From Dry to Wet Conceptualism in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2025 | Paris
hosted by Centre des Récollets and
Master in Arts & Vision (MAVI) of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University
September 1 – 6
Faculty Bios
Saâdane Afif (born 1970 in Vendôme, France) is a French artist with a conceptual approach who lives and works in Berlin. His work explores a variety of media (performance, objects, texts or printed materials) without fitting into any particular artistic category or discipline. Recent solo exhibitions include The Fountain Archives and Beyond…, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2021); The Fairytale Recordings, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); and This Is Ornamental, Kunsthalle, Vienna (2018). His work is also featured at Documenta 12 (2007) and the 56th Venice Biennale. In 2020, Saâdane Afif is selected for the Villa Aurora grant. He also received the Prix Meurice for contemporary art (2015) and the Prix Marcel Duchamp (2009). In 2025, a solo exhibition by Saâdane Afif will open at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Saâdane Afif was the convener of the 4th edition of the Bergen Assembly triennial: Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron (2022). Together with Yasmine d’O., he is the founder of Side Magazine.
Julieta Aranda is an artist and educator, co-director of the online platform e-flux and an editor of e-flux journal. In her artistic practice, Julieta Aranda composes encounters with the nature of time and speculative literature. She observes the altering human-earth relationship through a multidisciplinary lens, looking at science and technology, natural processes, man-made environmental changes, multispecies encounters, artificial intelligence, and collective subjectivities. She has been teaching in different institutions worldwide for the past decade, and many of her projects have a strong pedagogical base. Julieta Aranda‘s solo exhibitions have been held at MUAC, Mexico City; Galería OMR, Mexico City; Prometeo Gallery, Milan; Portikus, Frankfurt; Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea, Palermo; New Museum, NY; Guggenheim Museum, NY; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce; and the Kunstverein Arnsberg, amongst others. She has participated in numerous international group exhibitions including Fridericianum Museum, Kassel; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Public Art Munich; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. Julieta Aranda was part of Sonsbeek 20-24 in Arnhem; documenta 13 in Kassel; 10th Momentum Biennale; 12th Istanbul Biennale; VII Havana Biennale; 8th Berlin Biennale; the 54th and 56th Venice Biennales; 2nd Moscow Biennale; and 9th Lyon Biennale among others. During 2020 and 2021, Julieta Aranda directed “Summa Technologia,” a series of six online seminars commemorating the centennial of Stanislaw Lem. In 2024, Julieta Aranda had a mid-career retrospective at MUAC in Mexico City.
Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator and writer. He founded and co-directed the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (1999–2006), was the founding advisor for Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev (2003–2007), professor at the IUAV in Venice (2006–2007), and Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007/2010). In 2010, he headed the studies department at the Ministry of Culture in France and then became Director of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (2011-2015). Between 2015 and 2021, he founded and directed MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain which brought together La Panacée, art centre Montpellier, the ESBAMA art school and the Hôtel des Collections. In 2022, he funded Radicants, a curatorial cooperative producing exhibitions worldwide. As an independent curator, he was part of the curatorial team of Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennial and organized many international exhibitions including Traffic (Capc Bordeaux, 1996), Estratos (Murcia, Spain, 2008), Altermodern (Tate Britain, 2009), Wirikuta/Mexican time slip (Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2016), and, more recently, Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime (Venice, 2022). He has also curated several biennials including Lyon (2005), Moscou (2005 and 2007 with Rosa Martinez, Daniel Birnbaum, Joseph Backstein, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Iara Boubnova), Athens (2011), Taipei (2014), Kaunas, Lithuania (2015), Istanbul (2019), and Gwangju (2024). As a theoretician, he has published Relational Aesthetics (1998), which has been translated in more than 15 languages, Postproduction (2002), Radicant. Towards an aesthetics of globalization (2009), The Exform (2015), Inclusions. Aesthetics of the capitalocene (2020) and Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime (2022).
Gaëlle Choisne’s practice considers the complexity of the world, its political and cultural disorder, whether it be the over-exploitation of nature, its resources, or the vestiges of colonial history, where Creole esoteric traditions, myths and popular cultures mingle. Her projects are conceived as ecosystems of sharing and collaboration, pockets of «resistance» where new possibilities are created, notably with the “Temple of Love” project. Initiated from Roland Barthes’ original essay on love, “Fragments d’un discours amoureux” (1977), Gaëlle Choisne adds a political dimension to the concept of love by paying homage to invisible bodies, minority and fragile souls, and dispossessed hearts. The works/installations of Gaëlle Choisne have been exhibited in many institutions: Centrale Powerhouse (Montréal), CAFA Museum (Beijing), Pera Museum (Istanbul), MAM – Musée d’art moderne de Paris, Musée Fabre (Montpellier), Zacheta Gallery (Warsaw), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Bétonsalon (Paris), Gr-und project space (Berlin), MAMO – Centre d’art de la Cité radieuse de Marseille, La Villette x Pompidou (Paris), etc. She has also participated in several biennials and triennials: 15th Gwangju Biennial (2024), 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), 5th New Museum Triennial (2021), 11th International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA), 13th International Biennial of Lyon (2015), 12th Havana Biennial (2015), Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017) and 14th Curitiba Biennial (2017). In 2024, Gaëlle Choisne won the Marcel Duchamp Prize and, in 2021, the AWARE Prize.
Mathieu Copeland has been developing a curatorial practice that seeks to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and renew our perceptions of them. Copeland notably co-curated VOIDS. A Retrospective (Centre Pompidou and Kunsthalle Bern, 2009) and co-edited the anthology VOIDS (JRP Ringier, 2009). He curated, among many others, the exhibition of a film (2015) an exhibition as a feature film; A Retrospective of closed exhibitions (2016); and A Staged Exhibition (2021), the retrospectives on Alan Vega and Gustav Metzger (MAC Lyon, respectively 2009 and 2013); Phill Niblock and Robert Barry (Circuit Lausanne, respectively 2013 and 2022). Dr Copeland is Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University School of Arts. Copeland edited over twenty-five books, notably Philippe Decrauzat – Delay (Koenig, 2022), Gustav Metzger: Writings (1953-2016) (JRP, 2019), The Anti-Museum (Koenig, 2017), and Choreographing Exhibitions (Les presses du réel, 2013). His forthcoming publication, the first all-encompassing monograph Robert Barry, The Defining of It…, comes out in October (Koenig, 2025).
Mareike Dittmer is a writer, curator and lecturer engaging in projects and practices in transdisciplinary alliances. She is co-chair of the Futurological Congress 2015-2030 (with Julieta Aranda) that convened last in November 2024 in Zurich, discussing and practicing futures of care. Since 2024, she is curator of the writers’ residency programme Temporars Susch at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland. Since 2019, she is teaching at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in the BA Fine Arts program. After finishing her graduate studies at Universität der Künste Berlin in 1998, Mareike has conceived and published an array of programs, built multifaceted capacities for strategic approaches and led collaborations for publications and organisations, namely as director of public engagement of TBA21–Academy and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary (2020-2024), as director of Art Stations Foundation CH (2018-2020) and chair of Disputaziuns Susch (2017-2019), and as associate publisher of frieze magazine (until 2017) and co-publisher of frieze d/e magazine (2011 – 2015). She is the editor, among others, of Anda Rottenberg’s From Poland with Love: Letters to Harald Szeemann (Muzeum Susch / Scheidegger & Spiess, 2019) and, since 2011, she is part of the editorial team of the interview magazine Mono.Kultur. She lives and works in Zurich and Engadin, Switzerland.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger PhD, one of the major international female artists of her generation, is a prominent philosopher, psychoanalyst, theorist and writer, and the Marcel Duchamp Chair and Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis, EGS, Saas-Fee, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at GCAS. Bracha is the creator of the Matrixial Theory that she started to develop around 40 years ago and presented in many articles since 1990. Her books include The Matrixial Gaze, The Matrixial Borderspace, and Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics (edited by G. Pollock) where she developed her original concepts like copoiesis, fascinance, carriance, subreality, transjectivity, transubjectivity and wit(h)nessing, dealing with trans-generational and personal trauma, memory, healing, consciousness and the Unconscious, painting and artworking between ethics and aesthetics. Bracha’s art has been shown in major museums around the world including the Drawing Center in NY, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museums of Modern Art in Oxford, Helsinki, Warsaw, Torino and more. She participated in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (2018) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial in Turkey (2015). Her recent solo shows include Pompidou Centre, Paris (2024) and Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2022-2023). Her present shows include Dans le Flou, L’Orangerie Museum, Paris; Copyists, Centre Pompidou-Metz with Musée de Louvre in France; and a solo exhibition at K21 Museum, Dusseldorf.
Claire Fontaine was created in 2004 in Paris by James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale as a space of desubjectivization, where their biographies would not be an obstacle and visual and conceptual thinking could be open to new possibilities. In a time of extreme control and repression, of targeted advertising and algorithm, Claire Fontaine was conceived as a possibility for thinking impersonally about our inescapable contradictions, being both lucid and visionary without being limited by socio-economic, gender related and racial circumstances, but regarding them as a starting point for seeing more clearly our current limitations. In the 60th Venice Biennale, Claire Fontaine has been present in the main exhibition with a large installation of 60 neons from the series Foreigners Everywhere in the Gaggiandre and two Self-Portrait Foreigners Everywhere Stranieri Ovunque in the Giardini and in the Corderie. She is also amongst the artists selected in the exhibition With Your Eyes in Vatican Pavilion Holy See. Recent solo shows include: Foreigners Everywhere (Metropolitan Indians), Italian Institute, Kiran Nadar Museum of the Arts, Aga Khan Foundation, New Delhi, 2025; Tra cielo e terra, Museo Riso, Palermo, 2024; Beauty is a Ready-Made, Fondation Hermès, Seoul, 2024; Star Reply Forward Copy Info Delete, Memphis, Linz, 2022; Siamo con voi nella notte, Museo del 900, Firenze, 2020; I-WE-YES, Studio Concreto, Lecce, 2020; Your Money and Your Life, Galerias Municipais, Lisbona, 2019; La Borsa e la vita, Palazzo Ducale, Genova, 2019; and Les printemps seront silencieux, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, 2019.
Sozita Goudouna is a distinguished professor and curator based in New York City. In recognition of her impactful work, she was honored with the British Council Culture and Creativity UK Study Award in 2022. With over two decades of experience in the arts, Dr. Goudouna has held influential positions such as Director at Raymond Pettibon Studio in 2019 to curate a production for the Performa Biennial at the New Museum. Her career has been marked by prestigious appointments including her selection by RoseLee Goldberg in 2015 as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curator at the Performa Biennial and as a post-doctoral Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at New York University. Her curatorial projects have been presented at prestigious institutions including Documenta 14, Onassis Foundation New York, French Consulate in NYC, EMST Contemporary Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dr. Goudouna is the author of Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism/Oxford University Press) and the co-authored book Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance (Punctum Books). As a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, she pioneered the MA in Breath Studies, exploring the role of breath in the performing and visual arts. Her scholarly work extends to contributions in the Routledge Critical Studies on Breath and editorial roles for the Performance Research Journal, including the forthcoming issues “On Breath” and “On Iconologies,” as well as co-editing the issue “On The Mundane.” In 2022, she founded the non-profit Opening Gallery in TriBeca in New York.
Jörg Heiser is Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, and the Director of the Institute for Art in Context, at the University for the Arts, Berlin. He was an editor at frieze magazine from 1998 to 2018. He continues to write criticism for e-flux and Republik.ch. His books include All of a Sudden. Things That Matter in Contemporary Art (2008), Double Lives in Art and Pop Music (2019, both with Sternberg/MIT), and (as co-editor) Public Art. The Right To Remember and the Reality of Cities (2024, Distanz). Amongst numerous exhibitions, Heiser curated Romantic Conceptualism (Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany, and Bawag Foundation Vienna, Austria, 2007, catalogue), and he was co-curator, with Cristina Ricupero and Gahee Park, of the Busan Biennale 2018, South Korea (catalogue). Also together with Ricupero, he curated Ridiculously Yours! Art, Awkwardness and Enthusiasm (2022-24, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany, further stops Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Neue Galerie/Halle für Kunst, Graz, Austria).
Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. She is the author of Post-Work: What It Is, Why It Matters and How We Get There (Bloomsbury, 2025, with Will Stronge); After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023, with Nick Srnicek), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014).
Ingrid Luquet-Gad is an art critic, researcher and lecturer based in Paris. She is currently a doctoral candidate in art history and media theory at UNIL – Université de Lausanne, where she is working on a collectivist history of post-internet art. She was in charge of the arts section of Les Inrockuptibles and has been a regular contributor to Artforum, Cura, Flash Art International, and Spike Art Magazine. She writes about artists who are emerging, overlooked, or maybe just cautious about the current canon for exhibition catalogues and artist books. She teaches at ÉCAL/École cantonale d’art de Lausanne.
Warren Neidich is a text-based artist trained in fine art, architecture, and medicine whose work has been exhibited internationally including the Whitney Museum of Art, MOMA PS1 as well as the Venice Biennial. Recent awards include the Getty Research Institute Award, Hauptstadtkulturfond and Stiftung Kunstfond Neustart Kulture prizes in 2020. He is the founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2015-. He is editor of the three-volume collection the Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (2013, 2014, and 2017). The fourth edition of Neidich’s Glossary of Cognitive Activism was recently published by Eris Press, Athens.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (كاميلا جنان رشيد) “complete (K-M-L/ كاميلا) – hidden/obscured (J-N-N/ جنان) – rightly guided (R-SH-D/ رشيد)” is a learner and seeker from East Palo Alto, CA. A language and text-based artist, she is most curious about the life cycles – the life, death, afterlives, and hauntings – of Black knowledge production as expressed through physical spaces, spiritual beliefs, and written (marked) materials. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; 2022 Creative Capital Award; 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists’ books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); among others. Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. She is a full-time instructor at the Yale School of Art in the Sculpture Department.
Gregory Sholette is a New York City-based artist, author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010), educator, activist and co-founder of REPOhistory, Gulf Labor, and curator of Imaginary Archive, documenting a past whose future never arrived. Recent books include The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (2021) and Time Against Itself: Art and Politics in the Age of the Unpresent (forthcoming). Together with Chloë Bass and Catherine La Sota, Professor Sholette co-directs the Mellon Foundation funded initiative Social Practice City University of New York (SPCUNY) at the CUNY Graduate Center where he is affiliated doctoral faculty. A recent interview on Zerodeux: https://www.zerodeux.fr/en/guests-en/gregory-sholette-2/
Yann Toma is a French artist with a conceptual approach who lives and works in Paris and New York, an artist-observer at the UN, an academic researcher at the Sorbonne, and the president of Ouest-Lumière. By recovering materials from the former Ouest-Lumière electricity company in the early 1990s, he appropriated a symbolic network and an industrial infrastructure, which he made the essence of his research territory and the foundation of his artistic practice. His work intersects energy, networks, and ethics. As an artist, his projects experiment with redistributing Artistic Energy (AE) between the artist and the public, often yielding works that are generally community-based and participatory. He has been a Global Visiting Artist at the Maison Française at New York University since 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include Transmission Council, Primeo Energy, Basel (2025), A Light-World, Paris-Reykjavik-New York (2024-2025), Planet Energy Saatchi Gallery, London (2023), Capitalocene, Leroy Neiman Gallery, New York (2019), Human Greenergy, Bejin (2016), Human Energy, Cop21/Eiffel Tower, Paris (2015), Dynamo-Fukushima, Grand Palais, Paris (2011). He’s also a Tenured professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he directs the research of PhD students in the arts. Additionally, he leads
Sarah Wilson is a Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary art at The Courtauld, University of London. Publications include The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (2010, French 2019) and Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (2013). She curated Paris, Capital of the Arts (London, Bilbao 2002) and Pierre Klossowski (London 2006 + Cologne and Paris), and co-curated the 5th Guangzhou Triennial (China 2015). She is specialised in postwar European art including post-Communist countries and Russia, and set up the Courtauld Global Conceptualism MA in 2010 (with Boris Groys) which has produced much international original research. She has published over thirty lesser-known women artists. Appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1997, she received the AICA International Award for distinguished contributions to art criticism in 2015. See: www.sarah-wilson.london
Program Overview
Program Schedule
Public Lectures
Faculty Bios
Team