Care, Caring and Repair in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2020 | online
SESSION ONE: July 13-23, 2020
Faculty include: Chloë Bass, Paz Guevara, Leon J. Hilton, Amelia Jones, Maurizio Lazzarato, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Warren Neidich, Ahmet Ögüt, Rachel O’Reilly, Tobias Rees, Martha Schwendener, Vandana Shiva, Anuradha Vikram
SESSION TWO: August 3-13, 2020
Faculty include: Antonia Alampi, Suzanne Anker, T.J. Demos, Betti-Sue Hertz, Stefanie Hessler and Joan Jonas, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Warren Neidich, Clio Nicastro, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Jasbir K. Puar, Suely Rolnik, Daniel Ross, Barry Schwabsky
Faculty Bios
Antonia Alampi is a curator, researcher and writer born to Southern Italy and currently based in Berlin, where she is Artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary. She is also in the curatorial team of the quadrennial sonsbeek2020-2024. Between 2017 and until mid-2019 she was curator of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, with a three-years program focused on the manufacturing of the notion of European Citizenship. She recently co-founded together with Caroline Ektander, Simone Müller, the Hazardous Travels group from the Rachel Carson Center and SAVVY Contemporary, a research platform – Toxic Commons – that brings together cultural practitioners and academic researchers in the sciences to address environmental injustice by unravelling the complex nature of toxicity. In 2016 she initiated together with iLiana Fokianaki the research project Future Climates, by focusing on how economic fluxes shape and determine the work of small-scale initiatives in contexts with weak public infrastructures for arts and culture. From 2012 to 2015 she was curator of Beirut in Cairo. There, she conceived and directed the educational project The Imaginary School Program (2014/2015) looking into forms of organizing and institution building in the city. Between 2009 and 2011 she was the co-founding director of the art initiative Opera Rebis and prior to this she has worked for the Studio Stefania Miscetti (Rome), Manifesta7 (South Tyrol) and the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento.
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, she calls attention to the beauty of life and the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank’.” Anker frequently works with “pre-defined and found materials” botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Daejeon Biennale, Korea; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; P.S.1 Museum, New York, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin, Germany; the Center for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany; the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Anker’s exhibitions have been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Nature. Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Her work has been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Nature. She has hosted twenty episodes of the Bio Blurb show, an Internet radio program originally on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA in NYC, now archived on Alana Heiss’ Clocktower Productions. She has been a speaker at Harvard University, the Royal Society in London, Cambridge University, Yale University, the London School of Economics, the Max-Planck Institute, Universitiy of Leiden, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Banff Art Center any many others. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department in NYC since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Lab.
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She has held numerous fellowships and residencies, most recently from the CUNY Center for the Humanities, Lucas Artist Fellows, Art Matters, Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-
T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013)—winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award—and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organized Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014. During 2019-21, with the Center for Creative Ecologies, and as a Getty research institute scholar, he’s working on a Mellon-funded research project, art exhibition, and book project dedicated to the questions: what comes after the end of the world, and how can we cultivate futures of social justice within capitalist ruins? His new publication, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing is due out from Duke University Press in 2020.
Paz Guevara is a curator, researcher and author, born in Santiago, Chile. Currently she works at Haus der Kulturen der Welt – HKW in Berlin, Germany, where she collaborates in the long-term project Kanon-Fragen that questions the dominant cultural narratives and for which she curated Afro-Sonic Mapping: Tracing Aural Histories via Sonic Transmigrations (2019) and co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017-18). She has also contributed at HKW to the public programs of A History of Limits (2016), Past Disquiet (2016), Love and Ethnology (2019) and De-Centering Narratives (2019). In 2011 and 2013, she co-curated the Latin American Pavilion at the 54th and 55th Venice Biennale. She has written extensively on contemporary artistic practices. Most recently, she has published conversations with Elicura Chihuailaf (NIRIN NGAAY, Biennale of Sydney, 2020), Marcela Moraga (Villa Romana, Florence, 2020) and Marco Montiel-Soto (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Spain, 2019). Guevara lectures on exhibition histories and curatorial practice at the IED Istituto Europeo di Design in Venice.
Betti-Sue Hertz is Director and Chief Curator at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. She was Lecturer in American Studies at Stanford University (2016-2019) and Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School, San Francisco Art Institute (2011-2019). Hertz is a Public Art Consultant for TLS Landscape Architecture’s Shishan Park, Suzhou (2016-) and other projects; and was Curator-In-Residence at HOW Art Museum, Shanghai (2018). Hertz was Director of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2008-2015) and Curator of Contemporary Art at San Diego Museum of Art (2000-2008). Exhibition highlights include Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa; Dissident Futures; Audience as Subject; Renée Green: Endless Dreams; and Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark; Trained as an art historian and artist, her curatorial and scholarly projects are fueled by the intersection of visual aesthetics and socially relevant ideas with a particular interest in relational structures and comparative propositions on contemporary topics. Hertz is currently preparing an exhibition which features perspectives and responses to the global phenomenon of mass protests, and recuperative strategies of resistance.
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary systems from an intersectional feminist perspective, with an emphasis on the ocean and other ecologies, as well as on expanded definitions of life and non-life, nonhumans, and technology. Hessler is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. Recent curatorial projects include “Down to Earth” at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (2020); “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice (2019) and the Museo Thyssen in Madrid (2020); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018); the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018); and “Sugar and Speed” at the Museum of Modern Art in Recife. Between 2017–2019, she was guest professor in art theory at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She has edited books like Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, published by The MIT Press (2018). Her monographic book Prospecting Ocean was published by The MIT Press in 2019.
Leon J. Hilton is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, USA). His research focuses on modern and contemporary theatre and performance with particular attention to the way these fields overlap with disability studies and neurodiversity, feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, and psychoanalysis. His first book, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, examines how cultural attitudes towards neurological disability and difference have been represented, negotiated, and contested in performance across a range of genres—including theatre, documentary film, and media and performance art—from the mid-20th century through the present. Before joining the faculty at Brown he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and received his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2016. His research has been supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and is published in GLQ, Third Text, African American Review, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Howlround, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Art In America, and TDR/The Drama Review, where he was Managing Editor from 2011–2013. He has previously taught in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, the program in Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College, and the Cinema Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is on the advisory board of Spectrum Theatre Ensemble, a neurodiverse theatre company based in Providence, Rhode Island.
Joan Jonas, believing that sculpture and painting were exhausted mediums, became known for her pioneering work in performance and video art. Jonas, who studied sculpture and art history, was deeply influenced by the work of Trisha Brown, with whom she studied dance, as well as John Cage and Claes Oldenburg, particular in their exploration of non-linear narrative structure and form. Jonas’s own work has frequently engaged and questioned portrayals of female identity in theatric and self-reflexive ways, using ritual-like gestures, masks, mirrors, and costumes. Over time, Jonas began to introduce more symbolic elements into her work; frequent motifs include dogs, the sun and moon, skulls, landscapes, and hurricanes. Themes of memory, autobiography, mythology, and dreams became more central themes in her work in the 1980s.
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research, Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012); co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016); and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research (2016). Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey with accompanying catalogue (Queer Communion: Ron Athey) to debut in New York and Los Angeles in 2020-2021, and a book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance is forthcoming from Routledge Press.
Maurizio Lazzarato is a philosopher and sociologist. In the 1970s, he was involved with the Autonomia Operaia movement in Italy and was a founding member of the French journal Multitudes. His books in English include Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (2014) and Governing by Debt (2015).
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in India. He is a member of the advisory board for The International Deleuze Studies in Asia, one of the founding members of Asia Theory Network (ATN), and a director of Global Center for Technology in Humanities. He has written extensively on French and German philosophy and its non-Western reception, Korean cinema, popular culture, art, and politics. He has also organised a radical reading group, “Kyungsung Com,” and recently launched the Global Network of Critical Postmedia Studies. In 2013, he held The Idea of Communism Conference in Seoul with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek and edited the volume of The Idea of Communism 3.
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Metallica, Chuck D, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae. His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013. In 2014, he was named National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He produced Pioneers of African American Cinema, a collection of the earliest films made by African American directors, released in 2015. Miller’s artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and; The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.
Yann Moulier-Boutang, born in 1949, is a graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure (Philosophy 1970). He is now emeritus professor of economics at University of Technology of Compiègne which is part of Alliance Sorbonne University France (formerly Paris 4 + Paris 6 + ENSEAD), where he teaches political economy, economy of complexity, law economics of intellectual property rights. He is a member of the Costech Laboratory (Knowledge, Organization and Technical Systems) in the same University. From 2007 to 2015, he taught culture and digital contemporary culture at the Superior School of Arts and Design at Saint-Etienne and innovation by design at ENSCI (National Superior School of Industrial Creation). In 2008, he was appointed first visiting professor in economics at the National Superior School of Architecture (Paris-Malaquais). He has been running the quarterly Multitudes since its foundation. He is also an associate professor at the Sino-European Faculty of Technology (UTSEUS) in Shanghai University (SHU). Now he is President of the Scientific Board of the newly founded IHETN (Institute of Hight Studies of the Digital Transition).
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 in Berlin and the artistic director of sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Ndikung was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017; a guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018; and the artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali last year. He is currently a professor for the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin and is also a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto, Canada.
Having studied photography, neuroscience, medicine and architecture, Warren Neidich brings to any discussion platform a unique interdisciplinary position that he calls “trans-thinking.” He currently uses video and neon to create cross pollinating conceptual text-based works that reflect upon situations at the border zone of art, science and social justice. His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennial 2019, analyzed through a large hanging neon sculpture the relations of Fake News, networked attention economy, evolving techno-cultural habitus and the co-evolving architecture of the brain. His recent conceptual project Drive-By-Art (Public Sculpture in This Moment of Social Distancing) just opened on the South Fork of Long Island and Los Angeles to some acclaim including reviews in the NY Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Time Out and LA Magazine. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2015-), a theory intensive postgraduate course that attracts students worldwide operating in Los Angeles, NYC and Berlin. Additionally he was a tutor in the departments of visual art, computer science and cultural studies at Goldsmith College London as well as recently serving as Professor of Art at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin. He has been a visiting lecturer at the departments of art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Southern California Institute of Architecture, UCLA, La Sorbonne Paris, University of Oxford and Cambridge University, UK. He is American editor of Archive Books and author of over 20 books. His recent books include The Glossary of Cognitive Activism, Archive Books, Berlin, and Neuromacht (in German) Merve, Leipzig.
Clio Nicastro teaches at Bard College Berlin and is currently affiliated with ICI Berlin. She studied Philosophy at the University of Palermo (Italy) where she completed her PhD in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts with a thesis on the notion of Denkraum der Besonnenheit in Aby Warburg, which she is in the process of adapting into a book. In 2015 she moved to Berlin as a DAAD postdoctoral fellow working on the German filmmaker Harun Farocki. From 2016-2018 she was a postdoctoral fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry as part of the two-year program Errans in Time (2016-2018), where she carried out research on empathic temporality. She has published her work in academic volumes as well as in film and art journals. Amongst other topics, she has written on Harun Farocki, Philip Scheffner and Merle Kroeger, and Adelina Pintilie. In 2016, she co-founded together with Saima Akhtar and Rosa Barotsias the project In front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour. From 2018 she has been co-curating together with Hannah Proctor and Nadine Hartmann the series of reading groups and screenings Spellbound (Diffrakt, Berlin), which aims to explore experiences of collective mental contagion such as fainting fits, possession, the mimetic aspects of both hysteria and eating disorders, the regimentation of gesture and trances.
Ahmet Ögüt lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Following Diyarbakir Fine Art High School, he completed his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty at Hacettepe University, Ankara, and MA from Art and Design Faculty at Yıldız Teknik University, Istanbul. He works across different media and has exhibited widely, more recently with solo presentations at YARAT Contemporary Art Space (2020), Merdiven Art Space (2019); Kunstverein Dresden (2018), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2017), ALT Bomonti (2016), Chisenhale Gallery (2015); Berkeley Art Museum (2010); and Kunsthalle Basel (2008). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Zero Gravity at Nam SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008). Öğüt was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University (2013); the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2012); the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs 2011, Netherlands; and the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft, Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2010). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rdVenice Biennale (2009).
Rachel O’Reilly is an artist, poet, independent curator and critic whose work explores relationships between art and situated cultural practice, media and psychoanalysis, aesthetic philosophy and political economy. She teaches the theory seminar ‘At the Limits of the Writerly’ at the Dutch Art Institute and is a Phd researcher at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. From 2004-08 she was a curator of film, video and new media at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, including the Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. She has a background in comparative literature, and a Master (Cum Laude) in Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, which theorized videographic crisis genres as post-fordist commodities, symptomatic of art’s own neoliberal transition. From 2013-14 she was a researcher in residence of the Jan van Eyck Academie, NL where she was part of the Moving Images of Speculation Inlab. Her artistic work, including The Gas Imaginary (2013-19) diagramming forms and norms of unconventional mining practices in settler colonial space has been shown internationally most recently at Edit Russ Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg DE, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven NL; E-flux, New York USA; and UNSW Galleries, Sydney AU. Curatorial projects include The Leisure Class (co-curated w/ Kathryn Weir) GoMA, Brisbane; Videoground, (Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Chicago Film Studies Centre, MAAP, Brisbane); EX-EMBASSY Berlin (w/ Sonja Hornung); and Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law, Contour Biennale, with Natasha Ginwala. She co-wrote the book On Neutrality with Jelena Vesic and Vlidi Jeric for the Non-Aligned Modernisms series (MCA, Belgrade), publishes with Danny Butt on artistic autonomy in settler colonial space, and currently co-edits Feminist Takes on Black Wave Film with Antonia Majaca and Jelena Vesic for Sternberg Press. She just finished her first feature documentary INFRACTIONS addressing threats of shale gas to 50% of the Northern Territory in Australia. www.racheloreilly.net
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a lecturer at the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and a research fellow at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Afterall, Springerin, Camera Austria, e-flux journal, art-agenda, Mousse, Frieze, Domus, Inaesthetics, Manifesta Journal, or Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of The Reluctant Narrator (Sternberg Press, 2014) and, together with Eric de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken of a forthcoming book series on counter histories, to be published by Sternberg Press.
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) published with Duke University Press in the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise that she co-edits with Mel Chen. Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (December 2017). She also writes for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Art India, The Feminist Review, Bully Bloggers, Jadaliyya, and Oh! Industry. Puar’s major awards include a 2018 Fellowship from the Palestinian American Research Council, the 2013-14 Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University, the Edward Said Chair of American Studies 2012-13 at the American University of Beirut, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (1999-2000) and a Ford Foundation grant for archival and ethnographic documentation work (2002-2003). She received the 2013 Modern Languages Association Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus Michael Lynch Award for her years of scholar-activist work. In January 2013 she was honored with the Robert Sutherland Visitorship at Queens University, awarded to “a notable individual with expertise in race relations.” In 2017 Puar’s article “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled” (Social Text #124) was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Gay Lesbian/Queer Caucus’s Crompton-Noll Prize for Best LGBTQ Studies Article. Puar has held visiting positions in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, and Linköping University in Sweden. Currently Professor Puar is completing her third book, a collection of essays on duration, pace, mobility, and acceleration in Palestine titled Slow Life: Settler Colonialism in Five Parts.
Tobias Rees is Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at Parsons/the New School in New York; Founding Director of the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles; and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR). Previously he held positions at the University of Zurich/Switzerland and at McGill University in Montreal/Canada, where he served as William Dawson Chair. He holds degrees in philosophy (Heidelberg/Germany); anthropology (Berkeley/USA); and neurobiology (Paris/France). Rees is a globally recognized expert on the history of thought – on how the categories that silently structure our ways of thinking and doing emerged and changed over time. His research focuses on how events –– the sudden or slow and accumulative emergence of the unanticipated –– undermine such categories of thought and transform the previously taken for granted into questions no one has answers for. More specifically, he is interested in how such events reconfigure or render obsolete the categories of the human, of nature, and of technology. Alone and together with colleagues Rees has sought to build new conceptual and institutional possibilities for rendering visible the philosophical, aesthetic, and political stakes of contemporary technology and science. He has worked as advisor to many North American and European Universities on how to re-invent the human sciences and has collaborated with curators and museums around the world. Rees has a long-standing history of working with artists. Selected books include: Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008 (together with Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, & James Faubion); Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms, University of California Press, 2016; and After Ethnos. Duke University Press. 2018.
Suely Rolnik is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, writer, and full professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (since 1979), where she founded the Subjectivity Studies Centre (Ph.D Program on Clinical Psychology), and is a guest professor of the Interdisciplinary Master of Theatre and Living Arts program at the National University of Colombia (since 2013). She was guest professor of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) of Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MacBa) from the program’s founding in 2007 to its interruption in 2015, and an invited researcher of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris (2007). Her research is dedicated to micropolitics, the sphere where the existential consistency of a regime is produced. Her main focus is the dominant mode of subjectivation under what she calls “the colonial-racializing-capitalistic unconscious regime,” the ways to escape our characters structured by it, and the social scenes their performance belongs to – in order to perform new characters which necessarily draw together those scenes. To do so, her theoretical perspective has always been transdisciplinary, inextricably linked to clinical-political-cultural pragmatics. She has authored several books and essays in different languages. Her translated books in German or English include: Zombie Anthropophagie. Zur neoliberalen Subjektivität. (Turia + Kant: Vienna/Berlin, 2018), Archive Mania (Hatje Cantz/Documenta 13, 2011) and The Spheres of Insurrection: Suggestions for Combating the Pimping of Life forthcoming in English (Verso Books: NY). She co-authored (with Félix Guattari), Molecular Revolution in Brazil (Semiotext: NY, 2006). She is the creator of the Archive for a Work-Event, on the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s oeuvre (65 film interviews), from which a selection was produced by Carte Blanche (France), Cinemateca Brasileira (Brazil), and SESC-SP in 2011. Alongside Corinne Diserens, she was the curator of the exhibition Nous sommes le moule. A vous de donner le souffle. Lygia Clark, de l’œuvre à l’événement (Musée de Beaux-arts de Nantes, 2005 and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2006). She is the translator in Portuguese of Deleuze and Guattari’s, Mille Plateaux (Ed. 34, 1997), among others. She is a founder member of the South Conceptualisms Network, today including more than sixty Latin American researchers on conceptual artistic practices that took place in the continent during the 1960s and 70s. She was member of the Advisory Board for the 31th São Paulo Biennial (2014) and jury of the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 2014) and Prince Claus Fund for culture and development (The Netherlands, 2015–2016).
Daniel Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University in 2002, with a thesis on “Heidegger and the Question of the Political”. His book Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2004. The same year saw the premier at the Rotterdam International Film Festival of a feature documentary that he co-directed with David Barison entitled The Ister, which would go on to win prizes at film festivals in Marseille and Montreal. He has taught at the University of Melbourne, Yachay Tech and Tongji University, among others. Ross has worked extensively with Stiegler and published eleven volumes of translation of Stiegler’s work, most recently Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019 (Open Humanities Press). He is currently translating a collective work entitled Bifurcate: “There is No Alternative”, edited by Stiegler and the Internation Collective, and has a forthcoming book of his own entitled Political Anaphylaxis, both from OHP.
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.
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 include The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2020), Heretics of Language (Black Square, 2018), and The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016). A new collection of his poetry is forthcoming in 2021.
Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist who has dedicated nearly five decades of her life to the protection of biodiversity. Shiva did her M Sc Hons in Particle physics at Panjab University in Chandigarh in 1973. In 1979, she completed and received her PhD in the Foundations of Quantum Theory on the topic “Non locality and Hidden Variable in Quantum Theory “ at the University of Western Ontario. Her quantum training and her work in ecology has enabled her to understand the limitations of the mechanistic Monoculture of the Mind. Her scientific research and her Biodiversity Conservation work with local Communities, especially women, has allowed her to evolve a paradigm of Oneness and Non separability, which she refers to as the Biodiversity of the Mind. In 1981, she founded the Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology. Since 1984 she has dedicated herself to promote non-violent farming based on Biodiversity. In 1991 she found red Navdanya. Her work has shown how through conservation of Biodiversity, humans can produce more food, better health, and reduce hunger, disease and poverty. She is currently based in Delhi and Dehra Dun, her hometown where she established the Earth University and A Biodiversity Conservation farm. She has authored more than twenty books. She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.), and a figure of the global solidarity movement which she refers to as the Earth Democracy movement. She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1993, the Midori prize on Biodiversity and numerous other awards for her service to the Earth, the protection of Biodiversity, and people’s rights.
Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and educator who has guest-curated exhibitions for the Craft Contemporary (formerly CAFAM), Shulamit Nazarian, Mills College Art Museum, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, ProArts, and the DeYoung Museum Artist Studio, and held curatorial positions at 18th Street Arts Center, UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, Headlands Center for the Arts, Aicon Gallery, Richmond Art Center, and in the studio of artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Vikram is the author of “Decolonizing Culture,” a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017). Anuradha Vikram’s writing includes contributions to ARTnews, Leonardo, KCET Artbound, Artillery, Hyperallergic, Daily Serving, Art Practical, The Brooklyn Rail, and OPEN SPACE, the SFMOMA blog; catalogue essays on artists Sandy Rodriguez, Young Joon Kwak, Kal Spelletich, Sonya Rapoport, Chitra Ganesh, and Ana Mendieta; and to the Paper Monument collection “As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: what should art institutions do now?” She is faculty in the UCLA Department of Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design, and Otis College of Art and Design, and serves as an Editorial Board member for X-TRA and an editor for X Topics, a subsidiary of X Artists’ Books. Anuradha Vikram’s service to the field of visual arts includes past roles as board member of the College Art Association, chapter chair of ArtTable of Northern California, and Board Chair for Kearny Street Workshop. As a curator, her programs have been awarded major grants by National Endowment for the Arts, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Fundacion Jumex, and California Arts Council. Vikram holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.
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