Art and the Poetics of Praxis in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2018 | Berlin

Spike Art Quarterly
July 4 – 22, 2018

Faculty Bios

Meena Alexander is a prize winning poet and scholar with a special interest in migration and memory. Described as “undoubtedly one of the finest poets of contemporary times,” by The Statesman (India) she has two new books forthcoming in June 2018: her eighth volume of poems Atmospheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern U Press) and the anthology she edited Name me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing (Yale U Press). Her prose works include the collection of essays Poetics of Dislocation and the memoir Fault Lines. Her honors include grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, National Council for Research on Women, Arts Council of England and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the recipient of the PEN Open Book Award for her collection of poems Illiterate Heart, the Imbongi Yesizwe International Poetry Award from South Africa, and the South Asian Literary Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature.  She has been a poet in residence at Al Quds University and was named a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. In 2016 she was invited to compose a cycle of poems as part of the celebrations for the Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Ghetto Nuovo, Venice. Her poems have been translated into several languages, and set to music. She lives in New York City where she is Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY. www.meenaalexander.com

Central to Julieta 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. In addition to gallery shows, Aranda’s work has been exhibited internationally, in venues such as Public Art Munich (2018), FACT (2018), TBA21 Academy Venice (2018) , DER TANK (2016), 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Guggenheim Museum (2015, 2009), Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2015), Espace Verney – Carron, Lyon (2015), Mana Contemporary, 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.

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. In Berlin he is editor at large at Merve Verlag and in charge of the theory program at Volksbühne. He is co-founder of the bilingual research platform (including a series of events, translations and publications) Spekulative Poetik and of Bureau of Cultural Strategies. His work is translated into various languages.

Dr. Sven Beckstette is curator of Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart–Berlin. In 2008, he graduated from Freie Universität Berlin with a doctoral thesis on »Das Historienbild im 20. Jahrhundert« (History painting in the twentieth century). In 2009/10  he was assistant curator at Lenbachhaus, Munich. From 2010 to 2012, he was editor-in-chief of Texte zur Kunst, whose advisory board he continues to belong to. Between 2012 and 2016, he worked as a curator of Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; exhibitions he curated focused on artists such as Sylvie Fleury, Thomas Locher, Otto Dix, Dieter Roth, Amie Siegel and Anton Stankowski and on the relationship between art and jazz. Most recently, he co-curated a chapter on colonialism and postcolonialism in the exhibition “Hello World. Revising a Collection” at Hamburger Bahnhof. Furthermore, he published numerous essays on modern and contemporary art as well as pop music.

Andrew Berardini. Born in California. Lives in Los Angeles. Father of Stella. Writer of quasi-essayistic prose poems about art and other sensual subjects, occasional editor and curator with past exhibitions with MOCA – Los Angeles, Palais de Tokyo – Paris, and Castello Di Rivoli – Turin and current co-curator of the LULUNNIAL in Mexico City. Formerly held curatorial appointments at LAXART and the Armory Center for the Arts and on the editorial staff of Semiotext(e). Recentish author of Danh Vo: Relics (Mousse, 2015) and currently finishing a book about color and another about how to be an unprofessional artist. Regular contributor to Artforum, Spike, and ArtReview and an editor at Mousse, Art-Agenda, Momus, and the Art Book Review. Warhol/Creative Capital and 221a Curatorial Grantee. Faculty at the Mountain School of Arts since 2008 and the Banff Centre since 2014. His research interests include art writing as a form of literature, color, radical subjectivity, ecstatic resistance, literary chimeras, corporeality, language as incantation, the permeability between fiction and reality, underground culture, the erotics of art, and the aesthetic history of California. 

Sean Bonney is a contemporary English poet. Bonney was born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He now lives in Berlin. His publications include Notes on Heresy (Writers Forum, 2002), Poisons, their antidotes (West House, 2003), Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt, 2005), Document: hexprogress (Yt Communication, 2006), Baudelaire in English (Veer 2008), Document: poems, diagrams, manifestos (Barque 2009), and The Commons (Opened 2011). He edits the press Yt Communicationwith Frances Kruk. He was a regular attendee at the Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop. Together with other UK based poets, his work marks a progression and continuance of the British Poetry Revival. In Autumn 2006, he was a guest lecturer at the University of Roehampton. In Autumn 2011 he ran a seminar on Poetry and Revolution at the University of Cambridge.

Beatriz Colomina is Professor of History and Theory in the School of Architecture and founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller, 2016), The Century of the Bed (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2015), Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg, 2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (Actar, 2010), Domesticity at War (MIT Press, 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994), and Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012) and Radical Pedagogies (2014). She was curator with Mark Wigley of the third Istanbul Design Biennial (2016). She has been the recipient of diverse awards and fellowships, including the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the CASVA (Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts), SOM Foundation, Le Corbusier Foundation, Graham Foundation, the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture), The American Academy in Berlin and the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Mathieu Copeland has been developing a practice seeking to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and to renew our perceptions of these. He co-curated the exhibition “VOIDS, A Retrospective” at the Centre Pompidou—Paris and the Kunsthalle—Bern, and edited the celebrated anthology VOIDS. Among many others, 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 or again “A Mental Mandala” at MUAC—Mexico City. He initiated and curated the series “A Spoken Word Exhibitions”, “Reprise” and the “Exhibitions to Hear Read”. His recent exhibitions include “A Retrospective of Closed Exhibitions” at the Kunsthalle Fribourg, “The Exhibition of a Dream” at the Gulbenkian Foundation and realized “The exhibition of a film” – an exhibition as a feature film for cinemas. Amongst many others, Copeland edited the critically acclaimed anthology and manifest publication “Choreographing Exhibitions,” and he edited the radical anthology “The Anti-Museum”.

Daniel Falb is a poet and philosopher based in Berlin. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Freie Universität Berlin and has published three volumes of poetry with Berlin-based publisher Kookbooks: die räumung dieser parks (2003), BANCOR (2009), and CEK (2015). Translations include Naturezas-mortas sociais (pt-de, Edition Sextante 2009), New Zork (nl, Zegwerk 2014), and the Anthropocene long poem CHICXULUB PAEM (en, Broken Dimanche Press 2017). His work besides poetry focuses mostly on geophilosophy, radical ecology, and poetics. The collaborative poetology Helm aus Phlox appeared in 2011 (with A. Cotten, H. Jackson, S. Popp, and M. Rinck at Merve Verlag Berlin). Recent works include essays on the aesthetics and poetics of the Anthropocene (“Epistemologies of Art in the Anthropocene,” in: Art in the Periphery of the Center, ed. Christoph Behnke et al. (Sternberg Press 2015) and Anthropozän. Dichtung in der Gegenwartsgeologie (Verlagshaus Berlin 2015)). Falb’s work has been supported by grants and prizes, most recently the German PEN Center’s ‘Kurt Sigel-Award for Poetry’ (2016). His forthcoming book on geophilosophical metaphysics Geospekulationen. Metaphysik für die Erde will be out in late 2018 at Merve, Berlin.

Marina Fokidis is a curator and writer based in Athens Greece. In 2014 she was appointed Head of the Artistic Office, Athens and curatorial advisor for documenta 14. She is the founder of Kunsthalle Athena and South as a State of Mind, a biannual arts and culture magazine. In 2011 Fokidis was one of the curators of the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennial (www.thessalonikibienniale.gr). She has also been the commissioner and the curator of the Greek Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennial, (2003) and one of the curators of the 1st Tirana Biennial (2001). She was an adjunct curator at the Art Space Pythagorion by the Schwarz Foundation, where she curated solo shows with newly commissioned works by Slavs and Tatars (2013) and Nevin Aladag (2014). From 2001 to 2008 she served as the co-director of Oxymoron a non-for profit organization in Athens dedicated to the promotion of contemporary visual art in Greece and on an international level. Fokidis has also written for different edited collections, for artists and exhibition catalogues and several international art magazines and publications including Frieze, Art-Agenda, Artinfo, Flash Art, Art and Australia, Manifesta Journal, Empires Ruins and Networks, A reception of Urban Ecology: Detroit and beyond, Articulating Power and Subversion, among others. She has also participated in many conferences and discussions internationally including Arco 2010, Art Basel Conversations 2013, Global Art Forum, Art Dubai 2014, Liverpool Biennial 2016, São Paulo Biennial 2014 and 2016. She has been jury member for various awards, 2013 Furla Award, Bes Revelaco 2013 – Serralves Museum, among others.

Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and an internationally renowned expert on Soviet-era art and literature, specifically, the Russian avant-garde. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). His work engages radically different traditions, from French post-structuralism to modern Russian philosophy, yet is firmly situated at the juncture of aesthetics and politics. Theoretically, Groys’s work is influenced by a number of modern and postmodern philosophers and theoreticians, including Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Walter Benjamin.

Anke Henning is a theorist of 21st century literature and visual culture. Recently she was Visiting Professor at University of the Arts, Berlin and is teaching at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She is chairing the international research group Retro-Formalism (www.retroformalism.net) and co-founder of the trans-national research platform Speculative Poetics (www.Spekulative-Poetik.de). She holds a PhD from the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Free University Berlin and has been a Fulbright Fellow at New York University. She is the author of Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy (in German Vorwerk 8, 2010) and, in co-operation  with Armen Avanessian, co-author of Present Tense. A Poetics (Bloomsbury 2015, in Russian RGGU Press 2014, in German Diaphanes 2012) and of Metanoia. Speculative Ontology of Language (Bloomsbury 2017, in German Merve 2014).

Karl Holmqvist is an artist living and working in Berlin. The main focus of his artistic practice is on language and includes writing in the form of artist’s books, in video animations and room size installations as well as in spoken word performances. His writing is mostly made up of quotations from a variety of sources rearranged in the form of a type of written collage that deals with repetition, double meaning and memory function. Recent one-person exhibitions include Centre d’Art Contemporaine, Geneva, Indipendenza, Rome (with Klara Liden), Kunstverein Braunschweig (with Klara Liden), Power Station, Dallas and Camden Arts Centre, London. He has participated in the Venice Biennial in 2003 and 2011, and Performa, New York in 2005, 2007 and 2013.

Yuk Hui teaches and researches at the Leuphana University in Germany; he is also a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art, and researcher at the Centre international des études simondoniennes. He published on philosophy of technology in periodicals such as Research in Phenomenology, Metaphilosophy, Cahiers Simondon, Deleuze Studies, Techné among many others. He is co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and The Question Concerning Technology in China -An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016).

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien CBE RA, makes multi-screen film installations and photographs that incorporate different artistic disciplines to create a poetic and unique visual language.  Born in 1960 in London, he is one of the most prominent figures at the intersection of media art and cinema today and his installation work is included in some of the highest profile institutions around the globe. His 1989 documentary-drama Looking for Langston exploring author Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance garnered Julien a cult following, while his 1991 debut feature Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Julien’s solo exhibitions and presentations include; Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco (2017);  Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2017); Platform-L Contemporary Art Centre, Seoul (2017); The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2017); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016); MAC Niterói, Rio de Janeiro (2016); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); De Pont Museum, Netherlands (2015); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2013); The Bass Museum, Miami (2010); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2009); Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005). Julien participated in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, at the inaugural Diaspora Pavilion with Western Union: Small Boats. Previously, he presented Das Kapital Oratorio in the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, in 2015. His latest work, Stones Against Diamonds, was also shown that year as part of the Rolls-Royce Art Programme as well as at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Julien has exhibited work at biennials including the 7th Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2008); Prospect 1, New Orleans (2008); Performa 07, New York (2007) and in documenta 11, Kassel (2002). Julien is the recipient of the James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize and Lecture at Yale University (2016). Most recently he received the Charles Wollaston Award (2017), for most distinguished work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and in 2018 he was made a Royal Academician. He was awarded the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s birthday honours, 2017.

Marie-Luise Knott is a journalist, translator, and author living in Berlin. She is the founder of the German edition of Le Monde diplomatique and was its editor-in-chief for eleven years. She has written numerous essays on art and literature, as well as two important studies of Hannah Arendt. David Dollenmayer is an emeritus professor of German at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His translations include works by Bertolt Brecht, Elias and Veza Canetti, Michael Kleeberg, and Hansjorg Schertenleib. He is the recipient of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (for Moses Rosenkranz’s Childhood) and the 2010 Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York (for Michael Kohlmeier’s Idyll with Drowning Dog).

Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, and editor from California whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017); Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder, coedited with Adam Szymczyk (Sternberg Press, 2014); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse Publishing, 2013); Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (WIELS/Motto Books, 2013); and Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012). Her writings, readings, and lecture-performances have been featured widely, including at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chisenhale Gallery, London; DRAF, London; Radio Athènes, Athens; and the Sharjah Biennial 13. A frequent contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor of frieze, Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

Raimundas Malašauskas’ character has two palm tree palms. Often, you would read Rai’s email closing: “easy.” That had been plain-sailingly typed by the palms. Rai thinks thinking is like what he eats: fungus. Rather than saying that Rai thinks about things, he’s more passing by things. So I would re-phrase it as: he navigates thoughts in a way like a mycelium’s network which tends to fork. People understand Rai’s practice performs a certain degree of post-socialist schizophrenia, but in the eyes of a Chinese, however, Rai is quite a-sociailistic. Soup, it is salty soup that he adores to drink. The grains of salt accumulated as Rai’s works crystalizes different salt fields. Oo. o O. o Oo. If you do a crystal gazing, you see what I’m saying in the area where Rai’s stomach is supposed to be. The sodium chloride forms a Spiral Jetty along the rhythmic ‘Os’. That actually leads us to understand why he walks so fast, extremely fast along the Amsterdam streets and canals that form concentric circles. I’ve once seen the helicopter documenting along the spiral range of a spiral jetty. One needs certain speed to convolute the thinking and chemical processes akin to the crystals of the Great Salt Lake. Malašauskas has co-written an opera libretto, co-produced a television show, served as an agent for dOCUMENTA (13), curated oO, the Lithuanian and Cyprus pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale, and keeps occurring under hypnosis.

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.

Olu Oguibe’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions including, most recently, documenta 14 for which he won the Arnold Bode Preis and the 2018-2019 Ruhr Triennale, among others. He also curated and co-curated many major exhibitions at the turn of the century for venues including Tate Modern and Venice Biennale, and introduced several major contemporary art curators to curating. For three decades beginning in the late-eighties, he wrote film, theatre, literary and art criticism for newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals in Africa, Europe and the US, and taught in several universities. His institutional critiques, theoretical essays and pioneering studies of non-Western and female contemporary artists helped put global contemporary art and art institutions on a more open course. Outside his visual-art-related practices, he has also written and published several collections of award-winning poetry. Oguibe began his public life as a student activist in the eighties, and later received a PhD in history of contemporary art from University of London in 1992. He’s currently represented by KOW, Berlin.

Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, immigrated with his family to New York in 1979, and currently lives in Berlin. He writes in American English destabilized by puns, sound play, and foreign words. His latest book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, published by the New York Review of Books, contemplates the challenges of pirate-parrot communication. It was been translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck for release by KookBooks as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt.

After thirty years teaching at the University of California, in 2011 Laurence A. Rickels accepted the professorship in art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe as successor to Klaus Theweleit. After retiring from the Akademie, Rickels was the Eberhard Berent Visiting Professor and Distinguished Writer at New York University (spring semester 2018). He continues to teach at the European Graduate School (Saas Fee, Switzerland and Malta) as the Sigmund Freud Professor (media and philosophy). Rickels is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (1988), The Case of California (1991), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Devil Notebooks (2008), Ulrike Ottinger. The Autobiography of Art Cinema (2008), I Think I Am. Philip K. Dick (2010), SPECTRE (2013), Germany. A Science Fiction (2014), and The Psycho Records (2016).

Cia Rinne, born in Gothenburg/Sweden, MA in philosophy (Frankfurt/Main, Athens, and Helsinki), is a poet based in Berlin. Readings, performances, and exhibitions of translingual minimalist and concrete poetry a.o. at the Grimmuseum Berlin, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Signal Malmö, Overgaden Copenhagen, Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris, CNEAI Chatou, ISCP New York, and INCA Seattle. Her latest publications include l’usage du mot (Héros-limte/Genève, Gyldendal/Copenhagen, and kookbooks/Berlin 2017), Skal vi blinde os selv og forlade Theben(Shall we blind ourselves and leave Thebes, Virkelig/Copenhagen 2017) as well as notes for soloists (OEI Editör/Stockholm 2009; Gyldendal/Copenhagen 2018).

Georgia Sagri lives and works in Athens and New York. She is the visiting lecturer at the Polytechnic School of Art Zhdk in Zurich on the concentration field of performance. She studied music at the National Music School of Athens; she holds a diploma in cello, a BA from Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens, and an MFA from Columbia University, New York. At the center of her practice lies the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life. Most of her work is influenced from her on-going engagement in political movements and struggles, on issues of autonomy, empowerment, and self-organization. From 1997-2001 she was a member of Void Network a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. Later in 2011 she was one of the main organizers of Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of Embros Theater Occupation in Athens. She is the founder of the audio-only magazine FORTÉ and SALOON, an ongoing curatorial project. In 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLEa semipublic space in the heart of Athens. Her participation in documenta 14, titled Dynamis consisted of a series of workshops and trainings of more than 200 participants, twenty-eight sculptures and ten breathing scores (pairs of two for Athens and Kassel) and a performance of a group of sixteen people from various backgrounds, that took place simultaneously and in continuum in both cities Athens and Kassel for six days, June 7-12. Recent exhibitions include: Georgia Sagri and I at Portikus, Frankfurt; Georgia Sagri Georgia Sagri at Kunstverein Braunschweig (curated by Christina Lenhert), documenta 14 Learning from Athens (curated by Adam Szymczyk); Public Programs documenta 14; Exercises on Freedom (curated by Paul B. Preciado), Manifesta 11, Zurich, Switzerland; The Eccentrics, Sculpture Center, New York; Secret Surface, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Bread and Roses, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. She participated in the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), Biennale de Lyon (2013), ProBio, Expo 1: New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2013) and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011).

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, including Words 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 this fall is a new collection of criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions).

Martha Schwendener, Ph.D., is a Visiting Associate Professor at New York University, Steinhardt School of Art, and an art critic for The New York Times. Her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Bookforum, Afterimage, October, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Paper Monument, Flusser Studies, and other publications. She edited Flusser/Essays (São Paulo: Metaflux, 2017), and is working on a manuscript on Vilém Flusser’s philosophy and its relationship to art.

Born in London in 1976, the Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal constructs situations that challenge conventional art-and-spectator relationships, focusing on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of lived experience rather than on material objects. In Sehgal’s works, “players” enact all manner of conversational or choreographic activities: Kiss (2002), for instance, involves two dancers in a gallery whose movements allude to various amorous scenes from throughout art history; while This Situation (2007) takes the form of a salon in which six players enact a conversation game in which each point begins with a statement from the history of political and social thought. Visitors are engaged to participate in the discussion that follows, and thereby help construct the endlessly renewable philosophical practice that the work generates. Sehgal’s practice has been shaped by his formative studies in dance and economics, and uses the museum and related institutions—galleries, art fairs, and private collections—as its arena. He considers visual art to be a microcosm of our economic reality, as both center on the production of goods and their subsequent circulation. Sehgal seeks to reconfigure these conditions by producing meaning and value through a transformation of actions rather than solid materials. Along similar lines, he refuses documentation of his work through photographs, film, or video—mediums that would reify his work’s ephemeral situations and result in ancillary material products that could potentially be bought and sold. On the other hand, Sehgal does not subscribe to an ascetic, unrealistic ideal of a world without financial exchange: His situations may be bought and sold, and are infinitely repeatable. Through this delicate balancing act, Sehgal draws out difficult conversations about the function of art and possible new ways of understanding value, both aesthetic and economic. Sehgal has had solo shows at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2004); Fundao Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (all 2006); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2006–07); MMK Frankfurt (2007); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (ongoing since 2007); Trussardi Foundation, Villa Reale, Milan; and Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall (both 2008); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). In 2006, he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize.

Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher, and translator. Her performances, lecture-performances, and videos which visualise, embody, or translate text via poetic dialogue, sculpture, costume, installation, and choreography, have been (or will be) presented at Art Night London, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), the Drawing School (London), the Royal Academy, Bold Tendencies (London), the Arnolfini (Bristol), La MaMa Galleria (NYC), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Parasol Unit (London), Company Gallery (NYC), Neue Töne Festival (Stuttgart), Tactic Gallery (Cork, Ireland), and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry and performance books Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), and the artist book 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012); the translator of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna*, 2017); and the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). Some other writing, translations, and interviews have been featured in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, The White Review, Bomb, Emergency Index, Lana Turner, The London Review of Books, and 3:AM. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, she’s currently finishing her critical book Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (working title), which is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in late 2019. Recent critical writing includes an essay on contemporary post-digital publishing in Chicago Review, a chapter on multilingual poetry and poetics in Reading Experimental Writing (forthcoming from Edinburgh UP), and, with Danny Snelson, ‘Lodging & Dislodging the Little Magazine: A Google Document Conversation in Fifteen Parts’ published by Hotel.

Marjan Sharifi works across disciplines and landscapes. Respectively, the cognitive sciences, humanistic disciplines and art practices, living between Berlin, LA and Berkeley. She received her PhD (2017) in psychology completed within the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Brain Sciences. Since her PhD, she has used her strength as an interdisciplinary scholar to develop novel courses and workshops examining the phenomenon of mind-wandering and its significance for creative insight. She holds appointments as a lecturer from the University of the Arts, Berlin (UdK) and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). She enjoys contextualizing her academic work through different perspectives, and therefore consults and collaborates regularly with artists and designers. The range of her colorful experiences include working as a researcher within the studios of Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno in Berlin, the marketing department of Dior in London, and as a private mathematics tutor for over 10 years. For the Spring 2018 term, she has been invited as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s philosophy department. She plans to return to Berkeley for her postdoctoral work to commence in 2019 at the Center for New Media where she will bring philosophical and cognitive perspectives of the wandering and wondering mind to human computer interactions.

Marcus Steinweg, born in 1971, lives and works in Berlin as a philosopher. He holds a guest professorship at HfBK (University of the Arts) in Hamburg and teaches at UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin. His recent books include: “Behauptungsphilosophie” (Berlin: Merve 2006); “Duras” (with Rosemarie Trockel, Berlin: Merve 2008); “Politik des Subjekts“ (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes 2009); “Aporien der Liebe” (Berlin: Merve 2010); “Kunst und Philosophie / Art and Philosophy” (Cologne: Walter König: 2012); “Philosophie der Überstürzung” (Berlin: Merve 2013), “Inkonsistenzen” (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015), “Evidenzterror” (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015) and “Gramsci Theater” (Berlin: Merve 2015).

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968 in Zurich, CH) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. 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 shows. In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. 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.

Daniel Tiffany is a poet, theorist, and critic from Los Angeles, whose work examines the correlation of poetics and other disciplines. He is the author of ten books of poetry and literary criticism. Among his critical works are Infidel Poetics : Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (University of Chicago Press) ; Radio Corpse : Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard UP) ; Toy Medium : Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press) ; and My Silver Planet : A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins UP). His collections of poetry have been published by presses including Action Books and Omnidawn. His most recent collection (with BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP), The Work-Shy,was published last year in the Poetry Series of Wesleyan University Press. Work from this project has been exhibited in numerous museums in the U.S. and adapted for theater and performance. His poems have been published in Poetry, Paris Review, Tin House, Bomb, Fence, jubilat, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Iowa Review, Lana Turner Turner, Chicago Review, and many other journals. In addition, Tiffany has published translations from French, Greek, and Italian. He has been a recipient of the Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Prof. Dr. Hubertus von Amelunxen was born in Hindelang, Germany in 1958.  He lives in Berlin. After studies in French and German Literature 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. 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, among them the first large European exhibition on William Henry Fox Talbot, which toured from the New National Gallery in Berlin to Vienna, Lausanne, Antwerp and Paris in 1989/1990. Among his books are:  Die aufgehobene Zeit – Die Erfindung der Photographie durch William Henry Fox Talbot (Berlin, 1988), Jacques Derrida, Die Tode von Roland Barthes (Berlin: Nishen, 1987), (with Andrei Ujica) Television/Revolution. The Ultimatum of the Image. Rumania in December 1989, (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1991), Allegorie und Photographie (Mannheim: Universität Mannheim, 1992), Photography after Photography, an exhibition which travelled in Europe and North America (G+B Arts, Munich, 1995), Les Lieux du Non-Lieu (Berlin: Verlag der Kunst, 1997), Territoire en deuil (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998) and Tomorrow For Ever – Photography as a Ruin (Cologne: Dumont, 1999), Theorie der Fotografie, 1980-1995 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000) , Zaha Hadid with Hélène Binet (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2000) , Photo and Concept Art For a Building (Heidelberg/Berlin 2000), Jean Philippe Reverdot, Bilan provisoire (Marval, Paris 2002), Tangent|e – Alain Paiement, (Lars Müller Publishers, Canadian Centre for Architecture 2003), Tangent|e – Dieter Appelt, (Lars Müller Publishers, Canadian Centre for Architecture 2004), Tangent|e – Victor Burgin, Voyage to Italy, (Hatje Cantz, 2006), Tangent|e – Naoya Hatakeyama, Scale (Nazraeli Press, 2007) and together with Dieter Appelt and Peter Weibel, Notation – Calculus and Form in the Arts, (Berlin, Akademie der Künste 2008, ZKM, 2009), and he edited together with Angela Lammert and Philip Ursprung, Gordon Matta-Clark Moment to Moment: Space, (Nürnberg: Verlag  für Moderne Kunst, 2012). His last books are a monograph on the Palestinian artist Steve Sabella, Photography 1997-2014 (Hatje Cantz, 2014) and a large essay “Framing négritude” for Winfried Bullinger, At the Edges of Power (Hatje Cantz, 2017). He curated the exhibitions Iannis Xenakis at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (together with Angela Lammert) in 2011 and Cy Twombly Photographs 1951-2010 at BOZAR in Brussels in 2012.

John C. Welchman is Professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. His books on art include Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997), Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Routledge, 2001) and Guillaume Bijl (JRP|Ringier, 2016). Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art (Sternberg, 2016) is the first volume of his collected writings. Welchman is co-author of the Dada and Surrealist Word Image (MIT Press, 1987), Mike Kelley (Phaidon, 1999), and Kwang-Young Chung (Rizzoli, 2014); and editor of Rethinking Borders (Minnesota UP, 1996), Institutional Critique and After (JRP|Ringier, 2006), The Aesthetics of Risk (JRP|Ringier, 2008) and Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (JRP|Ringier, 2010) as well as the collected writings of Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism (MIT, 2003); Minor Histories (MIT, 2004); Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 1988-2004 (JRP|Ringier, 2005). He has written for Artforum (where he had a column in the late 1980s and early 90s), Screen, the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Economist among other newspapers and journals; and contributed essays to catalogues and associated publications at Documenta (Kassel), the Louvre (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MoMA|PS1 (NY), Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool, Reina Sophia (Madrid), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), The New Museum (NY), Albertina, Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), LA County Museum of Art, Sydney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Vienna Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Ludwig Museum (Budapest), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Edinburgh Festival, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.

John Yau is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Radiant Silhouette: New & Selected Work 1974-1988 (1989) Borrowed Love Poems (2002) Ing Grish (2005) and, most recently, Bijoux in the Dark (2018) from Letter Machine Editions. A fiction writer and art critic, he has also published numerous monographs and books of criticism, including A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2008). Catherine Murphy (2016) Thomas Nozkowski, (2017), Philip Taaffe (2018), and The Wild Children of William Blake (2017). He is the recipient of 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize, which “honors an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition.” Previously, he has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Ingram Merrill Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, General Electric Foundation, Creative Capital-The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  He has been awarded a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Brooklyn College, and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts and Letters from the College of Creative Studies, Detroit, Michigan. Yau is Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University) and lives in New York.