BASEL ABBAS and RUANNE ABOU-RAHME, both born in 1983, live and work together in New York. Through sound, image, text, installation and performance they deal with the themes of spatial politics, desire, subjectivity, catastrophes and the absurdity of today's power politics. They examine the spatio-temporal resonances in relation to the real, the imagined and the remembered. In interdisciplinary installations and audio-visual live performances they explore the possibilities of experience of sound, image and environment. They usually present their works as large-format installations, which they often transfer into performances and sometimes publish online. Their works are exhibited and performed internationally. Recently they founded the performance collective Tashweesh in Ramallah together with the local artist boikutt. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme were scholarship holders at the Academy of Arts of the World from December 2012 to August 2013.

(2014)

RUANNE ABOU-RAHME and BASEL ABBAS, both born in 1983, live and work together in New York. Through sound, image, text, installation, and performance, they explore the themes of spatial politics, desire, subjectivity, catastrophe, and the absurdity of contemporary power politics. They investigate space-time resonances in relation to the real, the imagined, and the remembered. In interdisciplinary installations and audio-visual live performances, they explore the experiential possibilities of sound, images and environment. They present their work mostly as large-scale installations, which they often transfer into performances and sometimes publish online. Their works are exhibited and performed internationally. Recently they founded the performance collective Tashweesh in Ramallah together with local artist boikutt. In 2012-2013, Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas were Fellows of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).
(2014)

For me, all things are connected: from the atomic level to larger social structures. I am fascinated by the fact that even small interventions can change something to form new sustainable support systems. Most, if not all, of my practice derive from rhythms and systems. It depends on the context how I engage with those systems, from preserving to initiating, intervening, supporting, negotiating, hacking, questioning, etc. The closest I may come is to say that my practice is trans-disciplinary and exists on the intersection of sound/music, DIY engineering, research, biohacking, activism and more. It is formulated into installations, videos, audio, gigs, happenings, events, or anything.
As an artist, I always consider how I can function within my surrounding realities. It also made it easier for me to move between systems, therefore I am afforded with the chance to choose what, when and how I contribute. The question is always: How can I put that luxury to use? The broader question is how to best engage with systems? I would like to be able to look at things up close and from afar, from the personal and micropolitics to the universal language of art (if such a thing exists). To be an astronaut and astronomer at the same time.

(2020)

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN is an artist exploring sound and its intersection with politics. Recent solo exhibitions include Earshot at Portikus in Frankfurt, which was accorded the Nam June Paik Award 2016, and Taqiyya at Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen. His works have been shown at the Shanghai Biennial, MACBA Barcelona, Tate Modern London, Beirut Art Center and the Taipei Biennial. He currently lives in Beirut.

(2016)

BINI ADAMCZAK works as a writer and an artist. In her work she focuses on the intersections between capitalism and gender, desire and material conditions, and the past and future of revolutions. She coined the term ‘circlusion’ and has published in English the books Communism for Kids (2017) and Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future (2021). Adamczak lives in Berlin.

(2020)

ADWOA ADJEI, social worker and social pedagogue, works in the refugee counseling of the Diakonie Düsseldorf. In 2019, she founded the association Friendship e.V., which works for the integration and visibility of people of African origin in Düsseldorf. In 2020, Friendship e.V. received a special prize at the 6th Integration Award of the City of Düsseldorf.

(2020)

PÁVEL AGUILAR (*1989 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. His work combines ethnographic methods of research through oral history, focusing on the symbiotic relationships between territory and the human body through sound and music. Among of his projects have been shown at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (upcoming); Kunsthalle Basel; Kunsthaus Baselland; Kunsthalle Zürich; Kadist San Francisco; Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA; World Art Tokyo; Chroma - 58th Biennale di Venezia. He was a resident artist at FLORA ars+natura in 2018, among others.

In 2020, Aguilar got the Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt in Basel; was nominated for the Swiss Performance Art Award in 2021, and finalist for Contemporary Talents at François Schneider Foundation (FR) in 2022.

(2022)

HAIG AIVAZIAN (* 1980, Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist, curator and writer. Using performance, video, drawing, installation and sculpture, his work weaves together personal and geo-political, micro and macro narratives in its search for ideological loopholes and short circuits. Aivazian holds an MFA from Northwestern University and is a Skowhegan alumnus (2011).

(2014)

DOGAN AKHANLI

Singer and songwriter LEILA AKINYI merges rap, soul, and Afrobeat in her music. In 2016, she released her first EP, Afro Spartana, which has found great success. Her second album, Morgenkämpfer, followed in 2017. That year, she was also nominated for the popNRW prize in the Newcomer category. Leila Akinyi lives in Cologne.

(2018)

Filmmaker JOHN AKOMFRAH (* 1957 in Accra, Ghana) made his mark in 1982 as co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective in London. For his debut film Handsworth Songs (1986), he received the Grierson Award for best documentary film. Numerous works have followed, including The Unfinished Conversation (2013) and Vertigo Sea (2015). The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Britain in London dedicated solo exhibitions to him in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Akomfrah lives and works in London.

(2018)

Al-Qaisi Jasmina is a poet.

(2024)

ALAINGO (Bi Zia Alain Irie) began dancing as a child and today specialises in the combination of coupé décalé movements with hip hop and various Afrobeats. He has performed with the Afropop star Debordeaux Leekunfa as well as with Ordinateur, among others. He is a member of La Fleur.

(2019)

SHAHIDUL ALAM (* 1955 in Dhaka) is a photographer, author, curator, and activist. His photographic work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Royal Albert Hall and the Tate Modern, both in London, among others. He has been a guest speaker at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, and has chaired the jury of the World Press Photo contest. Alam is a visiting professor at Sunderland University in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board of the National Geographic Society.

(2018)

The Nigerien film director The Nigerien film director MOUSTAPHA ALASSANE (1942–2015) is considered a pioneer of African cinema and became well known especially for his satirical animations and feature films which were produced in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 2007 Cannes Film Festival Alassane was made Knight of the Legion of Honour. In 2017 the MoMA honored him with a retrospective.

(2017)

YURI ALBERT (* 1959 in Moscow, Russia) is one of the most known representatives of the Moscow conceptualist circle. In his extremely diverse artistic practice, he examines the relation of contemporary art to art history and the role of the artist, authorship, and spectatorship. Albert lives and works in Moscow and Cologne.

(2017)

Salwa Aleryani is a visual artist who works mainly with sculpture and installation. Through a constellation of found and made objects, her work engages with sites and infrastructures, their histories, potentials, and promises, as well as their resistance.

She graduated with a MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design, US and holds a BA in graphic design from the University of Petra, Ammam. From 2020 to 2021, she was a Graduate School Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences at the UdK in Berlin. Currently she lives and works in Berlin.

(2024)

TARIQ ALI is a writer, historian and filmmaker. Ali counts as one of the most important voices of the European Left. A founding co-editor of the New Left Review, Ali contributes regularly to The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He has been a consistent critic of US dominance in the Middle and Near East in his books Bush in Babylon (2003) and The Obama Syndrome (2010). Most recently, his book The Extreme Centre: A Warning (2015) criticizes the political elite in the UK for its devotion to an increasingly radical neoliberal capitalism. During the United Kingdom’s European Union membership referendum, 2016, Ali was one of the few figures on the left to support Britain leaving the European Union. He lives and works in London.

(2015)

BACHTYAR ALI is a novelist, poet and essayist. He is one of the best-known authors and poets of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. His first poetry collection Gunah w Karnaval was published in 1992. In 2009, he was awarded the HARDI literature prize at the largest cultural festival in the Kurdish part of Iraq. In 2014, he received the Sherko Bekas literature prize.

(2016)

AFRODEUTSCHE (aka Henrietta Smith-Rolla), is a Ghanaian-Russian-German producer, singer and DJ from Manchester. Her DJ-sets are shimmering light and demanding rhythm, mixing dark bouncing House, Drexciyan delights and tough UK techno mainstays like Claro Intelecto and Randomer. She holds a monthly radio show on the reputable NTS, featuring her own productions, ranging from dark electro to breaks and jacking house.

(2019)

FABIEN ALMAKIEWICZ studied dance at the European Dance Development Center (EDDC) in Arnheim and fine arts in Marseille. He has worked with the Skalen Collectiv in Marseille and, since 2012, with the choreographer Christian Rizzo. Since 2000 he has worked with Serge Ricci as a co-choreographer and designer. Besides dancing he works as a choreographic assistant and stage designer.

(2021)

DANIELLE ALMEIDA is a singer and anti-racist activist. She has a master’s degree in educational sciences and bachelor’s degree in music (singing). Almeida specializes in the history of Africa and the African diaspora in Latin America. Since 2002, she has been working on anti-racist education, decolonial studies and Afrodiasporic aesthetics. Danielle Almeida has received several awards and recognitions for her work as a researcher, singer and educator.

(2022)

MARIA THEREZA ALVES is an installation artist based in Berlin. Her installation The Return of a Lake (2012), which deals with the cultural, ecological and political history of Chalco, a municipality near Mexico City, was part of documenta 13. Another project, Seeds of Change (2012–2016), examines the exotic vegetation of port cities like Bristol and Liverpool as well as their roots in overseas trade.

(2018)

DOA ALY (b. 1974) is an artist who works across various media. Her research-based projects unfold through the deconstruction, reinterpretation and re-appropriation of various sources, drawn from literature, history, anatomy and movement. Aly has a long history of working with relics of antiquity and has reinterpreted texts and objects through choreography, sculpture, drawing and text collages, owing to her interest and involvement in archaeological processes of excavation and recovery. She currently lives and works in Cairo.

(2024)

AMEL ALZAKOUT is an artist and filmmaker. For her documentary film Purple Sea, realised in collaboration with Khaled Abdelwahed, she was awarded the Robert Bosch Foundation’s Film Prize for International Cooperation Germany/Arab World.

(2019)

FEBEN AMARA is a scholar of art and cultural studies and works across media and disciplines at the interfaces of text production, mediation and artistic intervention. She was a member of the Chorus, the art education program of documenta 14 (2017) and worked as editor of the Project Space Festival *When the Hunger Starts *(2019). In 2020 she joined the Fasia Jansen Ensemble as a performer. In her academic research she investigates artistic-cultural productions as part of transnational practices of resistance and organization. Her current focus is on decolonization, migration, anti-racism and the aesthetics of the political.

(2020)

PHENO AMBRO’s (Amed Bolalé Saliou Babatoundé) musical repertoire spans Afrobeats, ndombolo, coupé décalé and R&B. He sees his music as a new, modern African sound. His breakthrough came in 2015 with the internationally acclaimed song Alimé. Most recently Pheno Ambro has toured in Africa and played shows in Germany and the United States.

(2019)

HEBA Y. AMIN focuses on the convergence of politics, technology and architecture in her research-based artistic and scholarly work. She is co-founder of the Black Athena Collective and has taken part in group exhibitions including at the Dak’Art Biennale 2016, the Museums for Modern Art Warsaw and the 49th Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition. In 2017 Heba Y. Amin realized her research and exhibition project The Devil’s Garden with financial support from the Academy of the Arts of the World and Interkultur Ruhr.

(2019)

NORA AMIN is a woman of letters as well as a dancer and director. After completing her studies of French and comparative literature, she worked as an assistant at the Academy of Arts in Cairo. She also founded the performance group La Musica, initiated a theater festival and is a founding member of the Modern Dance Company at the Cairo Opera House. In 2004 she held the Samuel Fischer Guest Professorship at the FU Berlin. She was a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World in 2015. She is the author of several dramas, short stories and novels. Her latest publication is her essay Migrating the Feminine (60pages, MiCT, 2016), which deals with the role of the female body in public space, exemplified through the violent incidents in Tahrir square.

(2016)

NORA AMIN studied French and comparative literature and has worked Nora Amin lives and works in Cairo. She is a writer, performer, choreographer and theatre director and has worked as a teacher at the Academy of the Arts in Cairo for nine years. She started her professional stage career as a professional dancer and a founding member at the Modern Dance Company of the Cairo Opera House (1993/94). After that Amin moved to work as an actress in lead roles at the Hanager Arts Center till 2002. In 2000 she founded the independent theater group Lamusica and was the artistic director of the first international independent arts festival Jadayel in 2002.
She published three novels, four collections of short stories, an audio book, and translated 15 books on theatre and dance. Amin is the author of the first Arabic book on theatre and human rights Egyptian Theatre and Human Rights: the art of claiming our right under the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, 2003, and instructed the first storytelling workshop for women victims of the civil war in Sudan in cooperation with SIHA network. She is the author of Theatre for change: from the internal to the external, 2007.
One of her recent projects is The National Project for Theatre of the Oppressed where she trains units of Forum theatre activists all over Egypt. The team has now reached 500 activists in 30 cities and developed an Arab network of groups in Morocco and Lebanon. In 2014 she celebrated the 15th anniversary of her company Lamusica Independent Theatre Group ,where she directed 35 theatre, dance and music productions, by presenting a year long program of workshops and of ten restaged repertory productions with a grant from The Prince Claus Fund.
Amin was awarded with, among others, the UNESCO-Aschberg Laureat for the Center of the "Theater Of The Oppressed" in Rio De Janeiro (2003), the Samuel Fischer Guest Professorship for Literature, Germany (2004/05) and the Ibsen Scholarship, Norway (2009), and was announced by the British Council as the international young cultural leader of Egypt in the performing arts 2009/10.
In 2013 The National Festival Of Egyptian Theatre awarded her the prize of the best dramaturgy for her production An Enemy Of The People which was largely considered as the most popular theatre production in Egypt during political transformation.

Nora Amin was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) from June to August 2015.

Muhammad Amin, researcher, film programmer, and cultural practitioner based in Egypt, with a practice anchored in the critical study of cinema, ethnic music, and contemporary cultural and urban phenomena. His work encompasses curating film programs, seminars, and cross-disciplinary educational initiatives. His curatorial and research practice explores the intersection of contemporary image culture and global motion picture production, with a particular emphasis on the economic and cultural structures of the Global South. In this context, he has curated programs such as We may construct the world, but we cannot imagine it, which critically engages with the dialectics of development and underdevelopment in cinema, We carry in our worlds that flourish, our worlds that have failed, a homage to Ousmane Sembene, and the Beyond the Borders Forum, which challenges traditional boundaries between image-making mediums, exploring access, exhibition frameworks, and tools of reflection.

ULF AMINDE is a Berlin based artist. Drawing on cinematic, performative and documentary strategies his works critically confront questions of authority and representation, which frequently arise in collaborations in places and with people usually disconnected from the arts. What all his works have in common is unrestricted solidarization with the participants of his projects. In addition, he is active in the field of education with his current research focusing on the future potential of art academies. Beyond that, he is involved in various self-organized artists’ associations where he works on the solidarization potential within the art world. At the moment, he is developing the format foundationClass in Berlin which is supposed to enable refugees to apply at German art academies. To memorialize the victims and those affected by the racist terror attacks perpetrated by the NSU network on Probsteigasse (2001) and Keupstrasse (2004) in Cologne, he is developing the film and participatory project *Mahnmal Keupstraße.

(2019)

The expression ‘Anatolpolitan’ is inspired by Achille Mbembe’s term ‘Afropolitan’. With ‘Anatolpolitan’ Nesrin Tanç outlines a new perspective on questions that deal with the cultural location of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants. Motivated by the question of which narrative and normative structures immigrants from Turkey living in the Ruhr region and their descendants can draw on in the scope of a common cultural history between Turkey and Germany, a transnational perspective on the narrated space of memory is adopted. ‘Anatolpolitan’ examines the question of which spaces for action and negotiation exist for historical or fictional narrative as descendants of immigrants from Turkey.

(2020)

NATHALIE ANGUEZOMO MBA BIKORO merges installations, sonic radio, live art performances, film & archives. Her work analyses processes of power & fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles. She creates environments for untold narratives of resistance movements by African women and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives aretestimonies of sonic nature archives, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments, reacting to the different tones of societies shared betweendelusions & ritual. She brings new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records. She is the recipient of several awards including Fondation Blachère & Afrique Soleil Mali for Best Artist Dakar Biennale (2012), IASPIS Swedish Arts Council (2018), Arts Council England (2016), Goethe Institut (2018) and many more.

(2020)

ANOTHER ROADMAP FOR ARTS EDUCATION AFRICA CLUSTER (ARAC) is a global network that emerged out of a research project on the history of arts education. Initiated at the Institute for Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), today the cooperative involves educators, artists, and researchers working across four different continents. In the past five years, ARAC has organized international symposiums consisting of internal working sessions alongside public workshops, exhibitions, evening programs, live music, performance, site visits, and film screenings. The activities take place in various cities across Africa and beyond—convened by working groups of Another Roadmap in Johannesburg, Kampala, Lubumbashi, Lesotho, and Cairo, among other places, and include members of Keleketla! Library, Keep the Dream Arts, Wits School of Arts as well as local, independent cultural workers.

(2020)

VINCENZO ANTONA operates Autotrasporti Internazionali Italia – Germania, an import and export company that transports goods between Germany and Italy/Sicily for the Italian community in Germany and their relatives in Italy.

(2019)

ARJUN APPADURAI is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers (Duke 2006) and Modernity at Large (University of Minnesota Press 1996). Appadurai’s latest book, The Future as a Cultural Fact, was published by Verso in 2013.

(2015)

BRAZZAVILLE ARAGÃO is an ogan (ritual assistant). Percussionist, educator and merchant, he is a member of Ylê Asè Egi Omim, the Cultural Center of Afro-Brazilian Traditions. As a musician, he is part of Banda Love.

(2021)

WANDA ARAÚJO is a yalorixá (priestess) who guards the Ylê Asè Egi Omim temple. Black woman, anti-racism activist, educator and journalist, she coordinates Ylê Asè Egi Omim, the Cultural Center of Afro-Brazilian Traditions.

(2021)

SWOODING ARCHITECTS, based in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, are a team of architects and urban designers with strong technical resources and an avant-garde original concept. The team seeks to incorporate their understanding of future urban landmarks into their projects, which they consider to be the foundation of a better city life.

(2019)

YENNU ARIENDRA is a music composer, producer, DJ, and digital artist born in Banyuwangi, East Java, Indonesia. Also known as Y-DRA and as one half of Raja Kirik, much of Ariendra's work considers the shifting roles of tradition and history in Java. Yennu is currently working as part of art collective Teater Garasi / Garasi Performance Institute, the rock band Melancholic Bitch, music label Trauma Rhythm Record, WYST sound laboratory, and puppet theater group Papermoon Puppet Theater. Y-DRA’s 2019 No-Brain Dance album channels koplo’s rhythmic elements to create individual and collective spaces for resistance. It was released with an accompanying video series which responds to the spontaneous movement of the body unique to the koplo style and culture.

(2024)

ANNE ARNDT creates installations integrating photographs, sculptures, and moving images. In her works, she analyzes political concepts and their relation to architecture and society. She approaches her topics through a multilayered process and includes the beholder in a, at times, physical way. Anne Arndt lives and works in Cologne.

(2017)

INKE ARNS, PhD, is director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany. She has worked internationally as an independent curator and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She has curated many exhibitions – at the bauhaus dessau, MG+MSUM Ljubljana, Gallery EXIT Pejë, KW Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MMOMA Moscow a.o. She is the author of many articles on contemporary art, media art and net culture, and has edited numerous exhibition catalogues and books. In 2021–2022 she is Visiting Professor at the Münster Art Academy. 2022 she is curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri), 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

AIMAR ARRIOLA works as a curator, editor and researcher. He holds a PhD from the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was the inaugural Associate Researcher (2020-2023) at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao.

(2023)

JOÃO CARLOS ARTIGOS is a hacker clown and studied performing arts at Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). Between 1996 and 2018, he coordinated one of the largest clown meetings in the world: Anjos do Picadeiro. He is a founding member of the Red Latinoamericana de la Risa and one of the co-creators of the Muda Outras Economias network.

(2021)

A multilingual street journal on poverty and wealth, art and society: Arts of the Working Class is published every two months and contains contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and in different languages. It addresses the working class, meaning everyone, and it reports on everything that belongs to everyone. Everyone who sells this street journal earns money directly. Street vendors keep 100% of the sales. Every artist whose work is promoted in the journal, designs its substance with us. Arts of the Working Class was developed by Pauł Sochacki, María Inés Plaza Lazo and Alina Kolar, and is published for the streets of the world.

(2020)

The research areas of composer- performer MEIRA ASHER include Activist Social Documentary and the Amplification of the Human Body. When living in The Netherlands she was co-founder of the bodylab art foundation in The Hague (2001-2011). Currently she is a lecturer at Haifa University’s Art School, and curator-presenter of the independent Radio Art program radioart106 (KolHaCampus106fm 2014-2017, WGXC 2018 -, and Radia.fm affiliate).

Her recent works include “Voices vs. The Israeli Occupation of Palestine 2017” for Wurfsendung Deutchlandfunk Kultur, and the site-specific sound work “Still Sleeping” commissioned by EyeBeam (New York) for their Acoustic Infrastructure installations project.

(2020)

The artist KADER ATTIA (* 1970 in Dugny, France) grew up in both Algeria and the suburbs of Paris. At documenta 13 he showed his well-regarded installation The Repair.In 2016 he was awarded the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp and he, along with Zico Selloum, opened a new space for art and debate called La Colonie in Paris. Attia is a member of the Academy. He lives and works in Berlin and Algiers.

(2017)

ROCHUS AUST’s work as a composer and trumpet player is produced and performed in over 40 countries in premieres or unique performances. Important milestones of his work have most recently been the European Capitals of Cultural RUHR.2010 and Marseille Provence 2013, Space Odyssey in Kyiv 2011, /si:n/ festival in Ramallah 2013, and Highline in New York in 2015.

(2016)

YOCHAI AVRAHAMI lives and works in Tel Aviv. His art consists of installations, videos and sculptures. Since a few years he explores and questions the practices of exhibiting and presenting images in military collections of museums, memorials and visitor centers.

(2014)

DR. KAGONYA AWORI is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher. She has over 10 years experience in User Experience Research and Design having worked across the globe in countries including Kenya, United Kingdom, and Australia, with companies such as iHub Kenya, Microsoft Research, National Australia Bank and Safaricom PLC. She holds a dual Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), a Bachelors in Business Information Technology from Strathmore University (Kenya), and a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Melbourne, (Australia).

(2021)

PALOMA AYALA (b. 1980, Matamoros, Mexico) is a visual artist interested in empowering the relationship between domestic living strategies and political contexts. Her work takes the form of publications, videos, installations, reading/cooking sessions, and workshops that fictionalize historical, ecological or social problematics as means of analysis and critique. Paloma’s projects nourish visions of connection, dreams of emancipation and emphasize practices of care. Her favorite spaces to work range from kitchen to river shore, from international crossing bridge to agricultural land, from community meeting to aquelarre. Paloma’s work is rooted in her home, the eastern MX/US border landscapes, simultaneously blooming in her current base in Zurich.

(2022)

ELVIRA ESPEJO AYCA is an indigenous artist, cultural manager and researcher. Born in Qaqachaka (Abaroa province, Oruro, Bolivia), her practice is linked to textiles, oral tradition and poetry. She is director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF). 2020 she received the Goethe medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany for her work and commitment to cultural exchange. The importance of her work is linked to the dialogue between the practice and knowledge of indigenous communities and the intersection with academia, cultural management and museums. Her work vindicates the epistemologies and practices of native and peasant people.

(2022)

ANNE-SOPHIE AZIZÈ FLITTNER is an actress who performs at various German theaters. She also works as a director, writer, and translator. Since 2014 she moderates the audience discussions at the AfrikaFilmfestival Cologne.

(2018)

In his work artist YOUNES BABA-ALI (* 1986 in Oujda, Morocco) tackles issues of political identity and migration. Exploring new technologies and experimenting with sound, video, photography, and installation, his artistic practice can be described as eclectic. He lives in Brussels and Casablanca.

(2017)

Hanna Bächer works as a freelance curator of concerts, as an author and producer of audio pieces, and as an interviewer on topics between music and urban development. She is a trained sound technician and spent several years behind the mixing desks of live venues, studied musicology and geography, and now lives back in her hometown Cologne after seven years in London and Berlin.

(2023)

ALE BACHLECHNER is a performance and video artist and works in the city center studio in Cologne. She has a diploma in comparative literature and one from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her work includes the temporary dating agency Twelve Roses (2013) in Beirut, Lebanon, the performance coaching institute This Is Not A Competition (2016) and the online television format Studio Hallo (2018). Since 2018 she is a member of the Young Academy of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.

(2020)

ANTONINA BAEVER is an artist and curator based in Moscow. She participated in the video art festivals of Orebro, Cologne, Moscow and Melbourne and the Bergen Assembly 2013. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Socialism in a Dream (MUZEON Park of Arts, Moscow, 2014), Time Shall Be No More (CEH Manege, Moscow, 2014), Getting There Together (Triumph Gallery, Moscow, 2013). Her works can be found in museums and public collections such as the MMoMA and MUZEON Park of Arts, Documentary Film Center in Moscow.

In 2016 Antonia Baever was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

PAULA BAEZA PAILAMILLA has graduated from Universidad ARCIS in Pedagogy in Contemporary Dance and from the master’s degree in Art Theory and History at Universidad de Chile as a CONICYT scholarship holder. Since 2012, she has developed her performances based on her own Mapuche identity, being this the point of origin for her works, questioning herself and her context in its historical, political and social dimension. Her textile work has been produced from relational art projects. Since 2016, she has been part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü.

She has been a guest artist at various events, theaters and galleries in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia, Germany and Switzerland, where she has addressed issues related to the body, to racialized identities and their context. In 2020, she was a guest artist at the 11th Berlin Biennale in Germany. She won 1st place in the New Media category in the Young Art award given by the Municipality of Santiago in 2019, and 2nd place in 2018 in the competition granted by the Department of Native Peoples of the Ministry of Culture of Chile.

(2022)

JEEBESH BAGCHI, artist and curator, member of the Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi.

(2021)

STEFANIE BAILEY is a writer and editor. She is the global Editor-at-Large at Ocula Magazine and has been writing regularly for other publications and institutions, as well as programming the Art Basel Conversations & Salon program at Art Basel Hong Kong. She is interested in exploring the global artworld as a site for inter-cultural exchange.

(2024)

CLARA LOBREGAT BALAGUER (* 1980 in Manila, Philippines) is a Manila-based social practice artist and independent researcher interested in the decolonization of cultural production. She runs The Office of Culture and Design, an art and research platform, and has lectured at Walker Art Center, Strelka Moscow, and MoMA PS1, among others.

(2017)

MATTHIEU BAREYRE realized his first movie, Nocturnes, in 2012. This medium length documentary was selected in 2015 at the Festival du cinéma de Brive and awarded a prize at the Cinéma du Réel festival at the Centre Pompidou. He lives and works in Paris.

(2017)

JOHN BARKER (*1948 in London) is a writer, essayist, and performer who, since the 1970s, has been focused on economics, geopolitical dynamics, and the exploitation of labor. Since 2010, Barker has been collaborating regularly with the artist INES DOUJAK. Their work has been represented at various international venues.

(2017)

EVA BAROIS DE CAEVEL is an assistant curator at Raw Material Company, a center for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, and works as an independent curator. She has been working on academic research as well as on post-colonial questions and socially engaged practices in contemporary art. She collaborated with director Koyo Kouoh on several projects at WIELS, Brussels and at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in 2015. She is the co-founder of Cartel de Kunst, an international collective and solidarity network of emerging curators based in Paris.

(2016)

KATIA BARRETT is a London-based artist who is currently completing her master studies at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her current research and practice is concerned with the developments in interdisciplinary theoretical biology, where the subjectivization of nature corresponds with a naturalization of subjectivity. Referring to this as her theoretical platform, she explores questions of agency, reason, consciousness and will. Her recent shows include Young London at the V22 in London (2013) and Geology of Piss at xero, kline & coma in London (2012).
(2016)

In 2016 Katia Barrett was a Fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

GIUSEPPE BARTOLOTTA works for the Patronato ITAL-UIL welfare organization and chairs the committee for Italians abroad, Comitato degli italiani all'estero. He is also a member of the Italian cultural association Mondo Aperto/Offene Welt e.V. He dreams of retiring to Sicily, where he comes from, and loves to dance salsa.

(2019)

Dr. phil. Maan Barua is an environmental and urban geographer whose research focuses on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. It fosters new conversations between political economy, posthumanism and postcolonial thought, developed through four arenas of inquiry: urban ecologies, urban surrounds, biocapital and postcolonial environments. He is a lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

Prior to joining Cambridge, Maan was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford, where he also read for a DPhil and an MSc. In 2022, Maan was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his contributions to urban and environmental geography. At present, Maan’s focus is on the metabolism of cities. He is working on a short book on urban wetlands and the politics of carcerality provisionally titled An Amphibious Urbanism, drawing upon recent ethnographic work in Guwahati, northeast India.

www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/barua/
(2024)

WENDY BASHI is a Congolese filmmaker, journalist, and moderator. She moderated the fashion show at the presentation of the web series Kinshasa Collection at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and participates in Kizobazoba as a performer.

(2018)

Sound is a sensation that locates me in a physical environment. Through the act of conscious listening I position myself in space and time. I become aware of my physical body, myself and my surroundings. Although I have always heard and listened, I find it difficult to decode sound, which is perhaps why it appeals to me as a medium to work with. Sound encourages me to speculate, imagine, doubt and be curious; it makes me question what I thought I knew. In sound I have discovered a powerful tool to challenge assumptions about established hierarchies and power structures in the relationship between humans and nature and in the postcolonial context.
For the past two and a half years I have been working on Forest Scapes, a body of work that uses sound to explore the influence of colonialism on forest landscapes. In 2019 I co-established the sound archive SOUND OF NAIROBI (SON).

(2019)

UTE META BAUER is a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound that connect artistic work with other disciplines. Since 2013, she is Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and a professor in the School of Art, Design and Media. From 2012 to 2013, she served as Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, where she was the Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) (2009–2012) and Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program (2005–2009). In 2015, she co-curated with MIT List Center for Visual Art Director Paul Ha, presenting eminent artist Joan Jonas, the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale that received Honorary Mention for best National Pavilion by their International Jury.

At the NTU CCA Singapore, she curated and co-curated Allan Sekula: Fish Story, to be continued (2015), Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History (2017), The Oceanic (2017/2018), Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea (2018), Trees of Life: Knowledge in Material (2018), Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz (2018), Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public. Spaces for Democracy (2019) and most recently, The Posthuman City: Climates. Habitats. Environments (2019/2020).

Bauer was Artistic Director of the 3rd berlin biennale for contemporary art, Berlin (2004) and Co-Curator of documenta11, Kassel (2001-2002) with the late Okwui Enwezor as Artistic Director. Bauer has edited numerous publications in the field of contemporary art, most recently South East Asia. Spaces of the Curatorial (with Brigitte Oetker, Sternberg Press 2016), Thomas Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions (with Anca Rujoiu, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore 2017), Place.Labour.Capital (with Anca Rujoiu, Mousse Publishing 2018) and The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban) Asia (with Khim Ong and Roger Nelson, World Scientific 2020). Bauer serves as a member of various advisory boards, including International Boards of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, Bergen Assembly, Bergen and documenta commission, Kassel.


(2020)

NATALIE BAYER is director of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum in Berlin since 2018. She has been assistant at the Munich Citymuseum. When she worked as independent curator she contributed to exhibition projects like Crossing Munich. Orte, Bilder und Debatten der Migration (2009, Munich), Movements of Migration. Neue Perspektiven auf Migration in Göttingen (2013, Göttingen) and initiated multiple events by herself. She is member at kritnet - Netzwerk für kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung and active in committees and juries. Bayer studied european ethnology and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Currently, she's writing her dissertation Migration on Display. Eine wissensanthropologische Studie zum kulturpolitischen Migrationsdiskurs im Museum at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Her research and work focus are cities, politics of history, racism and history of migration.

(2018)

MARIANNE BECHHAUS-GERST is a professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne. Her researches include among others the history of people of African origins in Germany and German colonial history. Her latest publications in this field Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien (2009, ed. together with Mechthild Leutner) and Treu bis in den Tod (2007), were both published by Ch. Links Verlag. As a curator, she has supervised exhibitions on the colonial past of the cities of Cologne and Aachen as well as on the construction of Africa in our everyday culture. She is chairperson of the association KopfWelten, a local history project involved in memory work in Cologne.

(2018)

ANTONIA ALESSIA VIRGINIA BEESKOW (*1992) studied Archaeology at the University of Cologne and Applied Theater Studies at the Justus Liebig University Giessen from 2013 to 2022, as well as a Master's degree in Sound and Reality at the Institute for Music and Media Düssel-dorf in 2021. She is the recipient of the 2023 Förderpreis of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the field of music.

As an artist, sound designer and performer, Beeskow works in the independent scene, radio play, podcast, installation, experimental film and theater. In 2021, she won third place at Hörspiel festivals in Berlin and Cologne with her audio drama Noise. She founded the pandemic radio station Wilsonstrasse.FM and initiated the collective Sailor Tune in 2022, with which she presented the sound performance schrödinger's cats at the west off festival in 2022. She also shared the artistic practice that there then, not now here past with her colleagues Aran Kleebaur and Chiara Marcassa in the context of the festivals Implantieren: Beziehungsweisen 2022/23 and Politik im Freien Theater. Their Hörspiel Ecce Sigh! Siren calls, still I feel the same was commissioned for the Radiophrenia Festival Glasgow 2023 and premiered in cooperation with the Kunstradio of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation. She also writes for the fanzine grapefruits.online, among others.

(2024)

ALINE BENECKE addresses the constructions of cultural identity, questions of identity politics and the political relevance of the visual in her research and artistic work. She is interested in decolonial and postcolonial theories as well as queer and Black feminism. She perceives images as ‘material for thought’, flipping and twisting them to erode their inherent ideologies that pertain to historiography and the writing of history. Instead Aline generates with her works heterogeneous stories that resist linear and standardized narrations and subjectification, and which she sees as emancipatory stories and practices. Her current artistic research project will be realized as a series of workshops, installations, essays and performances based on the missing photos in her family’s photo albums, as part of an artistic doctorate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Aline examines the body as archive and researches forms of physical memory, especially with regard to diasporic everyday knowledge in dialogue with Tina Campt, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman, Premesh, Lalu, Okwui Okpokwasili, Diana Taylor, Eve Tuck and many others.

(2020)

SOLOMON BENJAMIN, urbanist; Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

(2021)

JONATHAN BERGER is an artist whose works encompass a spectrum of activity. Most recently, he presented the exhibition An Introduction to Nameless Love, which was co-organized by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University and Participant Inc NYC, exhibited at each venue in 2019 and 2020 respectively, and later selected for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. From 2013–2016, he served as Director of 80WSE Gallery at NYU, where he mounted a wide range of collaboratively produced exhibition projects presenting the work of Ellen Cantor, Bob Mizer, Printed Matter, James ‘Son Ford’ Thomas, among others. Berger’s work is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York and VEDA, Florence. He is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University. He lives and works in New York City and Glover, VT.

(2022)

MAREIKE BERNIEN is an artist and teacher working between experimental film, sound and text. In her practice-based PhD, which she completed in 2016 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, she investigated the material, historical and political dimensions of colour in film. Her latest films are Tiefenschärfe (Depth of field, 2017), co-created with Alex Gerbaulet, and Rainbow’s Gravity (2014), co-created with Kerstin Schroedinger. Her works have been featured at international festivals and in other artistic contexts, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Whitney Museum of American Art, Forum Expanded at the Berlinale, the short film festival in Oberhausen and Les Complices in Zurich.

(2019)

FLAVIA BERTON is a manager and cultural producer. Member of Teatro de Anônimo, Muda Outras Economias and Ylê Asè Egi Omim, the Cultural Center of Afro-Brazilian Traditions. She is a performing arts doctoral student at ECo UFRJ.

(2021)

VASTAVIKTA BHAGAT, artist and architect; faculty at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai.

(2021)

Since 1995 Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van Der Pol have worked in collaboration as BIK VAN DER POL. Working as a collective is a consciously political and artistic decision. With a radical step away from the studio as a place of production they make the artistic workplace itself – the practice – a format of research and production. Each project begins with the development of its parameters in which it presents itself as a performative platform and opens a dialogue within the context. The artistic engagement of Bik Van Der Pol addresses the collective public space. The artist duo explores how and in which way people have access to this space and are able to shape it. They investigate in what ways art can be an instrument or a place for the creation of forms of knowledge and how this relates to “publics”.

(2017)

CANA BILIR-MEIER is an author, curator and artist. She has worked as a schoolteacher and as an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She recently curated a program about experimental short films by Austrian women in Istanbul and developed a documentary film about censorship in art and cinema in Turkey since the 1980s. Currently she is a grantee of kültür gemma!, a project to promote city culture in Vienna as well as migrant art and cultural production. Her films have been shown at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and the Diagonale in Graz, among others. She lives and works in Vienna and Istanbul.

(2016)

KATHARINA BISCHOFF studied applied theater science and works as a director, dramaturge, and project and production manager. She is a founding member of the theater group bigNOTWENDIGKEIT. Since 2019, as part of the collective working alliance DAS BUCHPROJEKT, she had realized a variety of books with and for children and has organized readings, exhibitions and workshops.

(2020)

WALTRAUD BLISCHKE (* 1967) is an author, sound artist and producer. Since 2012, she is lecturer in writing / speaking about sound and acoustic research at the Institute for Music and Media at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf.

She writes for Spex, Stadtrevue, Testcard, Meakusma Magazin, St. Patrick's Zine Library and has collaborated with the Cologne labels a-Musik, Sonig and Baumusik, among others. In 2019, she created the composition Tracks United on behalf of the Düsseldorf Art Commission for the auditorium of the Heinrich-Heine-Allee subway station (curated by Ralf Brög) and collages in a DJ mix for the Meakusma Festival. In 2021 she presented the art and sound installation Trittschall at Ebertplatz Cologne. She has been working as an author for the pop anthology Testcard since 2011, most recently devoting herself to the phenomenon of eDigging.

(2024)

HANS BLOCK and MORITZ RIESEWIECK met at theater school in Berlin and founded the production label Laokoon. They work collaboratively in the sphere of theater, documentary, lecture performance, publication. Laokoon, the seer, was the only person who unmasked the Trojan Horse’s true nature: A dangerous fraud.

(2021)

JOHN BLUE is a composer and multi-instrumentalist born in Portland, Oregon, in 1970. Living in Berlin since 2007, he writes and performs music as a solo instrumentalist and in bands, as well as produces and records soundtracks for film, theater, dance and art installations.

(2020)

BOBWEAR (Abdoulaye Kone) is a fashion designer and performer. With his label Bobwear he has developed numerous fashion shows and collections in Hamburg and Abidjan. He designs and produces costumes for Schwabinggrad Ballett and other groups, including La Fleur and Gintersdorfer/Klaßen.

(2019)

MAI-ANH BOGER currently holds an interim professorship for 'Learning in Inclusive Schools' at Universität Paderborn. Her research focusses on educational philosophy and philosophy of Difference and Alterity.

(2019)

MANUELA BOJADŽIJEV has written key works on racism and migration research. For many years she has focused on the links between logistics and migration. She is Professor for Globalised Cultures at Leuphana University and Vice Director of the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research.

(2019)

CHRISTIAN VON BORRIES is an orchestra conductor, composer, filmmaker and producer of site-specific psychogeographic projects. His work was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival, the Kunstfest Weimar, the Volksbühne Berlin, the Kampnagel Hamburg and documenta 12, among others. Von Borries lives and works in Berlin.

(2016)

GISCARD BOUCHOTTE (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is an independent exhibition curator, critic, and social entrepreneur. In 2011, he curated the Haitian Republic's first Pavillion at the Venice Biennale with the exhibition Haiti Kingdom of This World (France, Italy, USA, Martinique, Haiti). His most recent projects include Périféériques, a travelling project exploring new artistic and social practicies in peri-urban spaces (Benin, Senegal, Haiti), and the Nuit blanche in Port-au-Prince, a plea for artists to be engaged in urban initiatives. His essays have appeared in Holland (Who More Sci-Fi Than Us? exhibit) and the US (Biennials and Art Practices in the Caribbean, Smithsonian). In Haiti, he develops workshops and has curated photographs by emerging artists in the Comoros Islands, and Guyana. He works with international public and private institutions in the Caribbean. Bouchotte has also produced and directed three films: Africa Left Bank (2006), Sarah's Dreamed Life, (2007) and Tap Tap Chéri (2017). He has assisted French filmmaker Claire Denis (and acted in her 2008 35 Rhums), and French filmmaker Charles Najman. Bouchotte was involved in the curation of the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in 2022.

(2023)

Davi BPLR is musician and DJ. He is two-third of In the Frame of Art, a vernissage and music event series from Cologne, and, together with Kevin BPLR, makes up the DJ duo BIPOLAR SOUNDSYSTEM, which debuted for the first time at the Feel Festival Germany last summer. Davi plays and mixes Afro and techno and house beats in new ways, it can't just be described as Afro Tech or Afro House but is something completely new.

To soundcloud profile

(2024)

MAXIMILIAN BRAUER is a born Berliner and then further born to be a magician. He works as an actor primarily for theater. He came into this world as a New Year’s Eve surprise in 1986.

(2020)

Julian Brimmers is an author, journalist, translator and filmmaker from Cologne. His texts on pop culture and literature have appeared in German and English in publications including Die Zeit/Zeit Online, The Paris Review, SPON, WDR and The Creative Independent. In 2020, his documentary debut We Almost Lost Bochum was released in cinemas, which he co-directed with Benjamin Westermann. He was the host of the first serial Spotify Originals podcast Trauma Loveparade, which was awarded the German Podcast Prize. Since 2023 he is also editor at the international music festival Le Guess Who? (Utrecht, NL).

(2024)

ANNA BROMLEY develops exhibitions, installations, performances, texts, radio conversations and plays. Her interest is aimed primarily at breaches and interruptions in/of representative ways of speaking and talking. She recently produced works for HKW Berlin, AgvA CIAT Berlin, MUU Helsinki, nGbK Berlin, documenta14 Radio, SAVVY Contemporary Berlin, Musrara Mix Jerusalem, Fondazione Arthur Cravan di Milano. Since 2010 she also conceives and produces curatorial formats – mainly in nonhierarchical collectives and collaborations – dealing with queer temporalities, self-ironic jokes, Central European ways of disciplining body and psyche, and ways to circumvent dominant techniques of the self. The anthologies Glossar inflationärer Begriffe (Glossary of Inflationary Terms, Berlin 2013, Mexiko City 2014) and Jokebook (Berlin 2015) arose from her curatorial research groups. Anna’s latest project is dedicated to radio practices in protest networks. She is a current Fellow at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

(2020)

AGNES BRÜHWILER, Swahili lecturer at the University of Cologne, Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, researches the relationship of language to gender and ideology as well as sociolinguistics and African literature.

(2018)

MAGDA BUCZEK is a Warsaw and Copenhagen-based multidisciplinary artist and the author of the collaborative platform SURPLUS. Her projects often involve texts, performance and artistic collaboration. Her works have been exhibited at Calvert 22 in London, WANTED Design in New York and SOMA in Mexico City, among other venues.

(2019)

BORIS BUDEN, PhD, is an author and publicist. He studied philosophy in Zagreb and cultural studies at the HU in Berlin. In the 1990s he was editor of the magazine Arkzin, Zagreb. His essays and articles encompass such topics as philosophy, politics, and cultural and art criticism. Among other titles he has translated into Croatian are two books by Sigmund Freud. Buden is the author of Der Schacht von Babel. Ist Kultur übersetzbar? (Berlin, 2004) and Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (Frankfurt/Main, 2009).

(2016)

EVA BUSCH studied anthropology and art. Her work is situated in the liminal spaces between science, mediation, art and activism. She is particularly interested in a queer feminist and postcolonial critique of power, differences and possible commonalities. In Bochum, Eva Busch, Julia Nitschke and other wonderful people run the atelier automatique, a workspace striving for solidarity among artists and an alternative art space supporting the local scene.

(2020)

YVAN HERVÉ BUTERA (he/they), is Rwandan-born and based in Kigali, Rwanda. He is an art, diversity, and inclusion consultant and facilitator. He is a mental health advocate, a curator, playwright, psychologist, and cultural event organizer, with one of the recent events being the first Kigali pride celebration in June 2022 in partnership with local activists and the support of the Goethe Institute. Butera founded the Kigali Pride Initiative and Kaze Film Festival, the first Queer Film Festival in Rwanda.

He serves as a Board member of the Rwanda Arts Initiative (RAI) and as a curator at the 250 Film Experiment Cine-club. In addition to working with other queer Rwandans, he has done activism work with Rwandan feminist organization Sistah Circle, gathering Rwandan LGBTQI+ communities and hosting safe discussions for queer Rwandans focusing on visibility, inclusivity, and mental health in Rwandan society. These series of events served as a tool to bring possible solutions to everyday challenges faced by the queer Rwandans in Rwanda and a safe space of experimental exchanges within the Rwandan queer community and He has been active in lobbying and institutional advocacy for Rwandan Queer Community and Rwandan Artists. He has worked at Ishyo Arts Centre as a playwrighter, logistics and production manager, and Festival Coordinator of Kuya Kwetu and Kina Festival; As well as an engaging and production coordinator at University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) and Hamwe Festival.

Butera holds a bachelor's degree in Cognitive Psychology and Psycholinguistics from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy and a Master's degree in the Psychology of Wellbeing and Social Inclusivity from the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy.

(2023)

ALYANA CABRAL a.k.a. t33g33 (she/they) is an interdisciplinary sound artist, and singer / producer / DJ from the Philippines. Her practice of queerifying sound is reflected in her ritualistic live performances, which are a futuristic ode to animism and pre-colonial spirituality. t33g33 is a co-organizer of queer safe spaces platform Elephant, and FLINTA-powered party Bliss. She is also a member of HERESY, an international platform which features women in sound and new media. She is currently a contributor for Dang A Dang Radio, which archives protest music from the Philippines. t33g33 has performed in art events, festivals, and venues in the U.S., Germany, Hong Kong, and all over Southeast Asia.

(2025)

JO CAIMO is a sound and visual artist, inventor, musician and radio maker. His work lies at the intersection between performance, music, product design, installation and the digital world. With his objects and instruments, he investigates ‘the collective‘ versus ‘the inner‘, and he therefore challenges the spectator to become part of his work. He develops effective measuring instruments and platforms through which we can better understand subconscious patterns and mechanisms in co-creation processes. Researching, stimulating and visualizing the energies between people collectively is the underlying theme.

(2020)

Jannis Carbotta is a musician and sound artist currently living in Cologne. He studied Music and Media in Düsseldorf and completed a short-term course in computer music and sound art at the Kunstuni Graz. The focus of Jannis' artistic work lies in the field of tension between analogue and digital spaces. He has already realised sound installations at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf and researched the topic of listening/hearing. His musical approach sometimes focuses on processed field recordings and soundscapes, sometimes it consists of experiments on synthesizers and electric guitar with pop song elements. His current side project AEOL explores sounds of wind organs in combination with synthesizers and sound collages. In addition to his studies at the Institute of Music and Media, which also develops his skills in the visual and sonic arts, he has always been active in various band formations as a musician (No Visa, Infant Finches), and curated radio shows as a DJ (Noods Radio, Dublab, LYL Radio). He released his first solo EP A Magic Spin on Kame House Records in February 2023.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/j_carbotta/
Bandcamp: https://janniscarbotta.bandcamp.com/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bat-actor

(2024)

CEDRIC CARNAVARO is an Ivorian music producer who focuses on the music styles coupé décalé and Afrobeats . He has collaborated with DJ Lewis, DJ Mix, MC One, Rocky Gold, DJ Kedjevara as well as Gadoukou La Star, among others, and is considered an expert on West African music trends.

(2019)

JEANNE LAURENT CARON started her dance training at the Centre Chorégraphique National of Roubaix, and continued it at the Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden. During her studies there, she had the opportunity to work with choreographers such as Avatara Ayuso, Cameron McMillan and to learn repertory from the Batsheva Company as well as from the Semperoper Ballet. In 2019, she joined Bodhi Project Dance Company in Salzburg, where she worked with Hillel Kogan, Stephanie Thiersch, Massimo Gerardi, Francesco Scavetta and Adrienn Hod.

(2020)

SHADOW CASTERS / BACAČI SJENKI is an international art- and production platform, that is internationally celebrated and awarded. The projects are focusing on working in public space in the form of artistic interventions. Their performances are characterized by time travels through the history and present of urban space as well as moments of collective and individual memory. Locations and their environment become stages and actors. Their projects and performances are designed as performative, multimedia-based and socially involved time-sculptures.

(2015)

Hana Černivec (1999, Ljubljana, Slovenia) graduated from painting in 2021 on Academy of fine arts in Ljubljana, where she currently studies illustration. She focuses on illustration and short comics.

(2024)

FILIPA CÉSAR (* 1975 in Porto) studied painting in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto and at the Faculdade de Belas Artes at the University of Lisbon. In 2008, she completed her master’s degree in the Art in Context department at University of the Arts in Berlin. As an artist, Filipa César participated internationally in solo and group shows. Since 2007 she is working as a filmmaker as well. She lives and works in Berlin.

(2018)

IAIN CHAMBERS is Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and coordinates the PhD programme in ‘Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world'. He is known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean.

(2019)

JORDAN CHANETSA is a performance artist, writer, and LGBTQIA+ rights activist and works as a consultant for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in working spaces in Zimbabwe. Chanetsa is a founding member of the Harare Queer Collective (HQ), which works to create safe spaces for Zimbabwean LGBTQIA+ people. As a presenter and media personality, she regularly addresses the difficult realities of the LGBTQIA+ community in Zimbabwe on radio shows and podcasts and is the host of "The Naked Truth Show," a program that focuses on gender, sexuality, and health. For the podcast "Her Hour" (Play Afrika TV), Chanetsa produced a special edition with the U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe about Pride Month, among other things. In 2019, Chanetsa was honored by the Dutch Embassy in Zimbabwe for her commitment as part of the "16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence" campaign. Chanetsa was also selected to participate in the “Young Leaders Program” of “Women Deliver”, an organization that promotes gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women. From June to October 2022, Jordan Chanetsa is artist-in-residence as part of the Participatory Residency Program organized by ADKDW together with DEMASK Kollektiv and Integrationshaus e.V.

BUDHADITYA CHATTOPADHYAY is a contemporary artist, researcher and writer. Incorporating diverse media such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installations and live performances addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race and decolonization. Chattopadhyay has been a Charles Wallace scholar and Prince Claus grantee; he has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards and his works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe. Chattopadhyay’s writings regularly appear in publications internationally, with two books forthcoming. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an MA in Media, Communication and Cultural Studies from Aarhus University; he recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship.

(2020)

The art collective CHEAP was founded in Berlin in 2001 by Daniel Hendrickson, Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel. Vaginal Davis is a permanent member; the collective works regularly with Phil Collins, Wilhelm Hein, Hannah Hurtzig, Bruce LaBruce, Xiu Xiu and others. CHEAP has presented performances, installations, festivals and club events at the Volksbühne/Prater (2001), Podewil (2002/2003), Ujazdowski Castle Kino-Lab, Warsaw/Bunkier Sztuki, Cracow (2002), HAU (2003-12), Theater an der Parkaue (2005-10), Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2006), the Berlinale/Forum Expanded (2006/2007), Theater an der Gessnerallee, Zurich (2007), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt (2012), 80WSE Gallery, NYC (2015), Mezipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague (2016), Arsenal – Institute for Film and Videoart (2006-2017), Kaserne Basel / FFT Düsseldorf (2012/2018), silent green (2017), Kammerspiele München (2018), and Haus der Berliner Festspiele (2019). CHEAP’s performance-installation of The Magic Flute. An Opera in Six Steps at the 80WSE Gallery was included on The Best in Art of 2015 list in The New York Times. In 2018 the Academy of World Culture presented CHEAP’s Original Sin, a concert by Susanne Sachsse and Xiu Xiu at Stadtgarten in Cologne. Since 2017 CHEAP has been broadcasting the monthly radio show CHEAP Funk on the Berlin art radio project reboot.fm.

(2020)

CYNTHIA CHEPKEMOI regards herself as an archivist interested in the particular complexities of personal experience. She works in qualitative and quantitative research for both academic projects and market research companies. Her works employ research and surveys to understand Kenya at the margins, beyond the staple subjects. She has been involved with reports on various topics, including by ipsos on teenage pregnancies, medical insurance accessibility to Kenyans, the views of shareholders in KCB Bank research, the plight of sex workers in Salgaa in Nakuru County and agribusiness in Kericho County. She has a background in logistics and supply chain management and six year’s experience working in procurement in Nairobi.

(2021)

VIVEK CHIBBER is a sociologist and professor at New York University. In his book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, he formulates one of the most important contemporary critiques of postcolonial theory. His fundamental argument is that even though postcolonial theory sees itself as a critique of Orientalism and Eurocentrism, in fact, it supports them both. The book unleashes one of the most important recent debates in social theory and in the humanities and social sciences on the status of postcolonial studies. Despite his controversial positions, it has received many positive reviews ‒ for example, from American linguist Noam Chomsky and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

(2018)

The cultural platform CHIMURENGA, founded in 2002, includes the magazine The Chronic, the online Chimurenga Library, the Pan African Market in Cape Town, and the radio project Pan African Space Station. In their sound collages they interrogate the audible as well as our understanding of music and audio consumption and the conditions governing it.

(2021)

ANNICK CHOCO (Badekou Annick Prisca Agbadou) is a dancer and singer. Before her solo career she danced for Serge Beynaud and was a guest performer in Der Botschafter and Der Internationale Strafgerichtshof by Gintersdorfer/Klaßen. Since 2016 she is a regular member of La Fleur.

(2019)

BINNA CHOI is a curator and the director of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, the Netherlands, which she together with her team re-established in 2018 under its current name and modus operandi. In this context, she conceived and co-developed long-term transdisciplinary research projects like Grand Domestic Revolution (2009-2013) and Composing the Commons (2013-2016). The latter includes the collaborative project Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) (2014) of artist Annette Krauss and the Casco team. Other curatorial projects include the annual curatorial seminar Cultivate or Revolutionize? Life Between Apartment and Farmland at Times Museum in Guangzhou (2014, curated with Nikita Yingqian Cai) and the summer school and exhibition Group Affinity at Kunstverein Munich (2011, with Bart van der Heide). Furthermore, she worked as a curator for the 2016 Gwangju Biennale under the title The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do) and, in that context, organized the global forum and fellowship of experimental art organizations All the Contributing Factors alongside Maria Lind. Choi has been a faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute and is currently a member of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World) as well as Community Economies Research Network.

(2020)

SADDIE CHOUA is a Belgian-Moroccan filmmaker, writer and mixed-media visual artist, based in Belgium. A sociologist by education, she expanded her political critique of inequalities into the art and media domain, bridging art with her academic experience through political art of documentary, video installations, mixed media collage and short stories. She puts the racial/ethnic discrimination, discrimination against women, colonialism, class as well as her cats in the spotlight.

(2019)

KETI CHUKHROV is an associate professor at the Department of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, visiting professor at the European Unity at St. Petersburg, a head of theory department at the National Center for Contemporary Art. Since 2003 she has served on the editorial board of Moscow Art Magazine. Chukhrov has authored numerous texts on art theory, culture, politics, and philosophy which have appeared in periodicals such as, among others : Afterall, Moscow Art Magazine, Artforum, Brumaria, Documenta magazines, e-flux journal, New Literary Review, et Springerin. Her full-length books include To Be – To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophical Criticism of Art, Pound &£Ü, and two volumes of dramatic poetry Just Humans and War of Quantities.

(2018)

SEBASTIAN CICHOCKI lives and works in Warsaw, where he is the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Selected curated exhibitions include the Polish pavilions at the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennales, with Monika Sosnowska (1:1) and Yael Bartana (...and Europe Will Be Stunned) respectively, the latter project co-curated with Galit Eilat; Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2016); Rainbow in the Dark: On the Joy and Torment of Faith, Konstmuseum Malmö (2015); SALT Galata, Istanbul (2014); Zofia Rydet, Record 1978–1990, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2015); Procedures for the Head, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia (2015); New National Art. National Realism in XXIst Century Poland, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2012); Early Years, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); Raqs Media Collective, The Capital of Accumulation, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2010); Oskar Hansen.
Process and Art 1966–2005, Museum of Modern Art in Skopje, Macedonia. Cichocki is a curator of the Bródno Sculpture Park, a long-term public art program initiated in 2009 with the artist Paweł Althamer. He has curated exhibitions in the form of a novella, radio drama, opera libretto, garden, anti-production residency program, and performance lectures.

(2017)

BETH COLLAR is an artist working predominantly in performance and sculpture or in the shared ground between them. She was born in Cambridge, England. Recent projects and performances have been at Cafe Oto, London, 2017; Kunstverein München, Munich 2017; Kunstraum, London, 2017; Standpoint, London, 2017; Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow, 2016; Hester, New York, 2016; KW, Berlin, 2016; Fig 2, ICA, London, 2015; Cubitt, London, and Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, 2015; Raven Row, London, 2015; the Serpentine Galleries, London, 2015; and Flat Time House, London, 2014. She was recipient of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2016/17.

(2017)

Maracatu is a traditional Afro-Brazilian music style that originated in Pernambuco, (northeastern Brazil) and is still very widespread today. It originated in the 17th century and developed from traditional African music forms of the enslaved people coming from Africa.

(2023)

Eosin (DIANA COMBO) composes and performs with vinyl records. Starting from a process close to plunderphonics, she includes field recordings or sounds collected from online archives. Her re-compositions are the result of an intuitive exploration, informed by certain thematics for theoretical research and by the act of listening. Her relation with records and vinyl players has found yet another expression in contexts of collective performance, where they’re used as instruments for improvisation. In this context, Diana shared stages with Andrea Neumann, Ana Veloso, João Martins and Filipe Silva; Antoine Chessex, Werner Dafeldecker, Burkhard Beins, Nate Wooley, amongst others. She has performed solo at Transmediale, Tiny Noise and Festival ERTZ, and in venues as Casa da Música, Passos Manuel, Maus Hábitos, ZDB, Galeria Zaratan, Bar Irreal, Salon des Amateurs and General Public.

(2020)

STEPHANIE COMILANG identifies Kidlat Tahimik – the great auteur of independent cinema of the Philippines – as her inspiration. She centrally works around the spatial concept of home and being away from home. Her works explore how our understandings of mobility, capital and labor on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors.

(2020)

ANGE DA COSTA, musician, singer-songwriter from Berlin with his own band that performs "Bantu-Soul": Bantu means people – Music for the people.

(2018)

J-J DA COSTA is music producer and lecturer for music production in Cologne and at various educational and cultural institutions in NRW.

(2018)

FLORIAN CRAMER (* 1969 in Berlin, Germany) is a Rotterdam-based participant observer of contemporary arts and a lecturer in 21st Century Visual Culture at Hogeschool Rotterdam. Recent publications include Anti-Media (2013), What Is Post-Digital? (2013/14), and Pattern Discrimination (with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Hito Steyerl and Clemens Apprich, 2018).

(2017)

ALICE CREISCHER is an artist and writer living in Berlin. In 2004 she and Andreas Siekmann curated the exhibition project Ex Argentina at Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and in 2002 the exhibition Die Gewalt ist der Rand aller Dinge at the Generali Foundation, Vienna. With Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz and Andreas Siekmann she curated the project Principio Potosí. The exhibition was on display at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in 2010 as well as at Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico and at the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore (MUSEF) in La Paz in 2011.

(2022)

Lucas Croon (1987 born in Munich) is a musician and composer from Dusseldorf, working and living in Cologne. He is best known for his krautrock/post-disco band Stabil Elite and dreamy sounding synth-pop project BAR (Band am Rhein). Besides, his solo releases on Themes For Great Cities, Aiwo and recently on Ediciones Villasonara, decorated with balearic, melodic and tribal tones have become his sound signature that show presence in his DJ performances. His name became a synonym for a Dusseldorfer’s underground music club Salon des Amateurs where he is not only performing, but also being involved in club’s program, inviting different DJs and musicians from all over the world. Apart of his artistic involvement, he is also composing music for commercials and movies. Working closely with Cologne movie director Jan Bonny, he made soundtracks for the movies Über Barbarossaplatz, Wintermärchen, TV series Tatort, Polizeiruf 110, Freiheit ist das Einzigste, was zählt and Berlinale premiering Der Panther, as a part of Zeit Verbrechen.

(2024)

MAX CZOLLEK is a poet, essayist, and curator. He attended the Jewish Upper School in Berlin, graduating in 2006, and studied political science at the Free University of Berlin, completing his PhD at the Center for Research on Antisemitism. In 2016 he curated, along with Sasha Marianna Salzmann, the event Desintegration: Ein Kongress zeitgenössischer jüdischer Positionen. Since 2009, he has been a member of the poetry collective G13, organized group reading tours and publications and has been curator of the international poetry project Babelsprech. In addition, he is co-editor of the journal Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart. He is the author of such publications as the poetry volumes Druckkammern (2012), Jubeljahre (2015) and Grenzwerte (2019), published by the Verlagshaus Berlin, and the polemic Desintegriert euch! (2018), published by Hanser.

(2020)

IDA DANEWID is a Teaching Fellow at SOAS University of London. Her research is situated at the intersection of race, gender, political economy, and radical political thought, and specifically focuses on questions of internationalism and the politics of solidarity. She has written on migration, gentrification, and the black radical tradition, and is currently working on a monograph that examines the shared horizons of global solidarity movements. Her article White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History won the 2017 Edward Said Award.

(2019)

LAURA DANG grew up in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area and completed her studies of Applied Musicology and Music Education in Eichstätt. She is currently studying Media Art and Media Design in Master's program focusing on Experimental Radio at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Her works range between radio play, sound art, feature and live improvisations.

(2020)

SOROUR DARABI is a Paris-based performer, dancer and choreographer. Born in Iran they explore the issues of sexual identity, gender politics and language. In 2016 they were awarded the Acknowledgement Prize of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel for their short piece Farci.e.

(2017)

VAGINAL DAVIS is a genderqueer artist who made an international name for herself in the 1980s with her zines and punk bands in the Los Angeles underground scene. A central figure in the development of homo- and queercore, Davis is a celebrated queer performer of Color and international blacktress. She has lived in Berlin since 2006 and is known in the art world for her small-scale paintings, sculptures, and installations, which have been featured in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions.

(2022)

Black Pearl de Almeida Lima a.k.a. Black Pearl Saint Laurent (b. 1994, Brazil) is a multidisciplinary AfroLatinx trans artist living in Berlin. She graduated from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim, and subsequently performed in various art institutions, as well as with renowned professional dance companies in Germany. She has been involved in the German Ballrom scene since 2020 and is currently a member of the Iconic House of Saint Laurent Europe as well as Kiki House of Solar.
Her research explores the use of the body as an artistic and political platform to subvert the invisibility (physical and symbolic) of trans identities through their life stories. Black Pearl aims to deconstruct the colonial, in narratives of all classical forms of movement and through her body into art.

(2023)

DEMASK Kollektiv is a queer, intersectional and feminist BPoC collective from Cologne that advocates for the representation, empowerment and social participation of qt*i*BI*PoCs through community organizing. DDEMASK Kollektiv aims to create spaces to highlight the voices, interests, needs and narratives of qt*i*BI*PoCs especially in North Rhine-Westphalia. Many of the discourses within/of this community are based on ideas that emerged in the context of identity negotiations in the United States. DEMASK Kollektiv aspires to push the own (counter-)discourses in german-speaking regions. DEMASK Kollektiv envisions a world where qt*i*BI*PoCs can live a more livable and fulfilled life. Therefore DEMASK Kollektiv organizes cultural and political events and workshops for qt*i*BI*PoCs, while some are open for BI*PoCs that consider themselves allies of the queer community. DEMASK Kollektiv events are there to forge alliances and exchange strategies against racism, sexism, anti-queer and anti-trans* sentiments/violence as well as other forms of discrimination and oppression that queer BI*PoCs face in a capitalist, patriarchal and cis-heteronormative system.

Instagram @demask_clgn

Facebook @demaskXclgn

(2018)

NURAY DEMIR studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, the Ècole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille and the Academy of Art in Vienna. She realizes projects as an artist/curator at and with various institutions, including the Kampnagel in Hamburg, the HAU/Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, the Vienna festival Wiener Festwochen and District Berlin. Since 2018, Nuray Demir has been cooperating with Michael Annoff on the project Kein schöner Archiv (Not a beautiful archive).

(2018)

Hicran Demir was born in Stuttgart and studied drama from 2005 to 2009 at CreArte – Internationale Schauspielakademie in Stuttgart. From 2009 to 2013 she lived in Istanbul, where she worked with the theater group studio5istanbul and gained experience with film, among other things. From 2013 to 2017 Hicran Demir expanded her training through studies in film and theater at the Free University of Berlin. In 2017 she was in Zinnure Türe’s production of Tevatür with Proje Difüzyon (Istanbul). In 2018 she worked for the first time with the fringe ensemble in Bonn, in the piece Anziehungskräfte. At Theater und Orchester Heidelberg Hicran Demir performed in 2019 in the piece Zwischenraum. In 2020 she appears in two solo pieces with Şermola Performans, Unvollkommen and Min’s Monolog. Hicran Demir lives in Cologne and works as a freelance actor with Şermola Performans, among others, but also for film and TV.

(2021)

GABRIEL DHARMOO lives and works in Montreal as a composer, vocalist, improviser, and researcher. His works have been performed internationally and he has received awards both as a composer (Canada Council for the Arts - Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music 2017) and as an interdisciplinary artist for his performative solo Imaginary Anthropologies.

(2014)

DIAKRON is a studio for transdisciplinary practice. Diakron has six members, working across action research, artistic and curatorial practice, graphic design and business anthropology. They have been exploring emerging organizational forms and their capacities for engaging in widespread systemic problems. Diakron is currently developing Primer, an art-based r&d department housed in the context of Aquaporin, a global water technology company.

(2019)

Aminata Estelle Diouf is a cultural professional, researcher and freelance translator (English - German - Japanese) at the intersection of art, film and decolonial activist practices. Initially, Aminata began working in the indie film scene, working for the independent film label Rapid Eye Movies, which specialized in music documentaries and South and East Asian cinema. From 2019, she worked for the German Research Foundation as a coordinator for a pilot project in the field of internationalization and digitization. She also worked as a facilitator for the exhibition RESIST!-The Art of Resistance at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne. Currently she is doing her PhD on Shaping Narratives & Shifting Visibilities - Black Identities & the Art of Postcolonial Resistance in Digital Spaces and works as a curator for the exhibition My Life Began Several Centuries Ago - An Ecosystem of Circulating Images in collaboration with ADKDW and University of Cologne.

(2023)

NICOLAS BAUDOUX aka DJ ELEPHANT POWER is a DJ, artist and producer from Brussels. Through the Cologne based label « Sonig », he released his first album « No Si, Ni So » in 2004. In 2011 he won the prestigious Belgium award Octaves De La Musique. And with his first released «Soda Waves ep» in 2017, he pushes his skills to the next level where kick-drum, percussion muscle, deep groove and bass flavour join forces. Inspired by Belgium cold techno, UK funky bass and African music tribes, Dj Elephant Power drives his own perspective into a unique genre.

(2017)

Cordão do Boitatá is a carnival association from Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1996. It was created by students and musicians. Happenings took place on Praça XV in the center of Rio. Although it is not part of the official program of the Blocos in the city, it was one of the people responsible for the revival of the street carnival in Rio. Every year it attracts thousands of spectators to the performances, which last up to seven hours and always take place on Carnival Sunday.

(2023)

The Vozes do Brasil choir, a cultural bridge between two continents, is existing for 20 years! Choristers from Brazil and other countries share their enthusiasm for samba, bossa nova, baião, MPB, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian music.

(2023)

MARIA DO MAR CASTRO VARELA is professor of Pedagogy and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University in Berlin. She holds a double degree in Psychology and Pedagogy and a Ph.D. in Political Science. Her research interests besides Gender and Queer Studies are Postcolonial Theory, Critical Migration Studies, and Critical Education. Recent publications or her, amongst others, are: Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung (with Nikita Dhawan) and Die Dämonisierung der Anderen. Rassismuskritik der Gegenwart (ed. with Paul Mecheril).

(2019)

Spanning video installation, sculpture, installation and film, Bariş Doğrusöz’s multifaceted practice is mainly based on research into the cultural histories of the Mena and Turkey region. His practice is manifested through techno-political investigations and speculative scenarios. Dogrusoz creates works that interrogate the notion of territory, border, ecosystems, scale and cross-temporalities, whether physical or symbolic, and examine how fragmented elements such as found footage, military material, archeological artifacts and codes operate as a prequel or premonition for a near future fiction. He is currently based in Istanbul and Beirut.

(2024)

ADRIANA DOMINGUEZ VELASCO is an Art Historian and Independent Curator from Mexico, currently living and working in Zürich. She graduated in Art History from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and did an MAS in Curating at ZHdK (Zürich). She worked as Assistant Curator for Museo Tamayo in Mexico City until she moved to Switzerland in 2013. Dominguez Velasco specialises in Latin American art and her curatorial strategy mixes theory, critical thinking and humour to address current social, political and environmental issues through art exhibitions. In 2017 she co-founded the independent art space la_cápsula, which focuses on presenting Latin-American emergent art and creating links to the local art scene of Switzerland.

(2022)

ELSA DORLIN is professor of political contemporary philosophy at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France). A specialist in the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Dorlin’s research also focuses on black feminist epistemology and Fanonian phenomenology. Her latest book Self-defense: A philosophy of violence (Paris, Zones éditions, 2017), winner of the 2018 Frantz Fanon Book Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

(2022)

INES DOUJAK (* 1959 in Klagenfurt, Austria) is a feminist artist who has dedicated herself during recent years to an extensive study of textiles, investigating their global history as characterized by cultural, class, and gender conflict. Her last solo exhibition Not Dressed for Conquering took place at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2016–2017). Since 2010, Doujak has been collaborating regularly with the artist JOHN BARKER, their work has been represented at various international venues. Ines Doujak lives and works in London and Vienna.

(2017)

Max Dovey works with people and technologies to create scenario-based interactions and experiences, critically reflecting on emerging technology and exploring the politics of a networked society. For instance, A Hipster Bar (2015) is a pop-up bar that uses image recognition to only admit people recognised as hipsters according to a custom-made algorithm; Respiratory Mining (2017) is a work in which the act of breathing is turned into crypto currency. Dovey received a Master’s degree in Media Design & Communication at the Piet Zwart Academy Rotterdam and worked, amongst others, with V2_ and The Patching Zone in Rotterdam. He showed his work at the Ars Electronica and The Lowry in Manchester (Humans Being Digital), taught at the Dutch Sandberg Institute as well as St. Joost Academy Breda and is an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures and the Agorama London. He writes for Open Democracy, Imperica & Furtherfield.

(2019)

PROF. DIPL.-DES ANTJE DRINKUTH, is a professor of collection concepts and collection presentation at the AMD Akademie Mode & Design, Berlin.

(2018)

Friedemann Dupelius (*1987 in Schorndorf) works with sound and language. He studied in Karlsruhe at the Hochschule für Musik and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, as well as Sound Studies at the University in Cologne. As Friday Dunard, Friedemann Dupelius produces genre-fluid electronic music, which he releases, performs live or mixes into DJ sets. Under the alias Wednesday Dupont he creates radio plays, radio pieces, sonic research, digital and acoustic texts for radio, festivals and internet. His project The Voice of Wednesday Dupont explores the artistic use of synthetic AI voices. Collaborative projects include Tearss and Frankfurter Tor. Friedemann Dupelius also writes radio features for WDR3 and writes cultural journalistic texts for De:Bug, Dissonance, INKA, Kaput, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others. He works as a curator for the music label SPA and the Cologne sound art series Brückenmusik.

MADHUSREE DUTTA is a filmmaker, author and curator. Her areas of interest are urban public culture and archiving and documentary practices. She has been the artistic director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) in Cologne from 2018 until 2021. Before that she was the executive director of Majlis, an interdiscipli-nary art initiative in Mumbai, India (1998–2016).

Her publications include, amongst may other, Fake Hybrid Sites Palimpsest. Essays on Leakages (2022), co-edited with Nanna Heidenreich; Project Cinema City (2014), co-edited with Kaushik Bhowmik and Rohan Shivkumar; and dates.sites: Bombay / Mumbai (2012).

Notable curatorial projects include culture@WSF (2005–2007), Project Cinema City (2009–2012), Memory Stations (2019) and HANDS (2021), co-curated with Ala Younis. She lives in Mumbai.

(2022)

Yilmaz Dziewior is director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since February 2015. Previously, he was the director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB) from 2009, a venue which places itself as a leading role in the contemporary arts in Europe. In 2022, he curated the German contribution for the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Prior to his work in Bregenz, he was the director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg for eight years and, in parallel, taught as a professor of art theory at the Hochschule für bildende Künste. From 1996 to 1999 he worked as a freelancer for the Museum Ludwig. In 1997, he curated a project with Sarah Lucas and was responsible for the contemporary section of the exhibition "Kunstwelten im Dialog. From Gauguin to the Global Present” in 1999. Dziewior's texts have appeared regularly in "Artforum" (New York), "Camera Austria" (Graz) and "Texte zur Kunst" (Berlin). He has edited over 50 books and catalogs on 20th and 21st century art and has written catalog essays for institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

(2023)

KATHRIN EBMEIER lives in Bochum and Cologne and is an artist working in various formats. With their collective Anna Kpok, KE develops performances that turn the audience into fellow players, between online games and theater spaces. They are the initiator and curator of the Oval Office Bar / Schauspielhaus Bochum, a “cosmopolitan ‘homo bar’” with a solidarity bar, antifascist cooperation partners and an independent program. With the Screwing Bitches, KE films feminist mechanic tutorials for YouTube and also develops audio walks and audio pieces with C. Bovermann, C. Baron and E. Krefta. KE completed their MA in applied theater studies at Justus Liebig University in Gießen and has shown their artistic work since then at the Ruhrtriennale, the Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main, the Ringlokschuppen.Ruhr, the Theater Dortmund and the Schaubude Berlin, among others.

As an activist KE establishes (queer) feminist organization and fights against structural discrimination, particularly in the context of theater and art production. Their long-term goal is an end to the capitalistic and patriarchal economic and power systems. If KE would write a book, it would be about lesbian night/club/bar life.

(2020)

Ylê Asè Egi Omim is a Candomblé house which besides being a space dedicated to religious practice, is a Cultural Center of Afro-Brazilian Traditions, with the intention of facilitating a dialogue between the experiences of the African matrix sacred and the knowledge, sciences, enchantments, philosophies, and ways of life practiced within and beyond the sacred grounds, from an Afro-Pindoramic perspective.

(2023)

Sascha Ehlert is the founder and editor-in-chief of Das Wetter. He also ran the hip-hop magazine Juice from 2013 to 2015 and has written as a freelance author for publications including taz, FAS, Spex, Zeit Online, Nachtkritik and many more. In 2015, he founded Korbinian Verlag with Katharina Holzmann and David Rabolt, where he was one of three publishers until December 2023. He lives in Berlin - and is currently working on his debut novel, which is expected to be published in 2025.

(2024)

The artist YASMINE EID-SABBAGH studied history, photography and visual anthropology in Paris. In 2018, she earned her doctorate at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. From 2006 to 2011, she lived in Burj Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp next to Tyre, where she conducted photographic research, including a conversation project with young Palestinians, while also archiving private and studio recordings. Eid-Sabbagh has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation since 2008. She received the Arles Discovery Award 2013, and the 8th Vevey International Photography Award 2011 – for her collaboration with Rozenn Quéré titled Vies possibles et imaginaires (Possible and Imaginary Lives).

(2019)

Olivia Emefiele is a German-Nigerian artist and designer living in Cologne. Her works reflect anti-racist and socio-political narratives and discourses. She deals with interdisciplinary formats and figurative painting. She also works on experimental approaches in her artistic practice. She uses the symbiosis of art and design to visualize contextualizations that address diversity awareness and aesthetic changes of perspective of self-empowered inclusion. She has thematized postcolonialism, intersectional discrimination and power harassment as well as marginalized body images in her previous works. She studied Integrated Studies in Design at the Cologne International School of Design and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

(2023)

Born in Istanbul, TURGUT ERÇETIN studied composition and completed his doctorate studies at Stanford University under the supervision of Brian Ferneyhough. His current work focuses on issues of sound, which as a result of composed acoustics, is perceived not as sonically colorful but rather as a functionality travelling through various degrees of complexity.

His solo, chamber, and electro-acoustic works have been performed throughout the US and Europe with major performances at Ultraschall, MaerzMusik, Gaudeamus Festival, Manifeste and many other festivals. Erçetin has collaborated with pioneering ensembles such as The Arditti Quartet, The JACK Quartet, ELISION Ensemble and Ensemble Mosaik as well as many others.

In 2017 Turgut Erçetin was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

CEVDET EREK, born 1974, lives and works in Istanbul. He studied architecture at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul and sound engineering and design at the Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) at Istanbul Technical University, ITU. From 2005 to 2006 he was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2011, Erek received his doctorate in Music from the ITU MIAM. In 2012, he received the Nam June Paik – International Media Award from Kunststiftung NRW. He currently teaches at ITU TMDK and ITU MIAM. Erek has presented his installations internationally in numerous solo and group shows. In 2017 he represented Turkey at the 57th Venice Biennale with his work ÇIN. In 2012, at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, he showed the installation Room of Rhythms, a work that he later realized in site-specific versions in altered form at MAXXI, Rome (2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2015) and the Biennale of Sydney (2016). Erek has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago (chiçiçiçichiciç, 2019); M HKA, Antwerp (AAAAA, 2018); MUAC, Mexico City (A Long Distance Relation, 2017); Spike Island, Bristol (Alt Üst, 2014); and Kunsthalle Basel (week, 2012).

(2021)

As an organizer and activist, Erkus is jointly responsible for many (sub-)cultural projects and hybrid (exhibition) forms in Cologne. She founded the project space GOLD+BETON at Ebertplatz and Kulturverein Baustelle Kalk e.V.. With her commitment in sub-culture and hybrid exhibition/event-formats she is actively shaping the cultural landscape of Cologne. Erkus is engaged in various co-operations centered around curatorial practice: Brückenmusik, Stadtgarten Köln, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, die Akademie der Künste der Welt, amongst others. For the initiative Baustelle Kalk e.V. she received multiple awards, amongst others, the Kölner Kunstpreis 2016 für Junge Initiativen. At Ebertplatz she is jointly responsible for the design and preservation of Kunstpassage.

(2018)

MELANIE ERZUAH works in various projects in education and youth work in the spheres of music, bias-free and intersectional pedagogy and empowerment. Melanie Erzuah’s work focuses on emancipatory body practices, questions of identity politics and the construction of bodies in a postcolonial, capitalist and patriarchal world. In 2020, Melanie Erzuah was choir and musical director of the Fasia Jansen Ensemble. Possibilities of embodiment of one’s own subjectivity, collective connectedness and therefore political fighting spirit were built through vocal exercises, breathing techniques and bodywork building up to improvisation exercises that were incorporated in the arrangements of the songs. In 2021 in the scope of the Outreach Scholarship from the nGbK – neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Melanie Erzuah will further develop the experiences and methods used with the Fasia Jansen Ensemble.

(2020)

MERV ESPINA is an artist and curator based in Las Piñas, Metro Manila. In 2014 he co-initiated the Kalampag Tracking Agency and in 2016 Kamuning Public Radio. He helps run WSK Festival of the Recently Possible as well as the Nusasonic collaborative music platform and contributes to Radio alHara Palestine. His artistic explorations result in installations and film screenings, seminars and magazines, music mixes and comix anthologies, pirate radio hacks, choreographies, and perfume productions. His art projects have been featured in the 2015 Jakarta Biennale and the 2020 Yokohama Triennale. Merv is a member of the ADKDW.

(2022)

ETCÉTERA… are a multidisciplinary collective of visual artists, poets, actors and performers that formed in Buenos Aires in 1997. They all share the intention of bringing art to the sites of imminent social conflict, i.e. to the streets; and vice versa, social conflicts are brought into the arenas of cultural production, including art institutions and the media.

Etcétera… worked closely with the human rights group H.I.J.O.S. (Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence) in developing and popularising a form of direct action protest called “escraches” i.e. acts of public denunciation and humiliation of human rights infringers in order to reinstall social justice and influence the state’s legal and judicial institutions to follow a certain course of action.

Etcétera… form part of the urban scene as a statement of protest, denunciation and public signaling; and as a result the interventions pertain to a specific time and place. Using street-art, public interventions, and performances that are by nature contextual, ephemeral and circumstantial, they combine humour, irony, poetic means of discovery and the deconstructive potential needed to forge a new kind of socially committed art free of hackneyed rhetoric, often sarcastic and at times “incorrect”. In 2005 they co-founded the International Errorist movement based on the idea that error is a fundamental principle of reality and life.

The group develops interventions and activities in collaboration with other collectives and individuals, inside and outside the art institutions, and in the field of education. Loreto Garín Guzmán (Chile) and Federico Zukerfeld (Argentina) are the co-founders of the collective and they coordinate the archive, activities and other initiatives. In 2013 Etcétera... received the International Award of Participatory Art.

In 2014 Loreto Garín Guzmán and Federico Zukerfeld were fellows of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

https://www.facebook.com/grupoetcetera?fref=ts

“Born in 1994 in The Forest, Small Farm, I live and work in Amsterdam. My artistic practice encompasses a wide range of media through combining images and textual statements; my work is primarily based in the medium of drawing and further transformed through other media – such as installations, photography, text and video. The ideas for my artworks are not mine. Otherwise, I would have been a landscape painter, painting a beautiful river. But I lost Ali. The absence of my image constitutes a dialogue with the missing persons, with the lost villages and destroyed houses, ‘because a house is like a face too.’ I am a scrap of paper that has borne the pressure of the pen and absorbed the ink of Swedenborg. The ink said, ‘These are his memoirs, not mine.’ He wrote in his spiritual memoirs, ‘The spirits, with permission, may completely possess those who speak with them, so it can be as if they are utterly in the world, and even appear in a manner of speaking in this way, so that they can deliver their thoughts through their medium, even through written messages. Since from time to time, or actually most of the time, when I directed my hand to write, it was as if my hand were their hand, and I believe it wasn’t I that wrote, but rather the spirits.’ As an artist I try to stay hidden behind the furniture, like a woodworm you don’t see but seems to have eaten everything.”

(2021)

ELEONORA FABIÃO (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a performance artist and theorist. She performs, lectures, teaches and publishes internationally. Her performative actions have been featured in numerous contexts – festivals, exhibitions, museums, sociocultural projects – but usually take place in the streets of various cities. Things That Must Be Done Series (Wall Street, Performa Biannual, 2015) is the title of a work and also a way of referring to her artistic practice. Fabião is Associate Professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, School of Communication – Theater Directing Undergraduate Program and Arts of the Scene Graduate Program. Holds a PhD and an MA in Performance Studies (New York University, CAPES grant) and an MA in Social History of Culture (PUC-Rio, CAPES grant). She concluded her postdoc in 2017 at NYU. Fabião received the Arts in the Streets Award from the Brazilian National Foundation of the Arts (2011) and the Rumos Itaú Cultural Grant (2014) that resulted in the publication of the book AÇÕES/ACTIONS (Rio de Janeiro: Tamanduá Arte, 2015). Fabião is a Researcher Level-2 of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She is an invited artist of the 34th São Paulo Art Biennial, 2021.

(2021)

Born in 1970, the writer, art critic and curator HU FANG lives and works in Guangzhou and Beijing. The co-founder and artistic director of the Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou and the Beijing Pavilion has been involved in various international projects, including working as an editor for documenta 12 magazines and as co-curator of the Yokohoma Triennial 2008.

(2010)

HARUN FAROCKI traversed from pre-celluloid forms of photography and painting to the post-cinema forms of video and digital. His critic of production and circulation of images began with The Indistinguishable Fire (1969), in protest against the Vietnam War and ended with Sauerbruch Hutton Architekten (2013), a minute observation into the functioning of two architects in Berlin who are “bound to the language of modernity without being dogmatic”. In the intervening 44 years he created around 120 works in myriad genres – direct cinema, television series, essay films, children’s films, narrative films, found footage works and video arts.

(2020)

The FASIA JANSEN ENSEMBLE is a predominantly Black-identifying choir. Together Aischa Abdirahman, Feben Amara, Yemisi Babatola, Melanie Erzuah, Jocelina Fatouma Ndimbalan, Felicia Angélique Hilgert, Doude und Ezgi Özcan rehearse the songs of the Black German activist Fasia Jansen and try out the singing of these protest songs as a form of empowerment.

(2020)

NAFISEH FATHOLLAHZADEH is a photographer and artist from Iran based in Berlin. She studied visual communication in Tehran before she went on to complete a master in photography studies and research at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. Her work focuses on urban landscapes and research-oriented photographic studies. Her recent works, like Momentography of a failure, deal with post-photography and collaborative praxis in photography. Her work investigates the role of citizen photojournalism, appropriation of space through photography and the relation between collective and individual memories of space. In 2019 she was awarded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fotografie Education Prize for her collaborative photography and urban research project Momentography of a failure. She was also a recipient of a DAAD scholarship.

(2020)

CEDRIK FERMONT is a Berlin-based Belgian-Congolese composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host on Colaboradio/FR-BB.org, Staalplaat and Boxout.fm, and label manager (Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic and experimental music. His compositions and installations vary from sound art and soundscapes made of found sounds and objects to more conventional, ‘dance music’ to radio projects. He has toured extensively in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and his main research focuses on electronic, electroacoustic, experimental and noise music from Asia and Africa. In 2017 he released together with Dimitri della Faille the book Not Your World Music about noise music in South-East Asia; winner of the 2017 Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category.

(2020)

FABIAN FERRARI is a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, a multidisciplinary department based at Oxford University. In his dissertation, he focuses on the economic geography of artificial intelligence. Fabian holds an MSc in politics and communication from the London School of Economics and a BA in social sciences from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He is also a researcher at the Fairwork Foundation, an international action research project that is working to analyze and improve pay and conditions for platform workers across the world.

(2020)

DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA is a philosopher and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her academic writing and artistic practice address the ethico-political challenges of the global present. Among her publications are Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and A Dívida Impagavel (The Unpayable Debt, 2019), texts for the Liverpool and São Paulo Biennials (2016), Biennale di Venezia (2017) and documenta 14.

(2021)

ELLE FIERCE (they/them) is a Trans Non-Binary, British born Jamaican-Irish artist & activist, currently based in Germany. They are classically trained in ballet & modern dance, and graduated from English National Ballet School with a BA degree in Professional Performance in 2014. After graduation they joined Northern Ballet (UK) as an artist for 3 years and have performed on stages around the world. Their most recent engagement at Oper Leipzig, as a soloist for 4 years 2017-2021. Whilst based in Leipzig (DE) alongside their work at Oper Leipzig, they developed their activism through creating club events centering QT*BiPOC’s - the 1st in Leipzig, this then progressed to creating political demonstrations and the first “Black Queer Pride” in Leipzig. This was created through their now dissolved account “Series Be:” Now a freelance artist, with a multi disciplinary approach to performance, combining their activism and life experience as a black trans body to create provocative, yet honest work.

FILASTINE & NOVA are a multimedia duo collaborating since 2010. Grey Filastine (* 1978 in Los Angeles, USA) is a Barcelona-based video artist, composer, and producer whose premiere album Burn It! (2006) built the starting point for many critically acclaimed albums and world tours. Vocalist Nova Ruth (* 1982 in Malang, Indonesia) was part of the Indonesian rap sensation Twin Sista (Mother of Nature, 2003) and has been working in various genres with artists like Filastine, Sven Simulacrum, and Unkle Ho.
Filastine & Nova create a borderless sound, developing highly conceptual multimedia presentations, incorporating multi-screen visuals, dance, live percussion, and spoken word.

(2019)

SEBASTIAN FISCHER is artistic and managing director of the AfrikaFilmFestival in Cologne and works as an independent consultant for film production companies and the Goethe Institut.

(2018)

CHRISTINE FISCHER, cultural scholar and Hispanist, works at the GRASSI Museum of Ethnography in Leipzig in the areas of program planning and audience development. She is involved in delevoping a museum program that promotes social participation, multi-perspectivity, and cultural diversity in events, workshops, and projects.

(2018)

LA FLEUR is a transnational collective working between Berlin, Hamburg and Paris; since 2016, they have developed a highly physical performance style for a new form of theatrical work. The team brings together dancers in urban styles, DJs, actors and other stars of show business. La Fleur analyzes and choreographs French literature from a transcultural perspective. In co-production with French and German theatres, they have created the works Les Nouveaux Aristocrates (2017), based on Honoré de Balzac, and Nana ou est-ce que tu connais le bara (2019) and Körper als Unternehmen (2019), based on Émile Zola. For Pièce d’actualité n°11. Trop d’inspiration (2018) La Fleur worked on contemporary dance styles with young people at the Theater La Commune in Aubervilliers. The piece was performed at the Ruhrfestspielen and Westwind Festival in 2019.

(2019)

LAMIN FOFANA is an electronic producer and artist. His instrumental electronic music contrasts the reality of our world with what's beyond and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. From Sierra Leone, he lived in Guinea, the USA, and is currently located in Berlin. Fofana started the SCI-FI & FANTASY music imprint with Paul Lee in 2012. His latest project Brancusi Sculpting Beyonce was piublished on Hundebiss Records in 2018.

(2019)

Wanlov the Kubolor and his colleague M3nsa, also known as the FOKN BOIS, are stirring up the Ghanaian music scene with their direct rap and its musical love of experimentation. Mixing traditional African music with Rap, Dub and Techno, they produce a high-energy and hypnotic sound which is then combined with fearless lyrics and politically charged humor. Their “Gospel Porn Christian Rap” is full of tightly-worded, provocative lyricism and satirical ridicule—aimed at a planet of targets, but particularly at Christians, Muslims, Rastafarians, Chinese, and whites of all kinds. They thank God they are “not a Nigerians” and are reversing the debt aid gaze in collecting coin donations to “help America”. The FOKN Bois’ 2010 debut was the soundtrack to West Africa’s first full-length Pidgin-language musical film based entirely around samples of classic African highlife records, Cos Ov Moni. Their rap album FOKN Wit Ewe was released in 2012. The Mixtape FOKN Ode To Ghana followed in 2015. FOKN Bois live in Budapest.

(2016)

BRIDGET FONKEU works as academic staff at the Technical University in Dortmund; she studied at the Ruhr University in Bochum. In October 2019, she completed her PhD in Sociolinguistics. A mother of four children, Bridget Fonkeu came to Germany from Cameroon in 1998. With her advanced degree not being officially recognized in Germany, she worked as a cleaner and later began a new course of study in 2008. Since 2015, alongside a team of other immigrants, she has directed the Silent University Ruhr, an autonomous platform that engages immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers as advisors and lecturers – exactly the positions that are often denied to them at German universities and institutions. At the Silent University, Fonkeu started the Intercultural Women’s Empowerment Network to lend advice and support to other women immigrants. Fonkeu’s fields of specialization are multilingualism and languages in immigrant communities in Germany.

(2019)

TERESA FORCADES I VILA is a doctor and holds a PhD in theology. After studying medicine in Barcelona and New York and theology at Harvard she joined the Order of Saint Benedict in 1997. As a fierce opponent of the pharmaceutical industry Forcades is particularly critical of the medicalization of society. As a theologian she is committed to strengthening the rights of gay people and women, also within the Catholic Church. In her numerous speeches and contributions to debates she campaigns for direct democracy and a more equal distribution of goods. Forcades is considered one of the most influential voices of the intellectual Left in Europe.

(2017)

The FRAUENINITIATIVE HENRICHTSHÜTTE HATTINGEN, a women’s initiative at the Heinrichshütte Ironworks, was founded in February 1987 after the metalworkers’ union IG Metall had appealed in the union newspaper directly to the wives and partners of the ironworks employees. Information exchange was initially the focus of the event for the union, but the women who attended soon articulated a desire to immediately undertake something more. From this impetus at the initial meeting a women’s resolution was adopted and an independent women’s general assembly was convened in order to officially form the women’s initiative. One of its members described the composition of the group especially aptly:
“More than a hundred women attend the inaugural meeting. It is a diverse troop that has stepped up, a ‘community born of necessity’, one that with their various educational backgrounds, ages and political positions had found a common denominator in a deep material and psychological concern. Only four members are ‘real’ ironworks women, that is, themselves employees at the plant (one of them the only woman in the workers’ council). The majority are wives, whose husbands are workers in the plant, and what is especially astonishing: also in attendance are several ‘sympathizers’ who have no connection to the ironworks at all.” (Prinz: Das Engagement der Frauen in Stadt und Gemeinde [The engagement of women in city and community], 1990, p. 71).

(2020)

GUNNAR FRIEL studied at the Academy for Media Arts Cologne under Valie Export. As a media artist he investigates social qualities of spaces and their relationship to materials and digital technology. In collaboration with Anja Vormann he has been realizing interventions and installations in public spaces since 2003. In 2003 they have been awarded at the H.W. & J. Hector Prize for Young Art and 2006 at the German Video Art Prize Marl. In 2006 they participated in the 5th Biennale for Contemporary Art Busan in South Corea. Recently, their works were exhibited at Loop Video Art Barcelona, Linz 09 European Capital of Culture, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Times Museum Guangzhou. Between 2015 - 2018 Gunnar Friel worked as research artist and visiting professor at the Centro University in Mexico City. For his video project Dialogues with the Archive he received the International Research Grant of the Casa Planas and the Goethe Institute Barcelona in 2020.

(2020)

CHRISTIAN FRITZENWANKER is a Hair and Make-Up Artist currently based in Berlin. After studying in Austria, he has been working in Berlin, London, Paris and Los Angeles for international productions in fashion, film and art. His work has appeared in leading publications such as Harpers Bazar, Self Service, ID, Dazed and Confused, Another Man, American Vogue, Elle, Quest, 032c, Fantastic Man, Metal, Wallpaper, Pop, Baku, Candy and many more. He has been awarded numerous awards such as the ADC, Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion and the Elite award. Fritzenwanker’s long-standing and wide professional experience in his field of fashion editorials, photography, advertising and film has recently led him to expand his work into art productions in galleries, theatres and museums – such as a collaboration with Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon for the play Neck of the Woods starring Charlotte Rampling at the Manchester International Festival.

(2022)

MALTE FRÖHLICH was born in Berlin 1987. He studied at Universität der Künste Berlin, in the Professional Media Master Class (PMMC) at Werkleitz and at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He works as assistant director and production assistant, director and cameraman in the fields of theater, performance, film. He has worked many years in the field of social work as well. Is work was exhibited in Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Lyon, Marseille, Paris and other cities. His Films were screened at Film festivals in Leipzig, Dresden, Weimar and Berlin. Malte works in Cologne and Berlin and he lives in Cologne-Kalk.

(2019)

<!--M.S. KALK: M.S. BILANZ

M.S. KALK: Arrival City Kalk – Von (Lebens-)Entwürfen und (Wohn-)Biografien

M.S. KALK: First Kalker Sucuk-Party

M.S. KALK: One Day in Kalk

M.S. KALK: M.S. HALLEN KALK

M.S. KALK: Malte’s Memory Sunday & Mapping Kalk

M.S. KALK: MEMORY STATION

M.S. KALK: Get on Board!

YE FU (Zheng Shiping) was born in Enshi, in the Hubei province of China. He belongs to the ethnic minority group of the Tujias. As intellectuals, he and his family were relocated to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. From 1978 to 1981 he studied Chinese literature and culture at the Hubei Institute for Nationalities. During that time he began to write and quickly gained fame in the literary underground scene in China. From 1986 to 1988 he continued his studies of Chinese literature at Wuhan University, where he also organised the “Hubei Post-modern Poetry Salon”. In 1986 he published a collection of poems with the title “The Night Howl of Wolfs”.

After graduation he was assigned a job at a public security unit in Hainan. He quit the job in 1989 to support the students at Tiananmen Square. After the bloody military suppression of the protests, he was sentenced to six years in prison. Following his release he was running a publishing house in Beijing for ten years.

Today he is a freelance writer, who is well known throughout China. Apart from publishing poetry and fiction, he also writes essays and reportage, as well as screenplays and scripts for television (for example the TV series “My Father’s War”, which was successfully broadcasted in China in 2009).

Since his work has not yet been translated into other languages, he is less well known in western countries.

Ye Fu has received many awards, among them the “Contribution Award of Contemporary Chinese” in 2009, a prize set up by the Beijing Institute of Contemporary Chinese Language; the non-fiction award from the Taipei International Book Exhibition in 2010; and the “Freedom of Writing Prize“ from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre in 2011.

His works include:

• Under the River, (Jiangshang de muqin), essay collection, Taipei 2009
• Paijian dong lai huan jiuchou, Selected essays of Ye Fu, Hong Kong 2009
• My father's war, novel (later rewritten as TV series script), Beijing 2009, reprinted in Hong Kong 2010
• Earth Lament, essay collection, Beijing 2010
• Xiangguan hechu, selected essays, Beijing 2012

In 2013 he was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

ISABELLA FÜRNKÄS (*1988 in Tokyo) is the recipient of the Förderpreis des Landes NRW for media art and of the Paris Cité Internationale des Arts grant. In 2017 she received a travel grant from the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen as well as a residency from the Goethe Institute. She is a Meisterschüler of Andreas Gursky, studied with Keren Cytter and Johannes Paul Raether at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and at the Universität der Künste Berlin as a guest student with Hito Steyerl. Previously, she studied art history and philosophy at the Universität zu Köln, the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, as well as fine arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien. She uses different media such as drawing and video in her work and combines them into installations with performances. Since 2015 she has also worked as part of a performance duo with Lukas von der Gracht. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Nam June Paik Art Center Seoul, the Museum Abteiberg (with Lukas von der Gracht), CSA Space Vancouver, and in the project space of the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf.

(2017)

GALA DROP is a Lisbon-based quartet that was founded in 2003 by keyboarder Nelson Gomes and guitarist Tiago Miranda and completed by drummer Afonso Simões. Their first, self-titled album was released in 2010. Their second record, II, came out in 2014.

(2014)

NANCY GARÍN is an independent journalist, art researcher and curator. She works in projects related to critical thinking, new pedagogies, archives, memory and decolonialism. She is the co-founder of the research platforms Equipo re (and Espectros de lo Urbano).

https://puntorojo.org/

(2022)

CHRISTIAN GÄRTNER, an economist, is interested in the socioeconomic correlations between the economy, architecture and design. He is the founder and CEO of Urban Standards, a design and strategy consultancy that develops urban planning and mobility concepts, and also integrates contemporary urbanisation trends with the demands for a sustainable mobility policy.

(2019)

Political scientist RICHARD GEBHARDT is a freelance publicist and civic education trainer in Cologne. He is the author of numerous scientific contributions to books and journals, with a focus on the extremist, new and populist Right. His journalistic works have been published in ZEIT Online, Jungle World, StadtRevue and in German as well as international political periodicals. He published the book Volksgemeinschaft statt Kapitalismus? Zur sozialen Demagogie der Neonazis (PapyRossa Verlag 2009), in which he analyzes the phenomenon of successful vote catching by neo-Nazis using anti-capitalist slogans. In May 2017, he will publish an anthology on the return of hooligans in stadiums and on the streets.

(2017)

“‘The artist as burglar’, this could be the framework of ALEXANDRA GERBAULET practice. She breaks into spaces and dissolves frontiers. The body, the house, the village, the land: In her works geographies of ‘the familiar’ are revealed as closed institutions based on exclusions.” (Katharina Sykora)

(2020)

“Spinning around, overlooking a backyard in Northern Paris, Martha H. and Salome G. work on uncovering the institutionalization of a linguistic expression – the German word ‘man’ – which they consider to be a speech act, for it shapes the lives and minds of mankind in an unfortunate way, as the two researchers M. H. and S. G. perceive it.”

(2020)

RICHARD GABRIEL GERSCH works in various areas of film. He worked as a script editor at Tobis Film GmbH and most recently on various projects of Komplizen Film in different areas of production. He works with various (video-) artists including Yael Bartana, Lene Berg, and Susanne Sachsse.

(2022)

BASSAM GHAZI shifts between cultures and perspectives and trades in histories and stories: biographic, post-migrant, diverse, inclusive, non-integrated. He is a theatre educator, director and artistic director of the Import Export Collective at Schauspiel Köln. He offers workshops and training programs on diversity, intersectionality, discrimination and racism for educational and cultural institutions. Bassam Ghazi is a member of the Alliance of Critical Cultural Practitioners and curator for the festival Augenblick mal! 2021.

(2021)

MARIALAURA GHIDINI, contemporary art curator and researcher; faculty at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India.

(2021)

MAXIME GIDS is a filmmaker who reinvents the wheel on a regular basis, in order to better understand how it works, to get to grips with it, to have fun. Sometimes, in the middle of the journey, the process of reinvention forks and gives rise to new tools, new perspectives, new works.

(2021)

MONIKA GINTERSDORFER is director and co-founder of La Fleur. Between 2000 and 2004 she regularly produced works at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Münchner Kammerspielen and Salzburger Festspiele. In 2004 she founded the actionist group Rekolonisation with Jochen Dehn in Hamburg, and since 2005 has directed the performance group Gintersdorfer/Klaßen in collaboration with Knut Klaßen. Monika Gintersdorfer is a founding member of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World).

(2017)

ANTONELLA GIURANO is founder of the Italian cultural association Mondo Aperto/Offene Welt e.V., member of the women’s association Buntes FrauenNetzwerk e.V. and of the Integration Council Cologne. On Saturdays, she likes to go shopping for Italian food in Cologne-Kalk, for example, at the delicatessen IAIA, where you can get the typical fennel salsiccia (sausage). She’s originally from Sardinia.

(2019)

PABLO GIW is a trumpet player and sound artist from Cologne. He is active in improvised and experimental music scenes.

(2017)

THOMAS GLÄSSER lives and works in Cologne and Berlin. A musician, program director and cultural activist, he founded the platform Zentrum für Aktuelle Musik e.V. alongside other musicians in 2006. In the field of current and contemporary music he has curated international concert series (Reconstructing Song, Reverse Exotism, Outskirts) and created festivals (Invocation, Night of Surprise, Digging the Global South) and conferences as well as artistic, pedagogic projects and local cultural and political initiatives.

(2017)

FERNANDO GODOY is sound artist and producer based in Valparaiso. His work is focused on sound research and listening as an experience and social phenomenon. He has worked as director of the Tsonami Festival for more than ten years. As an artist he has produced radio works, sound installations, experimental compositions, sound performances and web projects, performing in Chile, Peru, Canada, Colombia, Estonia, Italy, Australia, Greece and Germany. Currently he is the director of the Tsonami Sound Art Festival, director of B.A.S.E Tsonami sound art center, co-curator of Sala BASE sound art gallery, co-editor of the Sound Art and Culture Magazine AURAL, artistic director of Radio Tsonami, editor of the Tsonami Records label and the Audiomapa platform.

(2020)

JOEL SUÁREZ GÓMEZ was born in 1988 in Holguín, Cuba. After graduating from Escuela Nacional de Ballet de La Habana, he joined the National Ballet of Cuba (BNC), later becoming part of the company Danza Contemporánea de Cuba (DCC). As a visual artist, he was invited to the 11th Bienal de Artes Plásticas de La Habana. Since 2013 Gómez has been living in Berlin, where he develops personal projects and practices, collaborating with Sasha Waltz & Guests, Mouvoir (Stephanie Thiersch), and other artists around the world. He is part of an emerging group working with ‘Present Time Composition’, an improvisational method for musicians developed by Allan Bern. Interdisciplinary collaborations, new performative practices, analysis, community, recycling and friendship are the main concepts that characterize his artistic concerns.

(2021)

MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS has a PhD in history and is research staff at the Ruhr University Bochum. Her work focuses on gender history, the history of labor and the cultural history of economics, cartographic construction of Europe, and feminist epistemology and methods. She works with these themes not only from a scientific perspective but also a political one. She has published, among others, works on the history of craftswomen in the early modern era and an anthology with students on the history of feminism: Feminismus in historischer Perspektive. Eine Re-aktualisierung [Feminism in historical perspective: A re-update] (Bielefeld, 2014). She is the editor of the Spanish new edition of the SCUM Manifesto (Valerie Solanas, Society for Cutting Up Men). She is currently working with maps and the genesis of the Eurocentric image of Europe.

(2020)

AVERY F. GORDON is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a visiting professor at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. She is the author of various scholarly articles and monographs including, most recently, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (2017) and Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2nd edition 2008). As part of dOCUMENTA 13 she developed Notes for the Breitenau Room of The Workhouse with artist Ines Schaber as part of the series 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts.

(2018)

ALICIA GORNY has recently become a mother and is currently a recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the History of the Ruhr Foundation. There she pursues her dissertation project Die Unorganisierbaren. Weibliche Gewerkschaftsarbeit in der Bekleidungsindustrie [The Unorganizables: Women’s Trade Union Work in the Clothing Industry]. She completed her MA in history and gender studies in 2018 at the Ruhr University Bochum with her thesis Unsichtbare Motoren. Die Fraueninitiative Hattingen während des Hüttenstreiks 1986/87 [Invisible Engines: The Hattingen Women’s Initiative during the Steelworks Strike of 1986/87]. She has also been commissioned to develop a leadership concept for the LWL-Industriemuseum Henrichshütte Ironworks Hattingen with a particular regard for gender issues. Her BA work focused on the connection between alcoholism, violence and masculinity in the military. Between 2009 and 2013 she studied film and directing.

(2020)

AHMAD GHOSSEIN (* 1981 in Beirut) is an artist and filmmaker. In his works based on documentary materials he combines video art, installation, and photography. His work has been shown in numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Oslo Kunstforening, and the Nam June Paik Art Center in South Korea, as well as in major film festivals like the Berlinale and the Cannes and Dubai film festivals.

(2018)

As a directors duo Miriam Gossing and Lina Sieckmann have produced several short films on 16-mm film, in which urban and private architecture, hyper- staged environment, subcultural individuals and the notion of desire are examined – combining documentary imagery with fiction and found footage.Their works are characterised by the depth of research and contact with communities and individuals, as well as by the clear lines in their approach to architecture and the worlds which shape desire, fear, anxiety, and alienation.

Their films have been awarded with numerous grants and scholarships and are shown internationally on film festivals and in art institutions, among them International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Anthology Film Archives New York City, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart Berlin).

Since 2019 they are hosting Blonde Cobra - Festival for Queer and Experimental Cinema in Cologne together with Lara Levi Nickel, a multidisciplinary festival for film, performance, theory and music. Currently they are working on their first hybrid feature film Sirens Call with ZDF - Das Kleine Fernsehspiel about a subculture of mer-beings in Portland, Oregon (USA).

They live and work in Köln.

2009-2015 Academy of Media Arts Cologne, with Prof. Matthias Müller, Prof. Phil Collins, Prof. Sophie Maintigneux, Prof. Marie Luise Angerer, Prof. Johannes Wohnseifer
Since 2012 Collaboration as directors duo Gossing / Sieckmann
2015 Diploma with honors
2016-2017 Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, Class Prof. Rita Mc Bride

(2024)

RAPHAËL GRISEY. Born in 1979, lives in Berlin. Grisey uses film, editorial and photographic works to address politics of memory, architecture, migration and farming ( such as the films Prvi Deo, Red Star 2006 mit F. Lazar; Cooperative, 2008; The Exchange of Perspectives; Minhocão, 2011; Amor e Progresso, 2014; Remanescentes 2015).

BOUBA TOURÉ. 1948-2022, lived in Paris and Somankidi Coura, Mali. He lived in France in the Foyer Pinel from 1965 and worked at the metal factory Chausson until 1969. He studied at the Vincennes University and was a projectionist at Cinema 14 Juillet and L’entrepôt, Paris. Photographer since the 1970s, he documented the lives and struggles of migrant workers and peasants in France and Mali. Touré co-founded the Co-op of Somankidi Coura in 1977. In 2015, he published the book Notre case est à Saint Denis, Xérographes Publishers. Since the 1980s, Touré has exhibited works and given talks in associative and foyer’s circles and more recently in art institutions. His photographic work has been presented amongst other places at the Bamako Encounters 2019 and in the Hamburg photography Triennale in 2022.

Since 2006 Touré and Grisey worked together on collaborative projects with the current name of Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive since 2015. It lead to various workshops, film and theatre production for example with the theatre group Kaddu Yaraax in 2017 and 2019, as well as publications and texts, such as Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive *(2017, Archives Book publishers) Their works were shown amongst other venue at Kàddu Yaraax Theatre Forum Festival (SN), Kunsthall Trondheim (NO), Archive Kabinett, Savvy Contemporary, HKW, Neue Berliner Kunstverein (DE), Den Fries (DK), 9th Contour Biennale (BE), Parco Arte Vivente (IT), Un Lieu pour Respirer, Centre Pompidou (FR), Dhaka Art Summit (BD), Open Justice (CA) and in Konsthall Göteborg (SE). Their long feature film *Xarassi Xanne - Crossing Voices has been awarded in 2022 at the Festival du Réel and at the Toronto Hotdocs Festival amongst others.

(2023)

The artistic practice of YOERI GUÉPIN comprises installations, (lecture-) performances and collaborative research projects in which various archival material is recontextualised. His work has been exhibited at ENSAPC YGREC in Paris, at Ormston House in Limerick and at TENT Rotterdam. He has also given lectures at various institutions.

(2018)

AYŞE GÜLEÇ is a researching activist and cultural worker in self-organized initiatives in the fields of migration, postcolonialism, anti-racism and art, such as the April 6th initiative and the “Unravelling NSU Complex” Tribunal. She worked as the community liaison at the artistic director’s office of documenta 14 in Kassel. Ayşe Güleç studied social pedagogy at the University of Kassel and started working in the field of migration and (inter-)cultural education at the Schlachthof cultural centre in 1998. She developed the documenta 12 advisory board and was a member of the Maybe Education Group at documenta 13.

(2019)

KÜBRA GÜMÜŞAY is a journalist, blogger and public speaker. As a freelance author, she contributes to Die Zeit, Zeit Campus, taz and other media. She reports on politics, Islam, racism, feminism and social media at universities, conferences, in the press, and on radio & TV. In addition, she works as a social media consultant at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
She is currently an ambassador against racism with the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency. Her blog, Ein Fremdwörterbuch, was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2011. She currently lives in Oxford, UK.

(2016)

XIAOLU GUO was born in China in 1973. She currently divides her time between London and New York and is a writer-in-residence at Columbia University. She has published collections of poetry, short stories, film theory and novels. Besides her work as a writer, Guo has directed documentary and feature films, some of which have won major awards. Stadt der Steine (2005) is the first novel to be published in German translation. The English edition of the book (Village of Stones, 2004) was nominated for the Foreign Fiction Prize by The Independent newspaper in April 2005. Her international breakthrough came with A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). The most recent German-language edition was Ich bin China (2014; I am China) and her memoir Es war einmal im fernen Osten (2018; Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, 2017), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017.

(2020)

ABEER GUPTA is the director of Krishnakriti Foundation in Hyderabad. He is also a director of the Achi Association India. He has directed several documentary films and curated art, education and community media projects. He directed A Day’s Job, a documentary short (2006) and executive produced Siddharth, the Prisoner, a fiction feature (2007) which received the Critic’s Choice Award at the second annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA), Gold Coast, Australia, 2008 and Best Actor Award for Rajat Kapoor at the 10th Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, 2008.
In 2010 Gupta received a fellowship from the Cluster of Excellence – Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows, Heidelberg University, Germany on the theme “Circulation of Popular Images and Media in Muslim Religious Spheres”. In 2011 Gupta received the Early Career Film Fellowships at Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai), and initiated the documentation of oral histories around the advent and the contemporary material and visual culture of Islam in the western Himalayas.
He has participated in several group shows, such as Project Cinema City (NGMA India, 2012), Fibre Fables (The Stainless Gallery, New Delhi, 2015) and Witness to Paradise (Singapore Biennale, 2016). He co-curated Atoot dor: Unbroken Thread: The Banarasi Brocade Sari at Home and in the World (National Museum, New Delhi, 2016) and curated Old Routes, New Journeys II (Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, Bhopal, 2017), Graphic Storytelling in India (KNMA, New Delhi, 2018) and Urban Frames, Visual Practices and Transitions (Hyderabad City, 2019).< br /> Gupta has a long experience of teaching, prominently at the National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad), Ambedkar University (Delhi) and conducted a series of lectures at the School of Art and Aesthetics, JNU (Delhi). He researches oral histories, material cultures and visual archives in the western Himalayas. He has published widely, including The Visual and Material Culture of Islam in Ladakh (2014), Discovering the Self and Others in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (Sage, 2014) and A Sense of Place: Islam in the Western Himalaya (Marg, 2018). Gupta has a master’s degree in visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, London. 

(2020)

SHILPA GUPTA (b. 1976, India) lives and works in Mumbai. She creates artworks using objects, photographs, interactive video and sound. Gupta is interested in human perception, and her work explores how objects get defined, be it places, people, experiences, and finds herself looking at zones where these definitions get played out, be it borderlines, labels and ideas of censorship and security. She studied at the Sir J. J. School of Art (Sculpture). She has had solo shows at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz and Arnolfini in Bristol; and has participated in biennales in Venice, Berlin, Kochi, Lyon, Gwangju, Havana, Yokohama and Liverpool, among others. Her work has been shown at the MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Mori Museum. In 2021, she will have solo shows at Muhka in Antwerp, Barbican in London and at Dallas Contemporary.

(2021)

RUPALI GUPTE, architect and urbanist; co-founder and faculty at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai.

(2021)

LÜTFIYE GÜZEL (1972, Duisburg) describes herself as a poet and works in between Berlin and the Ruhr Area. Since 2014 she publishes her poems and prose in her own label * go-güzel-publishing. She teaches writing in Poetry-Workshops and is jury member of national literature awards in Berlin (Treffen junger Autor*innen).
2017 she received the Literaturpreis Ruhr. Her new book *nahezu nichts gelingt [almost nothing works] has been published in march 2020.

(2020)

KIEN NGHI HA is a fellow of the Institute for Post-colonial and Transcultural studies at the University of Bremen and an independent curator. He has held research positions at New York University, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Tübingen. He has curated at the Haus der Kulturen der Weltat, the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre and the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Berlin. His research focuses on post-colonial criticism, migration and Asian diasporic studies. His latest monograph Unrein und vermischt (transcript, 2010) was awarded with the Augsburg Academic Prize for Intercultural Studies in 2011.

(2016)

Petrit Halilaj's work is closely linked to the recent history of his native Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often uses as a starting point to spark opposing poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, his projects span a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, text, and performance. He often uses materials from Kosovo and manifests them as ambitious spatial installations, translating personal relationships, places, and people into sculptural forms.

(2023)

AYESHA HAMEED addresses borders and migration, critical race theory and the visual cultures of the Black Atlantic in her research and performance-based work. Her artistic works have been shown at ICA London, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, among others. She currently teaches and conducts research at Goldsmiths, University of London.

(2019)

The artist and filmmaker JAN PETER HAMMER (*1970 in Kirchheim unter Teck) lives and works in Berlin. His works have been shown internationally, including The Beast and the Sovereign at MACBA, Barcelona & Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2015); Toys Redux – On Play and Critique at Migros Museum, Zurich; Athens Biennale (2013); Without Reality There Is No Utopia at CAAC – Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Sevilla (2011).

(2017)

STEFANO HARNEY and Fred Moten are the authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2020) both from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. Stefano is Professor of Transversal Aesthetics at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Fred teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. They have been friends and writing partners for almost forty years.

(2022)

Kinda Hassan is a libanese multimedia artist who works with video and sound among other art forms. She has exhibited her artwork in a number of local and international festivals and art galleries, including Transmediale in Berlin, MUCEM Museum in Marseille and La Maréchalerie Art Center in Versailles, Mumok Museum in Vienna, Zawya Cinema in Cairo, Oberhausen Film Festival in Oberhausen, at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, Werkleitz Festival in Halle, Casa Arabe in Madrid and Cordoba, Metropolis Cinema in Beirut, Al-Riwaq Gallery in Bahrain, and City Of Women in Ljubljana. Hassan completed her Master's degree in Fine Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts ALBA in 2007 and her Sound Design Master’s degree at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts ESBA-TALM in 2018.

In 2021–2022 she was Artist-in-Residence at Akademie der Künste der Welt together with Mohammad Shawky Hassan. Kinda Hassan and Mohammad Shawky Hassan met in Cairo in the summer of 2017, and started working together on the sonic concept and soundtrack design of the film Shall I Compare You in a Summer’s Day? in December 2018. Taking Arab folktales as its formal reference, and Egyptian pop music as its primary sonic material, Shall I compare You to a Summer’s Day? is a queer contemporary take on One Thousand and One Nights. The project consists of a research-based essay film and a publication that attempt to expand the possibilities of pop cultural genera, such as music videos, musical theatre and TV series, in order to explore the ways in which a queer lover’s discourse could emerge from traditional modes of storytelling and various registers of language deeply rooted in Arab popular culture.

(2022)

Mohammad Shawky Hassan is an Egyptian filmmaker and video artist. He studied philosophy, film directing and cinema studies at the American University in Cairo, The Academy of Cinematic Arts & Sciences and Columbia University. His film And on a Different Note (2015) premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded, and was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of its permanent collection. His work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), MUCEM, Sursock Museum, Sheffield DocFest and Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) among others. He is currently a Braunschweig Projects fellow at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK) and a lecturer at Humboldt University’s Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies.

In 2021–2022 he was Artist-in-Residence at Akademie der Künste der Welt together with Kinda Hassan. Kinda Hassan and Mohammad Shawky Hassan met in Cairo in the summer of 2017, and started working together on the sonic concept and soundtrack design of the film Shall I Compare You in a Summer’s Day? in December 2018. Taking Arab folktales as its formal reference, and Egyptian pop music as its primary sonic material, Shall I compare You to a Summer’s Day? is a queer contemporary take on One Thousand and One Nights. The project consists of a research-based essay film and a publication that attempt to expand the possibilities of pop cultural genera, such as music videos, musical theatre and TV series, in order to explore the ways in which a queer lover’s discourse could emerge from traditional modes of storytelling and various registers of language deeply rooted in Arab popular culture.2021–2022 war Kinda Hassan gemeinsam mit Mohammad Shawky Hassan Artist-in-Residence der Akademie der Künste der Welt. Kinda Hassan und Mohammad Shawky Hassan lernten sich im Sommer 2017 in Kairo kennen und begannen im Dezember 2018 mit der gemeinsamen Arbeit am Klangkonzept des Films Shall I Compare You in a Summer's Day?. Mit arabischen Volksmärchen als formaler Referenz und ägyptischer Popmusik als primärem Soundquelle ist Shall I compare You to a Summer's Day? eine queere zeitgenössische Interpretation von Tausendundeine Nacht. Das Projekt besteht aus einem recherchebasierten Essayfilm sowie einer Publikation und versucht, die Grenzen popkultureller Genres wie Musikvideos, Musiktheater und Fernsehserien zu erweitern. Dabei soll erforscht werden, wie - ausgehend von traditionellen Formen des Storytelling und sprachlichen Normen, die tief in der arabischen Populärkultur verwurzelt sind - die Geschichte eines queeren Liebespaar erzählt werden kann.

(2022)

ALICE HASTERS, born 1989 in Cologne, lives in Berlin. She studied journalism in Munich and has worked for Tagesschau and RBB, among others. In September 2019, her book Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen, aber wissen sollten [What white people do not want to hear about racism, but should know] was published by hanserblau. She and Maxi Häcke have a monthly podcast on feminism and pop culture called Feuer & Brot.

(2020)

EMMA HAUGH is a visual artist and educator based in Dublin and Berlin. Weaving together installation, performance, publishing and collaborative workshop techniques, she is interested in re-orienting attention in relation to cultural narratives and develops work from a queer/feminist questioning of what is missing?. She is the editor of ‘Having A Kiki - Queer Desire & Public Space’ published by PVA, and is co-founder of the artistic-curatorial collective the Many Headed Hydra.

(2018)

LYDIA HAUTH, ethnologist, has worked at the GRASSI Museum for Ethnography in Leipzig since 2014. As a volunteer and research associate she has coordinated and curated several special exhibitions in the series Grassi invites.

(2018)

The figure of the collector and art detective RAMON HAZE was “discovered” by the artists Andreas Grahl and Holmer Feldmann in 1997. Since then they have reconstructed his art collection called “The Cabinet”. From Marcel Duchamp to Andreas Baader and Jeff Koons, it covers almost a hundred years of cultural history.

(2017)

Leah-Lilith Heeren studied from 2015-2023 at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne under Prof. Alex Grein and Prof. Johannes Wohnseifer. During her studies she founded the platform IN MY HANDS. IN MY HANDS is a photography magazine and platform for mainly young photographers and artists, and shows a cross-section of today's young photography in physical and digital space. The form and design of the object magazine is constantly being questioned in the ongoing issues, thus breaking up a uniform structure. By distancing the magazine from its role as a mere information carrier, it is placed in ever new contexts and invites interaction and experiences in real space. In 2023, Heeren received the Cologne Design Award for IN MY HANDS.

(2024)

NANNA HEIDENREICH (*1970) is professor for Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is a media & cultural studies scholar as well as a curator for film, video as well as political & theoretical interventions. Curatorial works include Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (2008-2017), HKW (2016/17), Hotspots. Migration and the Sea, ADKDW, 2019. Her most recent project was Auslaufende Umwelten, developed together with Marcus Held for Kunstverein D21 in Leipzig. Her research areas include postcolonial media theory, critical migration studies, image politics, art & activism, queer cinema, oceanic perspectives and most recently, the discourse on the so-called invasive species. She lives in Vienna & Berlin.
nannaheidenreich.net.

(2022)

ÁGNES HELLER is a Hungarian philosopher and a Holocaust survivor. She was one of the key members of the Budapest School, a forum formed by philosopher Georg Lukács in the early 1960s to promote the renewal of Marxist criticism in the face of really existing socialism in Hungary. Heller emigrated to New York in 1986, where she became Hannah Arendt’s successor as chair for philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. She authored numerous works, among others Everyday Life (Routledge Kegan & Paul 1984), The Theory of Need in Marx (Allison and Busby 1976) and Can Modernity Survive? (polity press 1990). In 2016, her essay Von der Utopie zur Dystopie: Was können wir uns wünschen? (Edition Konturen) was released.

(2017)

STEFAN HELMREICH is an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In his award-winning book Alien Ocean (2009) he accompanies marine biologists in their deep-sea research. In a new book project he deals with the forensics and mediality of waves and their measurements in the time of climate change.


(2019)

LOUIS HENDERSON (*1983 in Norwich, UK) is a filmmaker whose works investigate connections between colonialism, technology, capitalism, and history. He has shown his work at places such as Rotterdam International Film Festival, Doclisboa, CPH:DOX, New York Film Festival, Contour Biennial, Kiev Biennial, Centre Pompidou, SAVVY Contemporary, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Tate Britain. He lives in Lisbon and Paris.

(2016)

DANIEL HENDRICKSON is a translator, musician, and member of the artist group CHEAP. He lives and works in Berlin.

(202)

SHEILA HETI was born in 1978 in Toronto, where she currently lives. She is the author of the international bestseller How Should a Person Be? (2010), which became an essential read for millennials. She co-authored Women in Clothes (2014) with Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits, another influential work featuring texts, images and numerous interviews on women and fashion. She writes for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her diverse body of work, ranging from drama to stage shows, ingeniously combines elements of art, autobiography and journalism. The New York Times listed her among the 15 most significant women who shape the way we read and write literature in the 21st century.

(2021)

TATIANA HEUMAN works as a musician and producer. Her unique approach to musical production was founded essentially in a free, intuitive and experimental self-made territory where genres and tags are fluid and in permanent mutation. After two EPs released in 2014 and 2016, her first album QEEI was released in August 2018 on New York based label Astro Nautico. She has toured all around Europe, USA, Mexico and South America. Her solo work and collaborations were presented on venues and festivals such as Mutek Buenos Aires, Volta festival, MONOM Funkhaus, Tauron Nowa Muzyka festival, Heroines of Sound, MACBA, HeK Basel, CTM festival, Alice Chp, Sophiensæle, Het Zuidelijk Toneel and Casino Luxembourg. Her aesthetic language has been enriched through collaborations with artists from various art fields working on sound design and music composition for films and performing arts. In 2018 Tatiana starts collaborating with performer and choreographer Olivia Hyunsin Kim. During 2019 she worked on the piece Neither God, nor Master or Husband for Kunst Radio in collaboration with Florencia Curci and Anna Raimondo, which addresses feminist contagion in Buenos Aires as the main topic. Tatiana actively develops a series of music production laboratories and workshops with the principle of understanding listening and audio processing as a means of manifestation. She is part of the communities #VIVAS (female* sounds platform), TRRUENO and female:pressure. Tatiana Heuman studied Dance, Corporal Expression (UNA), Expanded Music (UNSAM) in Argentina.

(2020)

Sandi Hilal (born in Palestine) is an architect based in Bethlehem. She is consultant with the UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) on the camp improvement programme and visiting professor at Al-Quds/Bard College Palestine. She is founding member of DAAR as well as Campus in Camps.
She is co-author of several research projects, such as “Stateless Nation” with Alessandro Petti and “Border Devices” with Multiplicity, which are published and exhibited internationally.

In 2013 she was together with Alessandro Petti a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

MIGUEL HILARI (born 1985 in Hamburg) is a filmmaker based in La Paz, Bolivia. His films address tensions between countryside and city, migration, colonial history and indigenous culture. They have been shown and won awards at various international film festivals. He also organizes film workshops in schools.

(2022)

DIRK HILDEBRANDT is a research assistant at the Department of Art History at the University of Cologne. He studied art history and philosophy in Bonn, Paris and Basel and wrote his doctorate on the relationship between work and practice in Allan Kaprow’s art. His current research focuses on artistic publication strategies in modern and contemporary art, the networks of European postwar art and the examination of the globalized situation of contemporary art.

(2021)

FELICIA ANGÉLIQUE, worked in business before she switched to education in 2015 and began working as a teacher at Sankofa e.V. She has been singing in the ComChor choir under the direction of Dr. Dr. Daniele Daude for five years. In September 2020 she began her studies in music education and social work at the FH Clara Hoffbauer in Potsdam with a focus on youth work and resilience. Felicia Angélique aka Feelicia.Sunflower is a part of the Fasia Jansen Ensemble, which is very dear to her heart.

(2020)

MAX JORGE HINDERER CRUZ is a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher. From March 2019 to June 2020 he was Director of the National Museum of Art (MNA) in La Paz, where he founded the museum's Program for Decolonial Studies in Art (PED) and was responsible for generating a historical change of the institutional profile. His work at the museum has been recognized by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), being considered a reference in the international museum community for its developments in the fields of social inclusion and education.

As curator and cultural programmer (selection): from 2008 to 2011 he was curator of the exhibition and publication project Principio Potosí (Museo Reina Sofía Madrid/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin/MNA and MUSEF La Paz - with Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann). From 2014 to 2016 he was coordinator of P.A.C.A. (Program of Autonomous Cultural Actions) and Seminário Público Micropolíticas in São Paulo (with Suely Rolnik, Amilcar Packer and Tatiana Roque). With Paul B. Preciado, Margarita Tsomou and Nelli Kambouri he organized the Apatride Society as part of the Documenta14 public program in Athens and Kassel between 2016 and 2017. In 2017 he was invited by Chimurenga’s Pan African Space Station, to co-program a section of their project Angazi, but I’m sure. at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

Hinderer Cruz is author of the book Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa - program in progress (Afterall Books/MIT Press, 2013 - with Sabeth Buchmann) and, amongst others, editor of Art and Ideology Critique After 1989 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König/Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2013 – with E. Birkenstock, et al.). Most recently, Hinderer Cruz published LA DEUDA CON LA BELLEZA. Textos 2019-2021 (PCP Programa Cultura Política, La Paz, 2022).

His texts and cultural critique have been published in Spanish, German, English, Portuguese and French, in various formats in catalogues, magazines, and international newspapers in Europe, Africa, the USA and Latin America. Hinderer Cruz regularly publishes essays in the Bolivian newspaper La Razón.

Hinderer Cruz was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) in 2016 and has been an active ADKDW member since 2018. He was the artistic director of ADKDW from 2022-2023.

HELMUT HÖGE, a journalist and author, writes about animals – including as a columnist and “Aushilfshausmeister” at Die Tageszeitung (taz) – and about non-Darwinian biology. His work also often deals with symbioses and correlations – keeping his eyes and ears open for interesting things. He is the author of the recently published book Die lustige Tierwelt und ihre ernste Erforschung (2018).

(2019)

TOM HOLERT works as an independent scholar and curator. He authored and co-authored various books on topics pertaining to the politics of the image, historical and contemporary art’s relation to knowledge production, migratory aesthetics, and the visual cultures of war education. He also organized exhibitions—such as Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (with Anselm Franke), and Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2012 he was invited to join the Academy of the Arts of the World as one of its founding members. In 2015 he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin. Recent book publications include Knowledge Beside Itself. Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020), Politics of Learning, Politics of Space. Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s (De Gruyter, 2021) and ca. 1972. Gewalt – Umwelt – Identität – Methode (Spector Books, 2022).

(2022)

SONGDAM HONG is a political activist and visual artist. Raised in Gwangju, South Korea, he was involved in the 1980 protests against the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. He became known for his woodblock prints that show the government’s brutal treatment of the demonstrators and which lend expression to the traumatic experiences of a whole generation.
In 1983, he founded, together with other activists and artists, the People’s Art School in Gwangju, which existed until 1992 as a kind of political and artistic summer academy.
In 1989, he and other exponents of the Minjung movement were arrested for allegedly violating the National Security Act of the South Korean government. They were declared ‘prisoners of conscience’ by Amnesty International, which demanded and successfully brought about their release in the early 1990s. In 1996, the South Korean government commissioned him to create a 42-meter-long mural for Chonnam National University in Gwangju.

(2020)

SAM HOPKINS is an artist and scholar who is attentive to the ways in which narratives and truths are encoded and produced by different media. His work is rooted in Kenya and engages with specific networks to collectively interrupt authoritative narratives of power. He explores various ways of ‘co-producing’ artworks as counter-narratives that can be read both within and beyond the gallery or museum.

Hopkins has participated in various exhibitions, including biennales in Lagos, Dakar, Poznan and Moscow. He has exhibited at a wide range of museums and galleries, including Dortmunder U, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Goodman Gallery and Richard Taittinger Gallery. His work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian, Abteiberg Museum and the Iwalewahaus. In 2014 he was named one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. He currently works as Assistant Professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and continues to develop his research in Nairobi.

(2021)

Since the beginning of their collaboration in the 1990s, collaborative processes have been at the center of Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger's artistic work. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with relationships between people, animals and machines and open up both critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of equal treatment between the actors. More-than-human others appear in their works as individuals, with their own interests, abilities and desires. To tell their stories, Hörner/Antlfinger use methods of multispecies ethnography that recognize the interconnectedness and inseparability of human and non-human life forms.

In 2014 they founded the Interspecies Collective CMUK * together with the grey parrots Clara and Karl. Aim of the Interspecies Collective was to decenter human animals as the sole creators and to move the focus onto the artistic practice and expression of non-human Others. Their work has been shown on numerable exhibitions and festivals. Hörner/Antlfinger have been professors of media art/transmedia spaces at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne since 2009. Since 2023, they have held a professorship for Multispecies Storytelling at the KHM. They joined the Minding Animals International Network in 2018. Hörner/Antlfinger live and work in Cologne.

*The word CMUK is an acronym based on the first names of the founding members: Clara, Mathias, Ute and Karl. It can be used in Slovakian as "kisses".

www.h--a.org

(2024)

INGVAR HORNUNG likes to organize and to cooperate in self-organized reading groups. Starting as a participant, he joined the ongoing reading group at ADKDW in 2018. Collectively keeping the flame alive, together with others he coordinated and moderated the reading group Towards A Dirty Universalism throughout 2019, including workshops and small lectures, focused on exchange of ideas and open discussions – reaching far beyond the texts.

For 2020/2021 he is part of the organizing team around the current reading group After Work.

(2020)

SREĆKO HORVAT is a Croatian philosopher and activist. He is regarded as one of the central figures of the new Left in post-Yugoslavia. His most recently published books include Subversion! (Zero Books 2017),* The Radicality of Love* (Polity 2015) and written with Slavoj Žižek What Does Europe Want? (Columbia University Press 2014). Together with Yannis Varoufakis, he is one of the initiators of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 2025). Furthermore, he was one of the founders of Subversive Festival, Zagreb. Horvat was co-curator and panelist of the symposium The Extreme Centre, which took place in April 2017 as part of the PLURIVERSALE VI. He lives and works in Zagreb.

In April/May 2017 he was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

“Spinning around, overlooking a backyard in Northern Paris, Martha H. and Salome G. work on uncovering the institutionalization of a linguistic expression – the German word ‘man’ – which they consider to be a speech act, for it shapes the lives and minds of mankind in an unfortunate way, as the two researchers M. H. and S. G. perceive it.”

(2020)

RANJIT HOSKOTÉ, born in 1969 in Mumbai, is a poet, art critic, translator, and the secretary of the Indian PEN Club. As a world-renowned curator, he was responsible for the Gwangju Biennale (2008) as well as the Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011), among others. His book Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West was published in English in 2012, coauthored by Ilija Trojanow.

(2020)

BANAFSHE HOURMAZDI is from the Ruhr region of Germany. She studied theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts Baden Württemberg and subsequently completed her Master’s degree at the Zürich University of the Arts. She has developed and presented pieces at the Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Theater Luzern and Ballhaus Ost, and been a guest a number of times at the Körber Studio for Young Directors and at the Fast Forward Festival at the Staatstheater Braunschweig; other works have been developed at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse Berlin, the Munich Kammerspiele, Theater Oberhausen and the Sophiensaele in Berlin. For her production Meine Nase läuft at Theater Drachengasse, she received the Newcomer Prize in 2015 from the City of Vienna. For her performance in Futur Drei (directed by Faraz Shariat), she won the Götz George Young Talent Award as part of the First Steps Awards in 2019. She has a lead role in Futur Drei and a supporting role in Kokon (directed by Leonie Krippendorf), both presented at the 2020 Berlinale. She lives and works in Berlin and elsewhere.

(2020)

HOUSE OF MELODY is the first German voguing house founded in 2012 by Mother Leo Melody. Next to teaching regular classes and workshops throughout Germany, the House actively organizes workshops, panels, session and dance events with international guests at venues like Tanzhaus NRW, Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf or Sophiensäle and HAU in Berlin.

(2017)

SATCH HOYT is a composer and a visual artist living and working in Berlin. Among others, Hoyt worked with Grace Jones, master percussionist composer Stomu Yamashta, played flute on Louise Bourgeois’ Otte, and is flautist as well as percussionist in the band Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber since 2001.

(2016)

ALI HUSSEIN AL-ADAWY is a critic, curator, and researcher. Ali’s research interests center around representations of labor in film and art, the shifting dynamics of art spaces in times of permanent catastrophe, and the relationship between the circulation of images, human rights, and financialization. He was a fellow of the Harun Farocki Residency in 2018 and was part of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

(2024)

RAED IBRAHIM is an artist and art instructor specialized in the arts in the public spheres and art interventions. He is interested in developing art historical ontology as well as discussing and enhancing the local and regional environment of art education, art production, and cultural policies.

He lectures at the Faculty of Design and Fine Arts at Jordan University. He worked as a consultant and content developer at the Children Museum Jordan, and lead numerous workshops in Jordan related to art thinking, diversity, research and cultural activism, including four editions of The Spring Sessions (2014–2017), a learning experience and arts residency program in Amman. He is also involved in regional and international art programs of learning, discussion and exchange, and with solo and group shows over the past two decades. Between 2015 and 2018, he co-directed the works of the Jordan national group for developing and researching cultural policies in Jordan, and co-organized in 2016 the massive exhibition About Culture in Jordan at Hangar Ras Al Ain which included over 50 independent cultural initiatives from around Jordan.

(2024)

As a New German Organization, we are committed to a post-migrant society in a democratic republic. Often, the domestic group identity does not include us. But we are fighting against that: This is our country, too. But this is not possible without resistance and opposition. Resistant perspectives are always there, no matter whether they are internal or external, our own or someone else's. To perceive them, to give them attention, to take a stand, to show solidarity, to ask questions, to stay curious – “panta rhei” is the symbol for our actions. Integrationshaus e.V. was founded ten years ago by two social workers in their apartment. We started as a migrant organization and today are a member of the network „Neue deutsche Organisationen". We stand up for equal rights for all, for the right for disintegration, for a society based on solidarity and for the visibility of different realities of life. We work with and for people whose voices are not being heard enough or who are being silenced, we have a clear anti-racist and feminist stance and we want to change structures to actually create space for everyone.

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SIMONE BERTUZZI and SIMONE TRABUCCHI have been collaborating as INVERNOMUTO since 2003. Invernomuto explores what remains of subcultures by moving through different media. Bertuzzi and Trabucchi have developed individual lines of research into sound with the outlets Palm Wine and STILL, respectively. Their in-depth field work lead to Negus: a series of sculptures, installations and a feature-length experimental documentary.

(2019)

BUKET ISGÖREN (born 1992) lives in Cologne. She has been working at Kunsthaus KAT18 since 2015.

Buket Isgören's cosmos of images follows a profound principle of organisation. What the artist processes on a temporal level in the exact reproduction of dates and deadlines is depicted in her drawings on a spatial level in clear contours. The creative process is characterised by strength, concentration and never-ending continuity. At the centre of this pictorial cosmos is the motif of the flower, to which the artist returns again and again. The Turkish name Buket means bouquet of flowers.

Buket Isgören's works have been exhibited at Kolumba Kunstmuseum, Cologne (2023/24; 2022/23); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2022); GiG Munich, Munich (2022) and Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2020), among others.

(Status: 2024)

MIKOŁAJ IWAŃSKI is the director of the Department of History and Art Theory in the Faculty of Painting and New Media at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. He studied philosophy and economics and earned his doctorate on the market conditions for the development of contemporary art in Poland. His special areas of study include the analysis of the art market as well as the social determinants of art. Mikołaj Iwański lives in Szczecin.

(2018)

DAGNA JAKUBOWSKA is a visual artist, theatre director, entrepreneur and author of critical culinary actions. With her performative practice she explores the politics of nutrition, nutrition-related processes and other aspects of daily life. She lives and works in Warsaw and is founder and coordinator of the socio-culinary initiative Ferment Traveling Kitchen and the Nowa Przestrzeń Foundation.

(2018)

rym Jalil is a poet, visual anthropologist and food artist. Jalil’s work orbits around relationships between memory, social space and cultural significations of food and coffee. Jalil’s long-term project Jebena Talks; Conversations and Ceremony Around Memory and Food is a space for intimate gathering and exploration of ritual with a focus on themes of access and exclusion. Their research into food rituals is driven by their interest in acts of nourishment, care, andnecessity within diasporic contexts. Jalil’s artistic research and practice takes an autoethnographic approach, using text and moving image in experimental visual assemblages. Jaili’s current academic research project explores black hair and intimacy within the intersections of gender and states of diaspora in two specific barbershops in Cairo and Münster.

(2024)

ŁUKASZ JASTRUBCZAK was born in 1984 in Zielona Góra. He works in various mediums: video, installation, sculpture, concert, journey, and ephemeral action. His solo exhibitions have been presented at Art in General in New York, Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, CCA Kronika in Bytom and Sabot Gallery in Cluj-Napoca. In 2013 he received ‘Spojrzenia’ (Views) – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award for the most interesting young polish artist in the past two years.
He is a member, with Krzysztof Kaczmarek, of the artistic duo Krzysztofjastrubczakłukaszkaczmarek; and author, with Sebastian Cichocki, of the publication and events titled Mirage. He played on synthesizer in the bands Boring Drug and ŁST. He is affiliated with Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw. He lives in Szczecin, Poland, where he works in the Painting and New Media Department of the Academy of Arts and where he co-directs with Zorka Wollny the Młode Wilki festival, dedicated to visual and sound art.

(2017)

Hyeseon Jeong is an artist with a background in design and works with experimental documentaries, fictional stories and sound. She is interested in seeking irony in technological and social transformations. Her works have been shown at EMAF in Osnabrück, die digitale düsseldorf and SONOHR Radio & Podcast Festival in Bern, among others. Currently she studies at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne.

(2021)

OLGA JITLINA is an art historian, critic, curator, and video artist from Saint Petersburg. She postgraduated at Repin Academy of Arts. Jitlina’s works often investigates labour migration, its narratives and illusions in post-Soviet space.

(2015)

THE JITTA COLLECTIVE is a collaborative project of various artists under the direction of Kefa Oiro and Stephanie Thiersch. Oiro (* 1981 in Nairobi, Kenya) is a choreographer, dancer, and head of the Tuchangamke Dance Group. He lives in Nairobi where he co-curates the Nairobi Festival of Performance and Media Arts. Thiersch (* 1970 in Wiesbaden) is a choreographer, director, and media artist who has developed several award-winning stage productions with her company MOUVOIR. She lives in Cologne.

(2017)

The artist duo JODI originated in 1995 when Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans created their first website, wwwwwwwww.jodi.org. Together with a small group of international artists, they developed the concept of ‘Net.Art’ and placed itin the context of contemporary art. The Net.Art movement expressed critical awareness of the impact made by the digital information society before this awareness became widespread. Digital media and networks are characterised by their double layering, a visible surface and underlying codes that determine or manipulate how the public reception and interaction should proceed (‘social design’ or ‘digital dictatorship’?). These underlying codes and programming options come to the surface in JODI’s work. Instead of structural contradictions, their focus is precisely on this medium-specific dysfunctionality. JODI responds to the flow of technological innovations as a parasite, experimenting with the characteristics of new digital means and the physical peculiarities of the immaterial medium. Online public interaction first motivated JODI to approach this medium.

(2019)

SUZANNE JOSEK was born in 1969, she attended numerous stage dance seminars at the John Cranko School in Stuttgart as a teenager. 1990-97Studied musicology, art history, archaeology, Romance studies and Slavic studies at the University of Cologne with study visits to St Petersburg and Moscow. Master's degree in The New York School: Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff (published by Pfau-Verlag). 2015 PhD in musicology on the complete works of Jonathan Harvey (Jonathan Harvey: ‘...towards a Pure Land’, published by Schott-Verlag). During this time, she has been involved in numerous international projects in the artistic-performing field: dance, theatre, music, music theatre, and in the areas of directing and dramaturgy. 2015-19 Training as a yoga teacher BDY/EYU at the Yogaforum Düsseldorf. 2019-2022 Training as a breathing and meditation teacher at Rosenwaldhof, Berlin. Since 2022 Study of Sanskrit at the University of Hamburg. - Since 2015 until today independent art mediator at the KOLUMBA Art Museum, for which she developed and realised the formats Museum in the Body (2021) and Work Meditation (2024). 2022/23 co-development and participation in the project Beau comme un Buren mais plus loinwith and for KOLUMBA as part of the project Tu peux prendre ton temps by the artist Éric Baudelaire, Paris Author,

ANJA JUNGHANS is Agent for Diversity at the LWL-Industriemuseum Henrichshütte Ironworks since July 2019. There she guides a diversity-oriented transformation process as part of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes program 360º – New City Cultures.

She pursued cultural studies in Magdeburg and Merseburg, and before starting at the museum in Hattingen, she was initially a freelancer in Munich and later a project manager at the Zukunftsakademie NRW in Bochum.

(2020)

RAJKAMAL KAHLON (* 1974 in Auburn, USA) questions the boundaries between painting, photography, and sculpture in her interdisciplinary practice. Her works have been shown in many prominent museums as well as at art biennials in North America, Europe, the Mideast, and Asia. She is currently showing a solo exhibition at the Weltmuseum, Vienna. She lives and works in Berlin.

(2018)

Historian KATJA KAISER conducts research in the areas of colonial history, museum and exhibition history as well as gender studies. Currently she works for a research project at the Centre of Natural History, Hamburg; she previously worked as research associate at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. There, among other things, she took part in the exhibition project German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present(2016).

(2018)

KMRU is the solo experimental ambient project of Nairobi based sound artist Joseph Kamaru. He is known for making intelligent atmospheric and emotionally experimental electronic music, giving a personal touch using everything from gritty indigenous sounds to field recordings and Synthesis to create intricate sonic soundscapes. Already earmarked by Resident Advisor as one of “15 East African Artists You Need To Hear”, KMRU is truly pioneering in the East African experimental music scene and breaking borders with his adventurous sounds. He is a regular of the legendary Nyegenyege Festival since 2017 and has also presented his live performances at CTM festival and Gamma Festival. KMRU was selected to participate at the MusicMakers Hacklab, CTM Festival, released his latest EP Erased on London label, Byrd Out, participated in GAMMA AI Lab Russia and Mutek Montreal AI Lab in 2020. Aside from his music production, KMRU has also been presenting a monthly Radio shows on Bloop Internet Public Radio, guesting on NTS Radio and Rinse FM, and also runs the Nairobi Ableton User Group.

(2020)

NELLI KAMBOURI is a gender scholar whose work and publications focus on gender theory, migration, labor, technology, logistics and social movements. Since documenta 14, she is a member of the Apatride Society of the Political Others. In the past, she was employed as a senior research fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and at the Foundation for Research & Technology in Greece. She has taught at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University and at the University of Athens. Currently, she works as a research fellow at the University of Hertfordshire (UK) for the Horizon 2020 Project PLUS: Platform Labour in Urban Spaces. She is also teaching at the Open University of Cyprus.

(2019)

FATOU KANDÉ SENGHOR believes that individuals, communities and countries must reclaim their missing historical narratives to enable them to move forward, and that the answers and tools they need to deal with their present lie firmly in their past. In Kandé Senghor’s world, history is not resolved.

(2020)

RAPHAEL KARIUKI is a DJ and Producer from Nairobi. He is a co-founder of World’s Loudest Library (WLL), an outsider artists collective, and Sound of Nairobi.

(2020)

BERND KASPAREK is a mathematician and cultural anthropologist with a focus on migration and border studies. In particular his interests include hotspots and digital borders. He is a founding member of the Network for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies and of movements: Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies as well as a board member of the activist research association bordermonitoring.eu.

(2019)

AKI KAURISMAKI, the most prolific filmmaker in the film history of Finland worked as postman, dish-washer and film critic before turning an auteur on celluloid – spinning bizarre parodies of cinema conventions such as film noir, road movies, Western films, musicals etc. Concentrating exclusively on the tales of the working class, his films are a delicate balance between minimalism and melodrama, deliciously mixed with deadpan comic elements.

(2020)

NATASHA A. KELLY holds a PhD in communication studies and is a sociologist specializing in visual communication, colonialism and feminism. Born in London and socialized in Germany, the author, lecturer and curator has taught and lectured at numerous institutions in Germany and Austria. In her publications Afroism, Sisters & Souls, Afrokultur and in her artistic works EDEWA, Giftschrank und African_Diaspora Palast, Natasha A. Kelly combines theory with practice, thus cross-referencing the fields of science, society and politics. Involved in the German black community for numerous years, she works as a scientific advisor to the Central Council of African Communities in Germany, amongst others. In addition to her work as a consultant for various art institutions, she is the artistic director of the theater programme M(a)y Sister, which was performed at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater in Berlin since 2015.

(2018)

LARA KHALDI (* 1982 in Jerusalem) is an independent curator. She has curated exhibitions and projects in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Cairo, Dubai, Oslo, Brussels, and Amsterdam. She is currently co-curating Desires into Fossils: Monuments without a State, a series of research exhibitions at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah. Khaldi lives in Jerusalem.br />
(2017)

FATIMA KHAN, born in 1987 in Bhola/Bangladesh and raised in Cologne, is an artist, curator, author and moderator. She studied Ancient Languages and Cultures - Classical Literature and German Studies at the University of Cologne. She was the initiator and co-founder of q[lit]*clgn, the first feminist literature festival in Germany. She is currently studying Media Arts/Literary Writing in the postgraduate diploma program at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. On Instagram, she posts a visual diary of banal everyday situations under @fatum.khan. (Status 2022)

FRED KHUMALO, former editor of the Sunday Times Review, is a renowned South African columnist and author. He won the literary award of the European Union for his novel Bitches' Brew (Jacana Media 2006) in 2006. Other prose works by Khumalo include Seven Steps to Heaven (Jacana Media 2008) and Dancing the Death Drill (Umuzi 2017). He has worked for a variety of newspapers in South Africa and abroad. From 2011 to 2012, Fred Khumalo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. As part of the PLURIVERSALE IV and the Rhine-South-Africa Fellowship, he dedicated himself to the sensitive subject of Xenophobia and racism in post-apartheid South Africa: Challenges to a writer. Khumalo lives in Johannesburg.

In 2016 he was a Fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

GRADA KILOMBA is a writer and artist. She was a Guest Professor for Gender Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is the co-editor of Mythen, Masken und Subjekte (Unrast, 2005) and author of Plantation Memories (Unrast, 2008). She performs theoretical texts at locations such as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

(2016)

KELVIN KILONZO grew up in Gießen and is studying contemporary dance in Cologne. He frequently appears in the free performance scene as well as with his breakdance crew.

(2017)

Born in South Korea, GYUNG MOO KIM had a few years of formal dance training during his period of transition from a street dancer into a contemporary dancer, but he considers himself essentially to be a self-trained dancer. In recent years he has worked as a dancer and performer with Sidra Bell, Gallim Dance, New York Theatre Ballet, Fabien Prioville, Helena Waldmann, Alexander Kolpin, E.K.K.O, Minako Seki, Sasha Waltz & Guests and Ana Borralho & João Galante in Europe. In 2011, Moo won first prize in both dance and choreography at the 15th International Solo-Dance-Theater Festival in Stuttgart with Grief Point, a collaboration with Sidra Bell. Since 2013, his works (Chasing Silence 1 & 2, Deconstruction;f1,4) have been presented at various venues in Berlin and Miltenberg in Germany as well as in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

(2021)

SOYOUNG KIM is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Korea National University of Arts, Director of the Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, and Visiting Professor at Duke University, UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. She is the editor of the ten-volume History of Korean Cinema, National Research Foundation of Korea, co-editor of Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space, with Chris Berry and Lynn Spiegel, and Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene with Shiuhhuah Serena Chou and Rob Wilson. Soyoung Kim’s Exile Trilogy (2014-2017) includes three documentaries about Koreans in Central Asia, Russia, and Korea. Kim Soyoung also directed Women’s History Trilogy, a series of documentaries (Koryu: Southern Women South Korea, I’ll Be Seeing Her, and New Women: Her First Song) realised between 2000 and 2004 and was Guest of Honor at the Guanajuato International Film Festival.

CHRISTOPHER KIRKELY is an archivist, artist, curator, and occasional DJ from Portland who runs the project Sahel Sounds, a platform for exploring the arts and music of West Africa through non-traditional ethnographic fieldwork.

(2016)

FELIX KLOPOTEK lives and works in Cologne. He is an editor at StadtRevue and contributes, among others, to Konkret, Jungle World and Kaput Magazin. In 2014, he realized, with the assistance of the Academy of the Arts of the World, the project A Revolutionary Parable on the Equality Of Men. Most recently, he edited the collective volume Zonen der Selbstoptimierung (Matthes & Seitz 2016).

(2016)

In 2001, BIANCA KLOSE founded The Mobile Council against Right-Wing Extremism (Mobile Beratung gegen Rechtsextremismus – MBR), which she currently directs. The main task of the counselling service is the analysis of phenomena such as right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism and racism in a local context, as well as the support of skills for dealing with them. Klose advises and coaches political parties, administrations, religious communities, organizations, unions as well as committed groups and individuals. She is a regular speaker at expert meetings, congresses and federal and state committees on the central issues of the MBR. Bianca Klose is a spokesperson for the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Demokratieentwicklung (Federal Working Committee for the Development of Democracy – BAGD). She lives and works in Berlin.

(2017)

Lisa Klosterkötter (she/her) is a curator and artist. Interventions in public space, in various city districts as well as in peripheral locations, are the focus of her work. In collaboration with artists, authors, collectives and experts from various fields, she works on exhibitions, reading series, performance programs and participatory formats that often focus on the immediate, present experience and embed artistic works in an overarching narrative or thematic bracket. The site-specific work is always based on sensitive research and social rapprochement processes with the aim of local anchoring, contemporary participation and historical reference and classification. Lisa Klosterkötter maintains a consistent writing practice and regularly publishes texts in exhibition catalogs, monographs, zines and artist books.

Lisa Klosterkötter has realized various exhibition and performance projects and interventions in exhibition spaces, institutions and public spaces. In 2023, she curated AIC ON - Das sogenannte Draußen, the joint festival weekend of Cologne's independent art scene; together with Paula Erstmann, she realized the neighborhood project Temporary Kitchen in the Mauritiusviertel for the Temporary Gallery in Cologne in summer 2023. Together with Elena Malzew, she founded the ongoing performance and exhibition format Gegenwart: Doing Youth in Hamburg, which took place in 2020/21 at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and several public venues in various districts of the city. From 2022 to 2024, the project Über Brücken - Bridging will take place in Cologne's public space. As part of the curatorial residency scholarship Residence NRW+, she realized the exhibition and performance series Les Gardiennes at Kunstmuseum Bochum in 2022/2023. In 2022, she curated Public Fictions, an exhibition and performance format in public space in Leverkusen. From 2018 to 2021, she realized projects in collaboration with international artists and collectives at the Strizzi project space in Cologne Kalk. In 2020 she received the research grant of the City of Cologne, in 2022 the research trip for curators of the Goethe Institute, in 2022 she was a scholarship holder of the Residence NRW+ as well as a residency scholarship holder in rural regions in Upper Austria (Aspach im Innkreis, Wirbelfeld, 2022) and Derbyshire (UK, DARP, 2022). She studied fine arts at the HFBK Hamburg and the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, as well as German and educational sciences at the University of Hamburg and completed a traineeship at the Kunstverein Lübeck, 2016-2017.

(2024)

ALEX SIMON KLUG aka FOAM works as an artist and experimental pop musician/producer in Cologne and Hamburg. From 2012 to 2017 he studied art with a focus on time-related media at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Since 2018 he is studying in the postgraduate diploma program at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
Since the beginning of his studies in Hamburg, his artistic work has developed into cross-spatial multimedia installations that play with a close connection between the visual (in digital as well as tangible space) and the acoustic/musical. During his studies he already works as an assistant to artists such as Karin Sander, Achim Mohné or Thomas Kohl and enjoys artistic supervision and seminars from amongst others: Hans W. Koch, Jeanne Faust, Tobias Hartmann, Franziska Windisch, Felix Kubin, Thomas Görne, Hans Joachim Lenger, Alexander Schubert and Ute Janssen.
Together with the artists Kristina Lenz and Tim Gorinski he built up FLAT. room to display artistic works and working methods in digital space as a platform to come together for art and music events and exhibitions.

(2020)

ADRIAN KNUPPERTZ has lately been dealing with questions of power relations and property issues in public space, commons, discourse and who is in position to access it. Besides photography as everyday practice, he is working with Flyposting, installation, sketches, video and sound.

(2020)

ALEXANDER KOCH is a gallerist, curator, and author living in Berlin. He is the director of the Berlin gallery KOW, which he cofounded in 2008 with Nikolaus Oberhuber and Jocelyn Wolff. He is also co-initiator and director of the international network Neue Auftraggeber / New Patrons, which brings artists together with local citizens, assisting them in commissioning contemporary art.

(2018)

Adriana Kocijan, born in Zagreb, studied drama and pantomime at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen. She is an actor and dancer in the independent theater scene, with performances at various German theaters, and also a choreographer and stage designer at the Schauburg in Munich, Theater Giessen, Opera Bonn, Schauspiel Düsseldorf, DT Berlin and Theater an der Ruhr, among others. In diverse productions by Ko Murobushi as well as by Anza Furukawa, she has worked as a Butoh dancer, actor and assistant. She also worked in these capacities in several productions by Susanne Linke. With the founding of the company Cantadoras she has increasingly pursued her own solo projects and performances, and has also undertaken interdisciplinary experiments with different artists like Eckhart Koltermann, Malcolm Goldstein, Fine Kwiatkowski, Robert Bosshard and Wolfram Lakaszus. She has pursued this work since 2016 with her new company Conterbande, never losing sight of theater work. Numerous invitations have brought her to places like France, the UK, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, Poland and Spain. Adriana Kocijan has won the Theaterzwang award several times.

(2020)

STEFFEN KÖHN (b. 1980) lives and works in Berlin. He is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his video and installation works he engages in local collaborations with artists, software developers and science fiction writers to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been shown at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, Lulea Biennial and the ethnographic museums of Copenhagen and Dresden. His films have been screened at the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Word Film Festival Montreal, among others.

(2021)

Jody Korbach (*1991, Bielefeld) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Tal R, Christopher Williams and Johannes Paul Raether. She completed her studies in 2017 as Meisterschülerin of Christopher Williams. Korbach lives and works in Düsseldorf.

"The current relevance of her works unfolds in particular with a view to the developments within the (West) German art scene since the 1970s, as well as the current visibility of the debate on classicism from a sociological perspective." (Katharina Bruns)

"Identity politics and the artistic engagement with the continuity of more or less loud political narratives and voids in German history are Jody Korbach's themes. As a self-proclaimed non-painter, Korbach has been forcing her surroundings into community and excess since 2014. Her soccer team, complete with hooligan bonds Eiskeller Export, revolutionized artificial turf football and brought new images to the art academy. In 2018, she founded the Schützenkorps Europa association, thereby rewriting or rewriting the construct of Europe. In her work, she draws on the themes of faith, custom, homeland and national (social) ism and brings a beer tent atmosphere including drink tokens, memes, revolutionary CDU merch, flags and fan scarves into galleries." (Julian Sturz)

(2024)

Chris Korda is an internationally renowned multimedia artist, whose work spans thirty years and includes electronic music, digital and video art, performance and conceptual art, and culture jamming. Chris pioneered the use of complex polymeter in electronic dance music, and invented a unique MIDI sequencer in order to explore polymeter composition techniques. Chris composes and performs music in a variety of genres, and has released many albums on labels such as Yoyaku, Perlon, Mental Groove, and Gigolo Records.

(2024)

CHRIS KORTE is a scholar, professor, dancer, and an 80s new wave music enthusiast. After completing her Ph.D. on the Berliner Volksbühne at York University in Toronto, Korte moved to Berlin and is currently teaching German theatre history at NYU’s Berlin campus. Chris’s next major research project is on 80s utopianism and synth-pop dance choreography.

(2022)