachers, and he participates in Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective.

Stefanie Hessler is a curator and writer. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary processes, close and long-term collaborations with artists and researchers from different fields, and systems at large, be they ecological, economic, or societal. Recent curatorial projects include the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI (2018); the symposium Practices of Attention (with D. Graham Burnett) at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018); Armin Linke: Prospecting Ocean at the Institute of Marine Science in Venice (2018); Océans at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, and at the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik (both 2018); Fishing for Islands (with Chus Martínez and Markus Reymann) at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2017); Sugar and Speed at the Museum of Modern Art in Recife (2017); the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss (2015); and Marjetica Potrč: Caracas Dry Toilet at Die Ecke in Santiago de Chile (2013). Hessler is the co-founder of the art space Andquestionmark (with Carsten Höller) and guest professor in art theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She has edited books like Life Itself, including 173 texts from different disciplines on the question of what life essentially is, published by Moderna Museet and König Books (2016), and Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, published by The MIT Press (2018). She is curating Joan Jonas’s exhibition at the Ocean Space in Venice in 2019, and writing a book on extractions in the deep sea (forthcoming 2019, published by The MIT Press).

Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He has been teaching philosophy at the Leuphana University Lüneburg where he wrote his habilitation thesis as well as at the China Academy of Art. In 2019 he is appointed as Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media of City University in Hong Kong. He was a research associate at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Media (ICAM), postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a visiting scientist at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. He is initiator of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology, an international network which facilitates researches and collaborations on philosophy and technology. Hui has published on philosophy of technology and media in periodicals such as Research in Phenomenology, Metaphilosophy, Parrhesia, Angelaki, Theory Culture and Society, Cahiers Simondon, Deleuze Studies, Intellectica, Krisis, Implications Philosophiques, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Techné, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Appareil, New Formations,Parallax, etc. He is editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, March 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, December 2016), and Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield International, February 2019).

Jitish Kallat was born in Mumbai in 1974, the city where he continues to live and work. Kallat’s works over the last two-decades reveal his continued engagement with the ideas of time, sustenance, recursion and historical recall often interlacing the dense cosmopolis and the distant cosmos. Frequently shifting orders of magnitude, Kallat’s works can be said to move interchangeably between meditations on the self, the city-street, the nation and the cosmic horizon, viewing the ephemeral within the context of the perpetual, the everyday in juxtaposition with the historical, the microscopic alongside the telescopic. Jitish Kallat has exhibited widely at museums and institutions including Tate Modern (London), Martin Gorpius Bau (Berlin), Serpentine Galleries (London), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Spain), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and the Gemeente Museum (The Hague) amongst many others. Kallat’s work has been part of the Havana Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Asia Pacific Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Asian Art Biennale, Curitiba Biennale, Guangzhou Triennale and the Kiev Biennale amongst others. His solo exhibitions at museums include institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Bhau Daji Lad Museum (Mumbai), the Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), CSMVS Museum (Mumbai), the San Jose Museum of Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2017 the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi) presented a mid-career survey of his work titled Here After Here 1992-2017 curated by Catherine David. Jitish Kallat was the curator and artistic director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

Isabel Lewis (b.Santo Domingo, 1981) is a Dominican-American artist based in Berlin since 2009. She lived in NYC where she worked as a dancer and choreographer showing work at The Kitchen, New Museum, PS122, Danspace at St. Marks Church, and Movement Research at Judson Church before moving to Berlin in 2009. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy Lewis created the format she calls hosted occasions that are immersive experiences including assemblages of dances, sounds, smells, and decor in heteroptopic spaces of social encounter. Lewis’s work has been presented internationally by theaters, music festivals, and contemporary art institutions including Tanz Im August at the Hebbel Theather (HAU 1) in Berlin, Kunsthalle Basel, Steirischer Herbst in Vienna, Tate Modern in London, Dia Foundation in New York, and Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai among others.

Jon Lindblom (b. 1986) is a cultural theorist and editor based in Stockholm, who is writing on modernism, formalism, technology and popular culture. He has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University, and runs the site modernismunbound.com.

Dr. Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of 13 books including AI Aesthetics, Theories of Software Culture, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” He was included in the list of “25 People Shaping the Future of Design” in 2013 and the list of “50 Most Interesting People Building the Future” in 2014. Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab that pioneered analysis of visual culture using computational methods. The lab created projects for Museum of Modern Art (NYC), New York Public Library, Google and other clients.

Warren Neidich is a conceptual artist, writer, and theorist. He is currently Professor of Art at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, founding director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and the American editor of Archive Books, Berlin. Selected Awards and Fellowships include: The Fulbright Specialist Program, Fine Arts Category, University of Cairo, 2013; The Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale, Berlin, 2010; AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship. Bristol, UK 2004. Recently published books include The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 3, Archive Books, 2017 Neuromacht, Merve Verlag, Berlin, 2017 and The Colour of Politics, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, Berlin, 2017-2018. His work represented by the Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland.

Susanne Neubauer is independent curator, art historian, researcher and author with a PhD in art history from Zurich University. She has been the project leader of the DFG research project „Entangled Diversities: Brazilian Art in Post-1945 Germany“ at Free University Berlin from 2014-2017 and is currently working on a three-year pedagogical innovation project based on Paulo Freire’s thinking. She is a specialist on the work and life of American installation pioneer Paul Thek and has done research on materiality and documentation in ephemeral art, Brazilian art of the 20th century, Postwar modernism, digital art history and transcultural art history. Susanne Neubauer received research and publication grants from the DAAD, the SAGW Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, the SFN Swiss National Science Foundation and the Müller Meylan Foundation Basel for Art Historical Studies and is a member of IKT International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art and ASHHA Association Suisse des Historiens et Historiennes de l’Art. In 2018, she was a stipendiary of art criticism in London by the Landis & Gyr Foundation, Switzerland.

Ruth Noack, author, art critic, university lecturer and exhibition maker since the 1990s, trained as a visual artist and art historian. She lives in Berlin. Noack was curator of documenta 12 (2007) and is currently developing a new institution, A Museum In A School, to open in 2020. Exhibitions include Scenes of a Theory (1995), Things We Don’t Understand (2000), The Government (2005) (with Roger M.Buergel), a solo show of Ines Doujak’s work (2012), and Notes on Crisis, Currency and Consumption (2015). In 2018, Noack presented the ongoing series Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life in Athens, Prague and Bejing. She is currently doing research for her next exhibition, Ghosting the Nation. Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Program, Royal College of Art, London in 2012-13, Noack also acted as Research Leader for the EU-project MeLa – European Museums in an age of migrations. She was Šaloun professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (2013-14), lead the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2014 and teaches at International Summer Academy in Salzburg (2017 and 2018). Since 2015, she is responsible for one of the Dutch Art Institute’s Roaming Academy trajectories. Her most recent symposium “Between Resistance and Hallucination” (2018) was realised within the DAI Planetary Campus. Next to articles and scholarly essays published widely and internationally, she has written Sanja Ivekovic: Triangle for Afterall Books and edited Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis. Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind (both 2013).

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zürich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’ in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is a contributing editor to the magazines Artforum, AnOther Magazine, 032C, a regular contributor to Mousse and Kaleidoscope and he writes columns for Das Magazin and Weltkunst. In 2011 he received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. His recent publications include Mondialité, Conversations in Mexico, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.

Boris Ondreička (*1969) is an artist, author, former director of an art-initiative tranzit.sk, since 2012 curator at TBA21, Vienna. He has co-curated Rare Earth, Supper Club, Tomorrow Morning Line, Olafur Eliasson „Green light—An Artistic Workshop“, 6 seasons of the frequence of spoken-word Ephemeropteræ, and recently 5-years project Class of Interpretation (all for TBA21), Manifesta 8, Murcia, ES, Being The Future, Palast der Republik, Berlin, DE, Symposion / The Event, Birmingham, UK, Auditorium, Stage, Backstage, Frankfurter Kunstverein, DE, The Question of Will, OSF, Bratislava, SK, Empire of the Senseless, Meetfactory, Prague, CZ projects of Lois & Franziska Weinberger, Stano Filko, Andreas Neumeister, Július Koller, Denisa Lehocká, Zbyněk Baladrán, and more. Ondreička has co-founded The Society of Július Koller. His projects were exhibited at Manifesta 2, Luxembourg, L, Venice- (Czecho-Slovak & Roma pavilions),Tai-Pei-, Prague-, Gyumri-, Torino-, Anzengruber-, Athens- , Kyiv-, Jakarta- biennials; MoMA PS1 NYC, US, BAK Utrecht, W139 and De Appel, Amsterdam, NL, Smak, Gent, BE, Tramway Glasgow UK, Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo Turin, IT, Air de Paris, Le Plateau, and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, all Paris, F, Frankfurter-, Kölnischer-, Badischer-, Münchener-, Würtenbergischer Kunstvereins, DE, Kiasma, Helsinki, FI, HKW, Berlin, DE, ACAF, Alexandria, EG, RIA Stockholm, Slovak and Czech national galleries, Secession, Mumok, Kunsthalle, TQ, Vienna, Donaufestival, Krems, Magazin 4, Bregenz, AT. His HI! lo. was published at tranzit / jrp Ringier, CH; One Second / Out of Time at Revolver, DE, and Spevník at Brak, SK. Ondreička is regular correspondent of the Slovak monthly Kapitál.

Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon), is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he will curate the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is currently guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and has been appointed as the artistic director of Sonsbeek 2020, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

Susan Ploetz (US/DE) is an artist-researcher working with somatics, theory, writing, performance and live action role plays (larping) in different configurations. Her work deals with the overlapping spaces of soma and technos; she uses imagination, magical materiality and protocol to induce emancipatory emotive dissonances and perceptual expansion. Recent projects have included exploring larping as a speculative design and rapid prototyping technique for AI in the workshop “Test Worlds” with Sascha Pohflepp at the UdK’s Symposium “Ästhetiken des Spekulativen”,  and “Xenosomatics/The Guild”: a series of somatic workshops culminating a larp inspired by Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy that instrumentalized somatic practices to embody/invite alien consciousnesses. She has presented work at the Berlin Festspiele/Martin Gropius Bau, Sophiensaele, ABC Art Fair, Rupert, Documenta 13, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and Performa. She has been a guest artist/teacher, lectured or given workshops at Universität der Kunst (Berlin), The Dutch Art Institute, The DAAD, The Pervasive Media Studio (Bristol), and SUNY Buffalo. She recently contributed to Death of the Artist published by Cabinet Magazine and will produce a project in Tokyo using larp to explore AI, robotics and the generation of online language through the Aoyama Gakuin University in November 2019.

Adina Popescu is a Philosopher, a Futurist and Entrepreneur, creating platforms that integrate nascent technology in order to generate impact and to empower bottom-up movements. She is currently working on a immersive platform called ÆRTH – a crowd-sourced, machine learning based news and content platform for good – visualized, interlinked and mapped on one model of the planet on web, mobile and in XR. She worked as a creative advisor to Conservation International (CI) on new forms of engagement via immersive and viral storytelling and has been an advisor to Peter Seligmann (CEO of CI) directly – which led to Conservation International’s VR experience Valens Reef at Chris Milks company WITHIN. Adina has been working with the team of CI on the ‘Nature is Speaking App’, working alongside Media Arts Lab and Lee Clow and has advised Media Arts Lab on storytelling in VR/AR and social Media on behalf of CI. She has a deeply rooted interest in Nature Conservation and was curator of a conference format called ‘Parley for the Oceans’ – organized on behalf of Pharrell Williams and Bionic Yarn, aiming to find biomimicry solutions in industrial production. Her artistic work and her publications have been featured at Art Basel, Venice Biennial, Palais de Tokyo in Paris and at Art Galleries such as Marlborough in NYC, alongside Richard Prince, Eigen & Art Berlin.

Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist, professor at the Akademie der bildenen Künste Wien, guest professor at Bauhaus University Weimar (2012), and member of GEDOK Munich. In addition to presenting international exhibitions and curatorial work, she teaches and researches on philosophy and history in relation to a theory of a collective consciousness – on the relation of art, psychology and politics in history and present times, on the theory and history of the image/concept of woman and the female identification (Mädchentheorie), and on the sacral androgyny and the modern loss-of-the-self (“Ich-Zerfall”). In her artistic practice she uses sculpture, performance, painting and video. She focuses on subjects like the systematic and symbolic location of female sculpture in the canon of art and in the ecological esthetic, or the geo-logic, of the body. Publications include: Epidemic Subjects. Radical Ontologies, Zürich-Berlin-Chicago 2017; Egon Schiele=Wiener Enzyklopädie, mit Ursula Storch, Wien 2016; Egon Schiele Sanctus Franciscus Hystericus, Wien 2012; Egon Schiele: Ich bin die Vielen, Wien 2010; Anti Elektra. Totemismus und Schizogamie, Zürich-Berlin 2007 (frz. L‘Anti Electre. Totémisme et Schizogamie, traduit par Béatrice Durand, Genève 2015, Anti Electra. Totemism and Schizogamy, transl. by Stephen Zepke and Anita Fricek, MU Press Minneapolis 2018). Selected recent exhibitions include: SEX (Taxispalais Innsbruck), Schiele reloaded (Leopold Museum Wien 2018), History of Psyche (Galerie nächst St.Stephan Wien 2018), The Parents‘ Bedroom Show (mit Juergen Teller), MaximiliansForum München, Austrian Performance Season (Solyanka State Gallery Moskau 2017), Transplants (Dominikanerkirche Krems 2016, curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein),  The Nervous System of the Earth (Galerie Jünger Wien 2014), Hippo Hypno Schizo Hoch Zeit (Freud Museum 2011), ELEKTRA (Belvedere Wien im Rahmen von GOLD, curated von Thomas Zaunschirm), SAMSONOW TRANSPLANT PARASONIC ORCHESTRA (brut Theater at Künstlerhaus 2012, curated by Thomas Frank), THE SECRETS OF MARY MAGDALENE (The Jerusalem Show 1.0, curated by Jack Persekian, 2008).

Barry Schwabsky is co-director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. He is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books are Heretics of Language (Black Square, 2018), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016), and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square, 2015). Forthcoming is The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg, 2019).

Mithu Sen obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan, and later, completed a postgraduate program at the Glasgow School of Art in the United Kingdom. In her works, often called “byproducts”, Sen contrasts scale, subject and even genre to venture into an enigmatic terrain of ideas and affects, problematizing the existing notions of hospitality, sexuality, communication, and gift economy. Swinging between distance and intimacy, Sen not only opens the barrier of the intimate to the public, but also makes sure of the interaction between the two – often under the theme of “radical hospitality”. Using both the virtual and real forms of social relations and individual experience, through an approach oscillating between the spontaneous and the premeditated, Sen expands the field and medium of art fundamentally as a ‘performer’ (understood in the term’s widest sense). Sen also creates works that challenge the notion of language as a natural means of communication and attempts to transcend the politics of control and codes of propriety that dictate our perception of the world. The use of subconscious language as a form of resistance against dominating languages has led Sen to create an abstract body of gibberish text that claims repressed emotional voices and a potential moment of what she calls ‘lingual anarchy’. The idea refers to an affective inquiry into the limits and possibilities of language under semiocapitalism by employing glitch, noise, and the nonsensicality of a radical glossolalia. This conception of language is at the epicenter of Sen’s recent explorations, developed by complimenting art objects bordering between abjection and allure. Sen’s recent works extend from the promise of language and community to the legality of a contract, opening up a zone caught between law and life. An enthusiastic traveler, Sen currently lives and works in New Delhi.

Jennifer Teets is a curator, writer, researcher and performer born in Houston, Texas, 1978, living and working from Paris. Her research and writing combines inquiry, sciences studies, philosophy, and ficto-critique, and performs as an interrogative springboard for her curatorial practice. She is co-curator (with Margarida Mendes) of The World in Which We Occur, a curatorial research-based entity that explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. TWWWO began as a live event series over the telephone in 2014 and has thus expanded to other formats such as Matter in Flux, an online monthly study group with participants from different fields across the world. TWWWO takes into account modern day issues rooted in the history of materiality and metabolism as well as pertinent politically enmeshed scientific affairs shaping our world today. Together with artist/philosopher Lorenzo Cirrincione (2014-onwards), she also curates Elusive Earths, an ongoing in situ work, process, and dialogue that looks to the elusiveness of rare clays, soils, and earths with forgotten origins, with recent talks and exhibitions held at the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial and documenta14. 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, where she initiated her practice (2003-2007). She was a resident curator at Platform Garanti CAC in Istanbul (2007-2008) and later at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2009). She has written extensively on art and curating in international art magazines and other publications and frequently lectures on curating and artistic research. She has guest lectured at Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures Basel, Städelschule Frankfurt, Vilnius Academy of the Arts, Goldsmiths London, CCA San Francisco, amongst others.

Charles T. Wolfe is a researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University (and associate member, IHPST, Paris). He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (Springer 2016) and La philosophie de la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (Garnier, 2019), and has edited volumes including Monsters and Philosophy (2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (2010, with O. Gal), Vitalism and the scientific image in post-Enlightenment life-science (2013, with S. Normandin), Brain Theory (2014), Physique de l’esprit (w. J.C. Dupont, 2018), Philosophy of Biology before Biology (w. C. Bognon-Küss, 2019) as well as various special issues of journals, most recently Sketches for a conceptual history of epigenesis (special issue of HPLS, 2017), and authored articles in journals including British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Early Science and Medicine, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Journal of the History of Biology, Perspectives on Science, Science in Context, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Synthese and others. He also co-edits the Springer series in History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences.

Pieter Vermeulen (1983) is a lecturer, researcher, art critic and curator. He is currently affiliated to the Advanced Master in artistic research at St Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. Pieter studied Philosophy and Cultural Studies (KULeuven) and previously worked for the School of Arts – KASK (Ghent), Ghent University – S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media) and New Patrons (Les Nouveaux Commanditaires) in Brussels. He organised several exhibition projects and academic conferences, a.o. at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Extra City (Antwerp), Bund18/World Expo (Shanghai), Vooruit Arts Centre (Ghent), Marres (Maastricht) and ARIA (Antwerp University)  Pieter is a Curatorial Intensive alumnus (ICI, New York) and former resident at Vessel in Italy. In 2012 he co-founded arts assembly POPPOSITIONS in Brussels, followed by BORG Biennial in Antwerp (2014-2016). He is a regular writer and editor for the Belgian contemporary art magazine H ART.

Prof. Dr. Hubertus von Amelunxen was born in Hindelang, Germany in 1958.  He lives in Berlin. After studies in French and German Literature, ins Philosophy and in Art History at the Philipps-Universität, Marburg and the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, he wrote his Ph.D. on Allegory and Photography. Inquiries into 19th Century French Literature. He was founder of the Interdisciplinary Center for Research at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel (1995) and the founder of the ISNM InternationalSchool of New Media in Lübeck (2000), from 2000 to 2007 Senior Curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. In May 2005 he was appointed the General Director of the European School of Visual Arts in Angoulême and Poitiers, France. From October 2010 till October 2013 he was the President of the University of Art in Braunschweig Germany. From October 2013 till June 2018 he served as Provost and as the President of The European Graduate School EGS in Switzerland and Malta. He has written and edited books on media theory and post-structuralism, and curated several international exhibitions and catalogues.