Cognitive Justice and the Crisis of Epistemology
SFSIA 2023 | New York City

in collaboration with The Brooklyn Rail and Residency Unlimited
August 7 – 11

Faculty Bios

Antonia Alampi is the founding artistic and executive director of Spore Initiative. Her professional practice as a cultural organizer, curator, and director has been defined by working collaboratively with artists and professionals from different fields and backgrounds and within small-scale, socially-sensitive, politically-engaged and structurally vulnerable organizations. She was the artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary from 2016 to 2020, on the curatorial team of sonsbeek20-24, curator of Kunsthal Extra-City from 2017 to 2019, and curator of Beirut in Cairo from 2012 to 2015, among other things. She has co-founded projects with strong positions, erratic lives, and little to no funding such as Future Climates (with iLiana Fokianaki) and Toxic Commons (with Caroline Ektander and Simone Müller, a.o.). Within and outside of institutions she has curated or been involved in many types of cultural and artistic projects, research, movements, publications and actions that pursue social, political and environmental justice and support forms of living and relating to the Earth that have often been historically repressed or erased. She occasionally teaches, writes essays, edits books and talks in public. She is the mother of a girl and lives in Berlin.

Armen Avanessian is Professor for Media Theory at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. His English monographies include Irony and the Logic of Modernity (DeGruyter, 2015), Present Tense. A Poetics (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Metanoia. A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain (Bloomsbury, 2017), both with Anke Hennig, Overwrite. Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), Miamification (Sternberg Press, 2017), and Future Metaphysics (Polity, 2019). Recently, he published One plus One. Spekulative Poetik von Feminismus, Algorithmik, Politik und Kapital (Berlin, 2019) in English and German with Anke Hennig, as well as Konflikt. Von der Dringlichkeit, die Probleme von morgen schon heute zu lösen (Berlin, 2022).

Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, cultural studies, and curatorial practice. She studied contemporary art and anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London, and received her Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently Global Humanities Professor of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin and Lecturer in Spatial Design at the Technical University Vienna. Since 2018, she has held an International Chair at the Laboratoire d’excellence des arts et médiations humaines, Université Paris 8 and Centre Georges Pompidou, was Guest Professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’art Paris-Cergy, Interim Professor of Curatorial Theory and Dramaturgical Practice at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Professor for Art Theory and History at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg, and Guest Professor at the Städelschule art academy in Frankfurt. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg), is a Guest Mentor of the Berlin Program for Artists, and Faculty at Large of SVA Curatorial Practice in New York. Her recent book The Metabolic Museum (2020) was published by Hatje Cantz in co-production with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin. It has been translated into Russian and published by Garage Museum, Moscow (2021) and recently came out in Spanish translation with Caniche Madrid (2023). 

Jeremy Dennis is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY, and lead artist and founder of the non-profit Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc. In his work, he explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis was one of 10 recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter Grant from the national non-profit organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth. Most recently, Dennis received the Artist to Artist Fellowship by the Art Matter Foundation. In 2013, Dennis began working on the series, Stories—Indigenous Oral Stories, Dreams and Myths. Inspired by North American indigenous stories, the artist staged supernatural images that transform these myths and legends to depictions of an actual experience in a photograph. He has been part of several group and solo exhibitions, including Stories—Dreams, Myths, and Experiences, for The Parrish Art Museum’s Road Show (2018), Stories, From Where We Came, The Department of Art Gallery, Stony Brook University (2018); Trees Also Speak, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY College at Old Westbury, NY (2018); Nothing Happened Here, Flecker Gallery at Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY (2018); On This Site: Indigenous People of Suffolk County, Suffolk County Historical Society, Riverhead, NY (2017); Pauppukkeewis, Zoller Gallery, State College, PA (2016); and Dreams, Tabler Gallery, Stony Brook, NY (2012). Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. He currently lives and works in Southampton, New York on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.

Sanford Kwinter is a theorist, writer, and editor, Professor of Science and Design at the Pratt Institute in New York City and University Professor of Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In the early 1980s, he co-founded the journal ZONE and the independent publishing company Zone Books as a transdisciplinary project to integrate philosophy and cultural production. He has contributed numerous essays and articles (many of which have been translated into a variety of languages) to periodicals such as: Art in America, L’autre Journal, Harvard Design Magazine, Yale Journal of Architecture, Assemblage and PRAXIS. His books include Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), and Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010). Additionally, Kwinter has edited many books in and around the field of architecture, urbanism and the environment including Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students (Flying the Bullet or When Did the Future Begin?) (Princeton Arch. Press, 1996), ZONE 6: Incorporations (with Jonathan Crary for Zone Books and MIT Press, 1992), and ZONE 1/2 The Contemporary City (with M. Feher for Zone Books, 1986, and MIT Press, 1987). Kwinter has taught at schools around the world, was a fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and was recipient of the 2013 design writing award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke, 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming, minor compositions). Her artwork is textile-based and relationally-oriented, often participatory. She is interested in the detail of material complexity, in what reveals itself to perception sideways, in the quality of a textural engagement with life. Her work often plays synesthetically with touch, of recent in acknowledgement and experimentation with the ProTactile movement for DeafBlind culture and language. Tactile propositions include large scale hangings produced with a diversity of tools including tufting, hooking, knotting, weaving. 3e is the main direction her current research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies: the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than-human encounter with worlds in the making.

Abdul-Karim Mustapha is a Phd Student in English at Johns Hopkins University and is a member of the editorial board of Multitudes. He served on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism from 2001-12. He is editor of “Dossier on Empire,” a special double issue devoted to the publication and debate of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), and co-editor of The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Volume I (2005) and Volume II (2007). He has published essays in Boundary 2, The South Atlantic Quarterly, African Arts, and Lugar Comum. He has written on topics ranging from geopolitics in W.E.B. Du Bois, psychoanalysis, subaltern studies, and the idea of the frontier in the creation of the Brazilian slave economy. He is currently writing a book on sovereignty and jurisdiction in contemporary Africa.

Trained in art, architecture, neuroscience, and medicine, Warren Neidich uses written texts and neon-light sculptures to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, science, and cognitive justice. His performative and sculptural work “Pizzagate Neon” (2018), on display at the Venice Biennale in 2019, analyzed the relations of fake news, the networked attention economy, evolving techno-cultural habitus, and the co-evolving architecture of the brain. “From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry” will be exhibited at the Taipei Digital Arts Center this June 2023. He was a tutor in the Departments of Visual Art, Computer Science, and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2004–2008), Research Fellow at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture (2006-2010) as well as recently served as Professor of Art at Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin (2016–2018). He has been a visiting lecturer at GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Southern California Institute of Architecture, and University of California, Los Angeles, in the US; Sorbonne in Paris, France; and University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times and Frieze. The fourth edition of his Glossary of Cognitive Activism will be jointly published in 2023 by Columbia University Press, New York City and Eris Press, London. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer. He has lectured and taught at numerous international universities and institutes. His latest philosophical work is Intelligence and Spirit (2018, Sequence Press/Urbanomic/MIT), a monograph on artificial general intelligence at the intersection of theoretical computer science, philosophy of mind and German Idealism. Negarestani is currently working on a book dealing with the multifaceted enigma of time and its relation to imagination entitled The Vicious Transparency of Time.   

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation, co-editor of international reviews for Artforum, and has taught at Hunter College, Yale University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Goldsmiths College. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2017) and The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2019), as well as two collections of poetry, Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, 2022) and Water from Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023).

Javier Téllez is a New York-based artist born in Venezuela. His work reflects a sustained interest in bringing peripheral communities and invisible situations to the fore of contemporary art addressing disabilities and mental illness as marginalizing conditions. Tellez’s projects have often involved working in collaboration with people diagnosed with mental illness to produce film installations that question the notions of the normal and the pathological. Tellez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester (2018); San Francisco Art Institute (2014); Kunsthaus Zürich (2014); SMAK, Ghent (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2011); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2004). He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; ICA, Boston; and Renaissance Society, Chicago, as well as dOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany (2012); Manifesta, Trento, Italy; Sydney Biennial; and Whitney Biennial, New York (all 2008); Venice Biennale (2001 and 2003); and Yokohama Triennial (2001). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, and in 2016 the Global Mental Health Award for Innovation in the Arts from Columbia University, New York.

Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. They are co-curator of the 2024 Portland Biennial and guest curator of the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Recent curatorial projects include Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022), Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate with Warren Neidich, Renée Petropoulos, and Christina Strassfield at Guild Hall, East Hampton Main Beach, New York (2022) and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica State Beach, California (2023), and eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves at Los Angeles State Historic Park in 2022. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. Their latest book is Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023), using speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. They are a contributor to art periodicals including Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail and Los Angeles Review of Books, and publications from Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. They are an Editorial Board member at X-TRA and an editor at X Artists’ Books. Vikram is faculty at UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. They hold an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from NYU.