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.

RUANNE ABOU-RAHME and BASEL ABBAS were from December 2012 to August 2013 Fellows of the Akademie der Künste der Welt. Further information about the two artists can you find here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

DANIELLE ALMEIDA is an anti-racist singer and activist. She holds degrees in Educational Sciences and in Music (Singing). She specializes on the history of Africa and Afro-Brazil. Since 2002, she has been working on Black music and Black cultural manifestations in Latin America, anti-racist education and Black aesthetics. As researcher, singer and educator Danielle Almeida has won several international prizes and awards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Nora Amin lives in Cairo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Enigmatic Majorities

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

KATIA BARRETT is a London-based artist who is currently completing her MA at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem. Her recent research and practice draw upon developments in interdisciplinary theoretical biology in which the subjectivization of nature corresponds with a naturalization of subjectivity. From this 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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SEBASTIAN CHICHOCKI 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

VAGINAL DAVIS is a sexy, itinerant, elderly, retarded, retired whore known internationally for luring innocent young Caucasian men from good families into madness and/or death.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

MADHUSREE DUTTA was born 1959 in Jamshedpur/Jharkhand, India. She studied theatre at National School of Drama, India and is a filmmaker, curator, and author. She is the founder and former director (1998-2015) of Majlis, a center for legal discourse and interdisciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urbanology, inter-disciplinary archiving practices, and Public Culture. Dutta's films are shown regularly at international film festivals and art events. She has received numerous awards, including the 1994 Filmfare Award for Best Documentary and the 2001 Indian Documentary Producers' Association Award. Retrospectives of her work have been shown in 2005 at the nGbK Gallery in Berlin and during the International Women's Film Festival, Trivandrum, as well as at the Feminnale 2006 in Cologne, and the Persistent Resistance Film Festival in New Delhi in 2008. She has curated several art and cultural projects, among others, Expression, the first festival on feminist arts and art discourse in India in 1990; India Sabka, a youth festival on multiculturalism in 2002; Import Export, cultural transfer between India and German speaking Europe in 2005 (Mumbai-Vienna-Berlin); Culture@WSF, the art component for the World Social Forum, 2004; Moving People, an art interface between Africa and Asia in Nairobi, 2007. Her latest curatorial work Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices (2009-2013) was a multi-disciplinary multi-scalar endeavour engaging one hundred visual artists, architects, filmmakers and social scientists. The project was premiered at Forum Expanded, Berlinale, 2010. Her publications include, among many others, Project Cinema City (Tulika Books 2012) which was adjudged the Best Printed Book of the year by Publishing Next Industry Award in 2014. Madhusree Dutta has been Artistic Director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World) since March 2018.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

<!--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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

“‘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)

“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.”

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

NANNA HEIDENREICH has been appointed professor for Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Art in Vienna in October 2020, following positions at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (visiting professor for Media & Cultural Studies, Summer 2016), at the ifs internationale filmschule köln (professor for Digital Narratives – Theory, 10 2016 – 03 2020) the University of Hildesheim (visiting professor for Media & Cultural Studies, Summer 2016) and the University of the Arts in Braunschweig (as lecturer/researcher in media studies at 2011–2016). From 2009–2017 she was curator for the Berlinale program Forum Expanded. From 2015–2017 she worked as a researcher and curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (hkw) in Berlin; projects include Now is the time of monsters. What comes after nations? and Soundtracks. Until 2009 she was a member of the antiracist network Kanak Attak, and she is part of the network critical migration and border regime studies (kritnet). In 2016 she joined the preparations for the 'Tribunal Unraveling the NSU-Complex', which took place in 2017 in Cologne. She has published widley on migration, visual culture, postcolonial media theory, art and activism, queer theory and has edited several DVDs (political, experimental and feminist filmmaking practices). Occasionally she develops independent curatorial projects with film/video and often participates in juries and serves as an advisor, most recently she conceived the Symposium Hotspots: Migration and the Sea in Cologne (11 2019). Occasionally she works as a translator (English-German, including articles by Kaja Silverman, Marc Siegel, Judith Halberstam, Saskia Sassen, Jasbir Puar). She lives in Berlin and Vienna.

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.

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.

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.

DANIEL HENDRICKSON is a co-founder of CHEAP. He works as a translator. Along with Vaginal Davis he organizes the film series Contemporary Vinegar Syndrom for Kino Arsenal in Berlin. Sometimes he also plays the piano.

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.

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.

MAX JORGE HINDERER CRUZ is a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher based in La Paz, Bolivia. 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.).

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.

He is member of the Academy of the Arts of the World since 2018.

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).

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.

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.

SREĆKO HORVAT is a Croatian philosopher and activist regarded as one of the central figures of the New Left in post-Yugoslavia. Most recently published books include Subversion! (Zero Books 2017), The Radicality of Love (Polity 2015) and together 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). Horvat is co-curator of the symposium The Extreme Centre and will be in Cologne as a Fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World in April/May 2017. He lives and works in Zagreb.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

DR. WERNER JUNG

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 />

FATIMA KHAN studied Antique Languages and Cultures – Classical Literature Studies and German studies at the University of Cologne and in Seville. In 2018, she initiated and curated q[lit]*clgn, the first feminist literature festival in Germany. A cultural worker and artist, she lives and works in Cologne.

FRED KHUMALO is a renowned South African columnist and author of the novel Bitches’ Brew (Jacana Media, 2006), for which he was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2006. Khumalo is a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

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.

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.

Paris-Cologne Performance Night

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

PEKKO KOSKINEN, a game designer and artist, creates fictional and alternative religions, lifestyles and societies as part of his work. He is a member of the Helsinki-based Reality Research Center, a performance collective that observes, questions and updates realities, as well as the Economic Space Agency, a collective made up of radical economists, computer scientists, and game designers that is working on creating a new system of economic and informational freedom.

HANNAH KREBS is a dancer who lives and works in Cologne and Stockholm. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Dance at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne as well as at the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm. She has performed for, among others, Michael Löhr/Emanuel Gat, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Ellen Söderhult and Chikako Kaido. In her own pieces, Hannah Krebs often works across disciplines. Her artistic work is based on interrogating current social issues from a feminist and socially critical perspective. She frequently uses documentary and biographical material to produce aesthetically absurd or surreal situations that play on the perceptions of the audience. She has collaborated with, among others, Thea Soti (vocals), Moritz Marquardt (media art), and Lena Kunz (dramaturgy).

MERLE KRÖGER is co-founder of pong a production company for creative documentary film. She works as a producer and screenwriter, and since 2003 has also published three novels. In addition she passes on her knowledge as an editor and mentor as part of the Berlinale Talent Campus and in the Professional Media Master Class for Documentary Film in Halle (Saale).

ELEFTHERIOS KRYSALIS completed his bachelor's degree in art history and theory at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He is currently completing his M.F.A. in Art and Design at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. From 2018 to 2020 he was a DAAD scholarship holder. His focus is on experimental radio formats and electroacoustic musical elements. Currently he is working on his master thesis under the topic Politics of Listening: Soundscapes from Ramallah, Palestine.

The author and activist ARUN KUNDNANI has conducted extensive research on the interrelated issues of racism, Islamophobia and surveillance for many years. His most recent book, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso 2015) received international attention – a Guardian review described him as “one of Britain’s best political writers.” Kundnani lives and works in New York.

HARI KUNZRU is the author of several successful novels. With The Impressionist (2002) he presented his widely recognized debut novel, followed by Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), Gods Without Men (2011) as well as White Tears (2017) which has recently been published in German. Kunzru’s books have been translated into 22 languages and awarded with several prizes. The author lives in New York.

Lia García, better known as LIA LA NOVIA SIRENA, is a trans activist and performer whose public interventions insist on reflecting on the emotional charges that bind us. Affective encounters, or encuentros afectivos, are a series of public performances through which Lia invite the audience to think about sexuality, intimacy, and social change.

GADOUKOU LA STAR (Franck Edmond Yao) is co-founder and choreographer of La Fleur. He won the Best Dancer of the African Diaspora at the African Awards in Paris four years in a row (2003–2006). He has worked collaboratively with Gintersdorfer/Klaßen on Not Punk, Pololo and Dantons Tod at Theater Bremen, among others. As Gadoukou la Star he has released coupé décalé music albums since 2008.

BRANDON LABELLE is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice and questions of agency. He develops and presents artistic projects within a range of international contexts, often working collaboratively and in public. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making. From gestures of intimacy and listening to creative festivity and open movement work, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of unrecognizability, dispossession and radical civility.
Works include The Other Citizen: Archive, Club Transmediale, Berlin (2019), The Autonomous Odyssey (with Octavio Camargo), Kunsthall 3,14 Bergen (2018), The Ungovernable, Documenta 14, Athens (2017), Oficina de Autonomia, Ybakatu, Curitiba (2017), The Hobo Subject, Gallery Forum, Zagreb (2016) and The Living School, South London Gallery (2016). He is the author of Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2019; 2010) and Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2015; 2006).
He lives in Berlin and is Professor at the Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen.

LAIBACH made its first big breakthrough in the late 1980s with industrial covers of pop classics by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Queen, and the Austrian arena rock band Opus. In recent years, Laibach has also worked more with conceptual rewritings of classical music, performing with symphonic and philharmonic orchestras, creating music for theatre productions and films, and also taking part in feature-length movies. Laibach has toured extensively around the world and performed in many famous places, including the Tate Modern in London, Bozar in Brussels and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. In August 2015, Laibach became the first-ever band of its kind to perform in the secretive country of North Korea.

GOTTHARD LANGE is an actor and performs at various theaters: Schauspielhaus Frankfurt, Berliner Ensemble, Schauspielhaus Bochum and Schillertheater Berlin. In addition to productions at TAT Frankfurt, HAU and Sophiensäle Berlin, Pumpenhaus Münster, Theater Rampe Stuttgart and many others, he has also acted in film and television productions, including Tatort, SOKO Wismar, Tom Tykwer’s Drei as well as Das Wunder von Bern. Since 2004 he has worked as a director and choir director in Bochum, Weimar, Berlin and Frankfurt. He lives in Berlin.

<!--CHEAP People Are Other People

People Are Other People. Ein ausgeleiertes Konzert--!

LASSEINDRA NINJA and KENDALL MIYAKE-MUGLER are voguers based in Paris. Before importing it to France and starting her own voguing house, Lasseindra discovered voguing in New York. Kendall is an official member of The Legendary House of Miyake Mugler.

JAN G. LEE is artist and author of literary texts, he is a forester by education. From 1968 to 1971 he conducted artistic actions (“visions”) at Mount Diablo State Park, using natural processes (objects subject to rotting, erosion, melting, crystallization, turning to powder, etc.) and including various species of animals and plants (such as Nesting—birds’ nests made of valuable ores, Poisoning—the production of vials of emerald-colored poison from the extract of Toxicodendron diversilobum, and Layering—drawings made by animals walking over cardboard set up near watering holes). In the mid-1980s, in a rented warehouse on the outskirts of town, he began making detailed models and mock-ups of his hometown of Lafayette Hills, along with dolls depicting its residents.

In his artistic practice, ACHIM LENGERER deals with the political effects and functions of language and text. In addition to film sound tracks, installations and publications, his forms of expression include performative lectures and events. Lengerer founded various collaborative projects, including the Friday Kitchen in Frankfurt/Main. In 2006, he co-created (with Dani Gal) the project voiceoverhead, which deals with archived spoken language in audio performances, exhibitions and screenings. Lengerer has been operating the mobile exhibition space and publishing house Scriptings since 2009. In his current oral history project Tonspuren zur Linken (Soundtracks on the Radical Left), he traces the connections between left-wing groups in Cologne/the Ruhr region and the migrant struggles since the 1970s.

NATALIE LETTENEWITSCH has written texts on ships and beaches as a film scholar, and in her current research project traces the fascination surrounding underwater film. She understands the oceans as deeply historical and political space where myths, histories of fascination, and new technologies meet tangible material interests. She is a lecturer at the ifs international film school cologne and the University of Vienna, among others.

LIZA LIM, born in Perth, Australia studied music at Melbourne University and completed her PhD at the University of Queensland. She has a long list of commissions from renowned orchestras: e.g. Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, musikFabrik, Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, Sydney Symphony Orchestra; and also several invitations to famous festivals including Salzburger Festspiele, Luzern Festival, Festival d’Automne à Paris.
Currently she is working on the opera Tree of Codes for Ensemble musikFabrik with a related research project on digital score technologies in collaboration with ZKM.A transcultural access to music is characteristic for Lim. Christopher Alexander's architectural work on pattern language has been an important tool for understanding cultural patterns. Her compositions reflect on performance rituals and aesthetics from East Asian and Australian Aboriginal sources, the specific sound of old instruments, calligraphy and notation of performance energies. She has won numerous prizes including the Paul Lowin Prize, Fromm Foundation Award, Ian Potter Foundation and Australia Council Senior Composer Fellowships.
In 2007/8 she was a guest of the Berlin DAAD artist programme. She is Professor of Composition and Director of the Centre for Research in New Music at the University of Huddersfield. Her compositions are published by Casa Ricordi (Milan, London & Munich).

MINOUK LIM (b.1968, South Korea) works in various media including installation, text, music, video and performance. Lim creates irony through performative forms that defy the definition and boundaries of specific genres. By exploring the conditions of our media environment, Lim’s oeuvre attempts to de-territorialize issues of identity and division aggravated by globalization. Her works employ a wide range of equipment, such as transportation vehicles, thermal imaging cameras, and broadcasting devices, in order to capture and visualize the speed, warmth and emotion of mourning. Her recent solo exhibitions include O Tannenbaum (ASAKUSA space production, Tokyo, Japan, 2018), Mamour_Minouk Lim (Tina Kim Gallery, New York, U.S., 2017) and The Promise of If (PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, 2015). Her work has also been in such group exhibitions as La Biennale de Lyon (2019), the Setouchi Triennale (2016), Sydney and Taipei Biennial (2016).

MARIA LIND is an art critic, curator, and author and has been director of the Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm since 2011. In 2015 she curated the exhibition Future Light, which was presented as part of the first Vienna Biennale. With her research project Abstract Possible (2010) she has been a guest at various international museums and galleries. In the early 2000s she was director of the Kunstverein Munich and the International Artist Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS) in Stockholm. Maria Lind lives and works in Stockholm.

TIMOR LITZENBERGER is a freelance composer in various musical disciplines. He has worked with Gintersdorfer/Klaßen on the album New Black - Couper Decaler electronique, released in 2012 by Buback, and has also regularly collaborated with La Fleur.

SHARON LOCKHART works in the space ‘between’ images, between photography and cinema, between everyday chores and performative rituals, and also between real and suspended time. Her works are mostly developed through long term collaborations with the protagonist individuals or communities and mediated through an artistic strategy that involves choreography of repetitive actions in front of a static camera. Lockhart is known for her passion to expand the formal attributes of celluloid.

The artist MELISSA LOGAN oscillates between performance, installation, pop music, sound, and new media in her work. She founded the artist collective Chicks on Speed in 1997 with ALEX MURRAY-LESLIE; they have recorded several albums and performed at the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. Since 2016, Melissa Logan has been working on her project University of Craft Action Thought. She lives in Cologne.

LOVA LOVA, aka Wilfred Beki from Kinshasa is a musician, performer, sapeur, and cultural activist. He is an important protagonist in the web series KINSHASA COLLECTION, for which he also composed the theme song.

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER (*1967 in Mexico City) is known for his electronic, interactive installations that straddle architecture and performance art. In 2007, he designed the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, MUAC Museum in Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer lives and works in Montreal and Madrid.

CHRISTINA LUCAS investigates the mechanisms of power in her performances, happenings, installations and video art. Her works have been on display in several museums, including Mudam – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxemburg), Kunstraum Innsbruck, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki).

GYM LUMBERA is a filmmaker who debuted with the two features Ának Araw and Taglish. He started his career as a cinematographer for Raya Martin, Sherad Sanchez, and John Torres. Lumbera lives in Manila, in Balete, and sometimes in Los Angeles.

MAHA MAAMOUN is a Cairo-based artist. Her work has been shown in international exhibitions and biennials. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC) in Cairo. Maamoun is a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

ZHENG MAHLER is a Hong Kong-based collective comprised of artist Royce Ng and anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks. They work together on research-intensive, community-based, site-specific projects often utilising digital media, performances and installation to explore relationships between art and research practice.

SUHAIL MALIK is a reader in Critical Studies and course leader for Art Practice Critical Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Between 2012 and 2015 he was a visiting professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture in New York. He has published numerous articles and books, including most recently the anthologies The Time-Complex: Postcontemporary (2016) and Realism, Materialism, Art (2015), both volumes with Armen Avanessian. He lives in London.

CECYLIA MALIK is a painter, performer, activist, and curator. In her artistic practice she addresses sociopolitical questions, engaging with the “Right to the City” initiative and exploring art’s potential for social change through the strategy of social sculpture. She has taken part in the Photography Biennale in Poznan and in the Dialogues at the 11th Biennale of Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg. Cecylia Malik lives and works in Kraków.

MANDHLA. is a trans-feminine gender non-comforming body from Zimbabwe, Africa. In her artistic practice, she brings a blend of experimental R&B and Soul music intertwined with visual projections and performative dancing. Her music speaks of the daily trials that Trans*, enby and femme* immigrant bodies experience daily with love, identity, sex and acceptance. A strong lover of fashion, the art of voguing and music, in her work she stages passionate queer representation and black femme power.

LATOYA MANLY-SPAIN is a spoken-word artist and a human rights activist who advocates for permanent residency rights for refugees. She is a founding member of ARRiVATi, a collective of people-of-color artists and activists that uses art and resistance as a means to fight inequality. She is also a member of the Hamburg agitprop collective Schwabinggrad Ballett. LaToya Manly-Spain recorded the album Beyond Welcome in 2016 in collaboration with both groups. She lives in Hamburg.

OLIVIER MARBOEUF is a writer, storyteller and curator. He is the founder of the independent art space Khiasma in Les Lilas, in the northeast outskirts of Paris, which he directed from 2004 to 2018. Since its inception, Khiasma has become an experimental platform, developing the radiophonic online tool R22 Tout-Monde, among other things. As a film producer, he collaborates with Spectre Productions in Rennes and contributes to the film distribution and research association Phantom. Marboeuf is a member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).

DJ MARFOX, born in São Tomé and Príncipe, sees his cultural roots as an important driving force of creative, technological and collective social evolution. His DJs di Ghetto compilation achieved cult status in Portugal and diasporic African communities throughout Europe. Eu Sei Quem Sou'n (Principe, 2011) refined his brash multi-layered poetics of complex percussion, dark baroque techno, garage, bass and batida. Releases on Lit City Trax, Warp and Principe. Dj Marfox is currently working on a commission for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

LORENZO MARSILI is a philosopher and activist working for a future beyond the nation state. He is one of the co-founders of the transnational NGO European Alternatives and board member of the global network CIVICUS. He was also one of the initiators of the pan-European movement DiEM25. His latest book Citizens of Nowhere (Zed Books 2018) is available in German as Wir heimatlosen Weltbürger (Suhrkamp Verlag 2019).

CAROLINE MARTEL is a documentary artist who was born in Montréal the year the cellular phone was created (1973). She has been synthesizing documentary theory and practice in a variety of projects since 1998, with a special interest in archival materials, cinema history, women and communication technologies.

RENZO MARTENS is a Dutch artist who currently lives and works in Brussels, Amsterdam and Kinshasa. In his documentary films Episode I (2003) and Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), Martens used his position as an artist to highlight the media and cultural exploitation of underprivileged people. In 2010, he founded the Institute for Human Activities (IHA), which aims to create gentrification effects in the Congolese rain forest through the establishment of an international art center. Since 2013, Martens has been a Yale World Fellow. He participated in the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, the Moscow Biennale 2013 and the 6th and 7th Berlin Biennale in 2010 and 2012, among others.

DIANA MCCARTY is cofounder and editor of the award-winning web radio station reboot.fm. The non-commercial, culture-oriented radio station based in Berlin broadcasts programs on themes of art, gender, pop culture, fashion, and (electronic) music, and involves the collaboration of 85 artists. McCarty has taken part in diverse international events and publications and has developed many interdisciplinary projects that address art, politics, media, and digital culture. She lives in Berlin.

YARA MEKAWEI is a Cairo-based electronic music composer and sound artist. A prolific artist and scholar, Mekawei‘s sonic bricolages draw inspiration from the flow of urban centers and the infrastructure of cities. Interested in the philosophy of architecture, history, and literature. Mekawei used the optical transfer from the musical conversation and transferring the sound waves to a visual form. Her work is based on sound as a tool of vision, the philosophy of composition is shaped by sophisticated practices that convey messages of conceptual dimension to the public. Her work shows an intangible aspect of her personality, and being feminine in an East African society.

DJ MEKO (Jean Claude Dagbo), known as le choucou du peuple or “the people’s favourite”, performs in the Paris clubs L’Ivoire, Elysee, Ritz and Titan. In addition to concerts with stars of the coupé décalé scene, he has performed with Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, in Dantons Tod at Theater Bremen, among others. Since 2016 DJ Meko has been a regular member of La Fleur.

KARLA MENDONCA DOS SANTOS DANY, born in Rio de Janeiro and currently living in Hamburg, wants to live in a world where the global environment and music have top priority. As foreign language assistant and translator, she has worked for creative and educational institutions such as Tate Modern, International School of Hamburg (ISH), Cirque du Soleil and many others. When she is not behind her computer typing, you can find her at the library in the morning or doing karaoke at night.

PHILIP KOJO METZ is a Berlin-based conceptual artist working with themes related to identity, history, and the relationship of contemporary cultures towards one another. He uses different media such as photography, painting, sculpture, objects, video and performance. His works were recently exhibited at the NGBK in Berlin, the Cité in Paris, the Kunsthalle München as well as the Haverford College Philadelphia.

NIQ MHLONGO is a Johannesburg-based journalist and novelist. After his novels Dog Eat Dog (Ohio University Press 2004) and After Tears (Ohio University Press 2007), Way Back Home (Kwela 2013) is his first novel published in German. His most recent publication is Affluenza (Kwela 2016), a collection of short stories. In 2017, MHLONGO is a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

<!--Way Back Home Niq Mhlongo--!

MISHAA (Michele Akotcholo) is a choreographer and dancer and teaches Afrobeats classes to children and youths in Paris. She is a member of La Fleur. Her first collaboration with Monika Gintersdorfer and Gadoukou La Star was as part of the piece Les Nouveaux Aristocrates.

ORRY MITTENMAYER started as a bicycle courier at Foodora in January 2016 and moved to Deliveroo a year later. He is co-founder of Liefern am Limit, an activist for better working conditions and a political speaker. He was also chairman of the first workers’ council at Deliveroo. Orry Mittenmayer was born hearing impaired and completed training as a bookseller. After spending a year volunteering in Ghana, he attended night school and completed his Abitur in 2017 to qualify for university studies. Since October 2018 he has been studying political science and continues to be involved in Liefern am Limit as a political consultant. The Liefern am Limit campaign was honored for its commitment to better working conditions with the Hans Böckler Award of the City of Cologne.

AVI MOGRABI is almost always in front of the camera, but the films are never about him at all; he films the commonplace, the everyday, even the prosaic – only to reveal with unsettling lucidity more profound and unseen truths about the paradoxes of contemporary Israeli society and ist occupation of Palestine. He seems to make films about making films that in reality are never made; he trumps documentary with fiction, performance with reality, back and forth, addling the codes of direct cinema. This is the trouble with Avi Mograbi’s cinematic and artistic practice: it is so essentially and literally subversive that it is impossible to classify. As is he: actor, sound recordist, second cameraman, singer, performer, director and citizen, he embodies all these roles dutifully, responsibly, without ambiguity or affect. And most remarkably, he never displaces himself or his body from the ailing social body he films, deconstructs, challenges or provokes.

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN merges film, photography, and essays to investigate histories of utopian left pro-jects. His two newest films premiered at documenta 14. Earlier films have been shown at the Sharjah, Venice, and Marrakech Biennales, and essays have appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Sun Never Sets, among others. He is a PhD candidate at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Founded by Nafiseh Fathollahzadeh and Parham Mortazavian, MOMENTOGRAPHY OF A FAILURE is a participatory research and photography project that seeks to develop a concept of participatory citizenship by curating photo-essays by local residents, practicing interdisciplinary collaborative creation and digital non-profit publishing

In their artistic practice the artist duo MP GOLD, made up of MARIE JOSEFIN STUTE and PHILIPP NAUJOKS, weaves together fragments from videos, drawings, sculptures, and objets trouvés to create installations. They live and work in Cologne and Düsseldorf.

RABIH MROUÉ, born in Beirut in 1967, is actor, director, author and ranks among the most important Lebanese contemporary artists. He is also editor of the Lebanese magazines Kalamon and The Drama Review, as well as co-founder and board member of the Beirut Art Center Association (BAC). Rabih Mroué works at the interface of performance and visual arts. His productions deal with the political situation in Lebanon and frequently combine everyday real material with self-created fictive narration. Rabih Mroué frequently works with Lina Majdalanie. His performances, such as The Inhabitants of Images (2008), Photo-Romance (2009), 33 Rounds and a few seconds (2012) as well as most recently Riding on a cloud (2014), have been represented at theaters and festivals around the world. His work The Pixelated Revolution (2012) was displayed at Documenta 13.

ESTHER MUGAMBI is a performance and video artist, actor, and singer. Her performances, the texts of which she often authors, have been presented at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, at the Rotterdam Festival, at La Mama Theater in New York, and at the Young Vic Theatre in London. Esther Mugambi lives and works in Amsterdam.

ALEX MUGLER is a New York-born, Paris-based voguer, dancer, and choreographer. His skills are reflected in intense, virtuosic and hybrid performances, traveling from high heels to ballet pointe shoes. He collaborates with artists such as Rihanna, FKA Twigs, François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea.

OGUTU MURAYA is an author, theatre-maker and storyteller. To him, art is an important catalyst for challenging one’s beliefs and for keeping alive the history that is retold in error or which remains hidden from the mainstream. His works have been shown in numerous festivals: among others, at La Mama (NYC), HIFA (Harare), Afrovibes Festival (Amsterdam) or Spielart Festival (Munich).

The film director and author SANA NA N’HADA (* 1950 in Enxalé, Guinea-Bissau) is part of the pioneers of Guinean cinema. In the 1960s he was engaged in the country’s independence movement, taking up the study of filmmaking with the aim of documenting the struggle against the Portuguese colonial regime. His films include, among others, O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral (1976), Xime (1994), Kadjike (2013) and Os Escultores de Espíritos (2015). He wrote the screenplay for Filipa César’s Spell Reel.

ALEXANDER NAGEL is Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. His interest in the multiple temporalities of art led to the publication of Anachronic Renaissance (co-authored with Christopher Wood, 2010) and Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (2012). His current work addresses questions of orientation and configurations of place in Renaissance art and culture. In 2016, he received an NEH Fellowship for a collaborative project (with Elizabeth Horodowich, NMSU) entitled merasia: A Renaissance Discovery

The NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA was founded in 2006 by KELLY COPPER and PAVOL LISKA in New York. The group is known for putting themselves in impossible situations and using the readymade material around them for their performances. Nature Theater of Oklahoma has performed at several important festivals and locations, among others at Berliner Theatertreffen, steirischer herbst and HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin.

BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG is an art curator and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of the art space SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of the SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He is Curator at Large for documenta 14.

DJ NERVOSO, born in the Portuguese-speaking island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the west equatorial coast of Central Africa, has been living in Quinta do Mocho, on the periphery of Lisbon for twenty years. His excitingly fresh DJ sets, which fuse the hard hypnotic rhythms and the frenetic energy of Angolan kuduro with straightforward techno influences, were an essential spark for the experimental kuduro mutations of DJ Marfox, DJ Firmeza or DJ Nigga Fox in the early 2000s.

ROYCE NG is an artist and is also part of the Hong Kong duo Zheng Mahler. In collaboration with the anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks, he works on research and community-based site-specific projects that often use digital media, performances and installations to explore the relationships between art and research practices.

ELIZABETH NGARI came from Kenya to Germany in 1966. Because of her experiences with refugee reception centers, official institutions, and the difficult conditions in refugee accommodations, which were even worse for women and children, she decided to become a political activist. Fourteen years ago, she founded Women in Exile, an organization dedicated to the concerns and worries of refugee women. For, Nagri says, in the mixed refugees groups in Brandenburg issues brought forward by women frequently met with resistance. In 2011, the association was renamed Women in Exile & Friends and now cooperates with women activists without forced migration background. They are calling for the unconditional abolition of all camps for refugee women and their children and for the extension of the Protection against Violence Act, which currently only applies to German women, to include refugee women and their children.

ANDREAS NIEGL is an artist living in Cologne. He works with installation, performance, video, sound, and text. He is also a sound designer and composer for theatre and dance performances. He has contributed to productions at FFT Düsseldorf, Helios Theater Hamm and Schauspiel Essen, among others.

JULIA NITSCHKE is a performance and mixed media artist. Her collective Meine Wunschdomain develops visions for a lovely future through oracle sessions. Her lecture performances deal with the Internet phenomena of current visual (cat) culture. As part of Ruhr Ding 2019 and the ADKDW’s Memory Station project, she has designed, along with Eva Busch, an exhibition on feminist battles and resistance in Bochum called Emanzenexpress_Gemeinsam sind wir gemeiner. Most recently, her work was seen at the Sophiensaele in Berlin and at Pathos Munich.

As co-founder of NON Worldwide, whose raison d’etre is described as “a collective of African artists and of the diaspora, using sound as their primary media, to articulate the visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power”, NKISI’s ethos and music is imbued with a certain punk sensibility along with a political push back against conformity. Her DJ sets draw from a wide range of influences forming a fast paced and exhilarating experience in the dance. Her production reflects deeply in these influences also and provide a sound that is equally relentless and evocative.

Lauritz aka NO OBI, NO INSERT operates one of the most exciting and obscure Youtube-channels in Northrhein-Westphalia and is a true connoisseur of various genres and rarities. Besides, he also delivered one of Cologne Sessions´ favourite ambient-mixes of all times.

SIMON NOORI is a geographer and a migration and border scholar, working at the Universities of Zurich and Neuchâtel. He is interested in the politics of digital bordering, examining both the emergence of biometric border control and the use of digital devices in undocumented border crossings. He has co-founded the open-access journal movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies and has worked several years for the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone.

CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA is an artist working across art, design, and theory. His practice includes the convening of a roaming program of exhibitions, screenings and lyrical performances concerned with the question of how to live together through exploring the ideas of monument and translation. His latest projects include École du soir, SculptureCenter, New York (2019), and A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness Without Sorrow, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK), Leipzig (2019). Nyampeta also exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (2019) and Camden Arts Centre, London (2017). He participated in the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg (2019), the Dakar Biennale (2018) and the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016). Nyampeta runs Radius, an online and occasionally inhabitable radio station. He is a PhD student at the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. He was awarded The Art Prize Future of Europe 2019.

PROF. CEDRICK NZOLO NGAMBOU, is designer and professor at the Institut supérieur des arts et métiers (ISAM), Kinshasa.

PASCALE OBOLO is a Paris-based filmmaker and editor-in-chief of AFRIKADAA, a magazin for African art and design. Her works have been shown at the Musée du Montparnasse and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris as well as the Dakar Biennale and several international film festivals.

KIZITO ODHIAMBO is a Germany-based Kenyan social entrepreneur and independent educational consultant from Gemeinsam für Afrika. He works with small farmers in Kenya to develop on-site perspectives, and his educational work is concerned with global trade structures, the living conditions of children and adults, as well as with racism.

ORDINATEUR (Pohé Cédric Kevin Bah) began his career in the coupé décalé scene alongside the renowned musicians Kedjevara, Eric Olomide and DJ Arafat. His astounding dance technique inspired his nickname Magic Feet. In addition to international solo performances and as a duo with Alaingo, he teaches dance classes across Europe. Ordinateur has regularly performed in Parisian nightclubs since 2016. He is a founding member of La Fleur.

Paris-Köln #1 Ordinateur et Alaingo

URIEL ORLOW combines film, photography, drawing and sound in his research-intensive artistic practice. His work has been shown at various film festivals, art biennials and in renowned museums. He holds teaching appointments at the University of Westminster in London as well as at the Zurich University of the Arts. Orlow lives and works in London and Zurich.

REX OSA came to Germany from Nigeria in 2005 and applied for political asylum. The period that followed was one of ongoing struggles with refugee authorities, which he perceived as “a machinery of control and discrimination.” This prompted him to join the refugee self-organization network The Voice, where he became one of the main initiators of the Break Isolation campaign, informing a broader public about the conditions in refugee accommodations. Rex Osa gives public talks, both in Germany and internationally, about forced displacement and its causes and the self-organization of refugees.

EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is the author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (2013), a poetry novel about challenges affecting communication between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, the book won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He is now the Dorothea Schlegel artist-in-residence at EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Freie Universität Berlin.

MILTIADIS OULIOS works as a journalist, moderator and lecturer in Cologne and Düsseldorf. The issues he focuses on include the immigration society and struggles for recognition and rights. He is an author for WDR radio and for daily newspapers; he also hosts the German-Greek magazine Radiopolis on the Funkhaus Europa radio station. In addition to this, he was active in the anti-racist network Kanak Attak. Since 2007, he has been researching the representation of migrant journalists in the German media. He is also a member of the network Neue Deutsche Medienmacher. His book Blackbox Abschiebung was published in 2015 by Suhrkamp.

Whether EMINE SEVGI ÖZDAMAR belongs to German or Turkish literature is something that scholars have quarreled over since the beginning of her career. She received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1991 for extracts from her first novel Life Is a Caravanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went Out the Other. Her volume Mother Tongue from 1999 is a collection of stories that are like milestones of the literature between Germany and Turkey: Mother Tongue, Grandfather’s Tongue, Black Eye in Germany (a theater piece composed in prose) and Career of a Cleaning Lady. Memories of Germany. From 1979 to 1984 Özdamar had an engagement at the Schauspielhaus Bochum under the direction of Claus Peymann, where she was contracted to compose Black Eye in Germany. Her themes are theater stages and world literature between Germany and Turkey. There has been much careful analysis and research into her literary examinations of Turkish nationalism and the transnational dynamics and historical entanglements between Turkey and Germany. Her works defy categorization in existing literary groups – except in those of world literature. Thus as early as 1997 Kader Konuk describes the protagonist and the being-in-the-world of the characters in Özdamar’s first novel Life Is a Caravanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went Out the Other outside of the question of self-image of a particular ethnically focused literary group. In the exhibition Ghosts, Traces, Echoes: Works in Shifts are extracts from her piece Perikızı – A Dream Play (2010), which in large part and also in dramaturgical sequence trace back to the fairy tale The Girl from the Half-Burned Forest from 2007. With the new telling of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey Emine Sevgi Özdamar wrote Perikızı – A Dream Play for Ruhr.2010 as part of the project Odyssee Europa, a further milestone that underscores Özdamar’s position in the European cultural landscape.

FERHAT ÖZGÜR's artistic works cover a wide spectrum ranging from video and photography to installations. His works have been on display in MoMA PS1 New York, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, among others. He is currently participating in the group exhibition Shame: 100 Reasons for Turning Red at Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden. Özgür is currently professor at the Yeditepe University Istanbul.

NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Polity, 2012).

JIYUN PARK explores sensory and synesthetic states through experimentation with materials in search of hidden and inherent sounds, spatial sound, and performances. Her works are mostly influenced by crossing the threshold of space and time in her surroundings. She is actively doing collaboration performances to expand her frame, e.g. communicating by data and human-sonic interaction.

ANAND PATWARDHAN is a Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker whose human rights-oriented work is often subject to suppression by the Indian government in power. While some of his films explore the rise of religious fundamentalism and casteism in India, others investigate unsustainable development. Many were awarded at international film festivals in Mumbai, Leipzig, Paris and Hong Kong and other venues.

MANUEL PELMUȘ lives and works in Oslo and Bucharest. He is one of the leading artists of the “new performance turn”, who have been reimagining the role of performance in the context of visual arts over the past decade.

MASSIMO PERINELLI is a historian at the University of Cologne. He was active with Kanak Attak and is a founding member of the initiative „Keupstraße ist überall“ and of the action group „NSU-Komplex auflösen“. Dostluk Sineması was a film series he screened in cafés along the Keupstraße in Cologne featuring testimonies of persons affected by the pogroms of the 1990s and by the NSU attack in 2004. The film series finally resulted in his publication Von Mauerfall bis Nagelbombe (Amadeu Antonio Foundation, 2014). In the near future he will take up a post as an advisor in the migration division of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin.

SYBELLA PERRY is a British artist based in Germany, working with sound, text and performance. Her works often incorporate the sounds other people make – featuring the voices of her sister, partner and friends or the music her parents play. Taking the form of multi-channel installations, live performance for radio, publications and records, they deal with sound both as a means to create shared spaces and as a material example used to raise socio-political and philosophical questions. In 2018/19, she co-founded and organised otic.radio, a web-radio platform for students at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. This year, she will release the LP and publication Rustic Airs in collaboration with Hideous Replica and Atlas Projectos.

The art critic and curator BRITTA PETERS (* 1967 in Birkenfeld an der Nahe) is the artistic director of Urban Arts Ruhr, a decentralized institution for contemporary art in the Ruhr region. Previously she was part of the curatorial team of Sculpture Projects Münster. She has taught at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster. As director of the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof from 2008 to 2011 she was responsible for numerous exhibitions in semi-public space.

NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ is an independent curator and author. The former co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers is also the co-founder of Cluster, a network of organizations that support and exhibit contemporary visual art. Currently she is curating Contour Biennale 9, which will take place in Mechelen, Belgium, in 2019. Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez lives in Paris.

AMANDA PIÑA is a choreographer and dancer. Her works address the mechanisms of exclusion and employ non-Western cultural perspectives in contemporary performance. Since 2005, she has collaborated with visual artist and filmmaker Daniel Zimmermann under the label nadaproductions. Their collaborative production WAR - ein Kriegstanz (2013) attained international attention. Amanda Piña lives in Vienna.

Floraphilia: Botanical Garden as a Colonial Site

ALEXANDRA PIRICI is an artist with a background in choreography and works freely across different mediums, from performance to visual arts to music. Pirici lives in Bucharest.

LYUDSKA PODOBA is an avant-pop band founded by Ukrainian artists Anatoly Belov and Georgy Babanski. Fusing dance beats, avant-garde madness, and post-Soviet soulfulness, they probe questions of queerness, gender, sexuality, beauty, love and the lack thereof – all for the first time in Cologne. Adopting consciously campy, maudlin poses, they stress the constructedness of identity, which is even implied by their name – translatable as “Human Likeness.” Against the backdrop of the homophobia that is widespread not only in Ukraine but in the whole post-Soviet region, they sound a note of joyous defiance. “It’s shiny music,” they say, “overflowing with all our favorite fetishes, mixing the things that inspire us, the things that makes us dance, turn, twist and laugh.”

MICHAEL PORTNOY is a New York-based artist. Although rooted in performance, his work employs a variety of media – from participatory installations to sculpture, theater, writing and video. His work has been presented internationally in such venues as Witte de With (Rotterdam), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Centre Pompidou (Paris), dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel), and The Kitchen (New York).

ABNER PREIS focuses on public performances and mixed-media with traditional storytelling as the central aspect. Preis received his Master’s degree from the Dutch Art Institute in 2014. He exhibited and performed in numerous institutions, i.a. Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dordtmund, TAAK Amsterdam, Museum Folkwang Essen, The Player Rotterdam, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Human Cities Festival Istanbul and Tetem Enschede.

ANNE RADEMACHER is an English- and German-language specialist and worked for many years as a literary editor. Today she is the director of a foundation and translates from English in her free time. She is the translator of all of Xiaolu Guo’s books published in the German language, and, most recently, works by authors like Helen Hodgman, Tracy Chevalier and Jo Baker.

Since 2009, TOMÁŠ RAFA has investigated notions of nationalism in Central Europe through his ongoing documentary film project, New Nationalism in the Heart of Europe. His documentary details the creation of conflicts that arise from prejudices, superstitions, and resentments in the region. Rafa’s film has been screened in museums and galleries across Europe. He is based in Warsaw.

MILO RAU is one of the most important contemporary theater directors in Europe. Since 2007 founder and artistic director of the International Institute of Political Murder, he is also a prolific writer and essayist, authoring Was tun? Kritik der postmodernen Vernunft (2013) and Althussers Hände (2015), among others. From 2018 on, he will be directing the National Theater of Gent. He currently lives in Cologne.

ETHIOPIAN RECORDS, born Endeguena Mulu, is one of the leading lights of Ethiopia’s burgeoning electronic music scene. Mixing Ethiopia’s traditional music, jazz sounds and rhythms with electronic styles like UKG, Ambient and Bass music, he created the new genre “Ethiopiyawi Electronic”.

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

GEORG RESTLE is a German journalist. He heads and anchors the political TV news magazine Monitor on ARD. Restle is based in Cologne.

REYOD (Youayou Audrey) tours as a dancer with different renowned companies, teaches dance classes to young girls and performs in various contexts, including at the Zénith de Paris, Élysée Montmartre and Cigale. She has quickly established a foothold in the coupé décalé scene and has danced with groups like Les Anges D’afrik and African Probo. With La Fleur she has collaborated on the piece Les Nouveaux Aristocrates.

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 etc. Laokoon, the seer, was the only person who unmasked the Trojan Horse’s true nature: A dangerous fraud.

With an interest in radical histories and speculative fictions, Mexico City-based artist NAOMI RINCÓN GALLARDO works across performance and video to investigate utopian possibilities and belief. Her often music-based narratives draw on counter-cultural forms like punk, DIY aesthetics, and queer identities to reframe touchstones in Mexican and Mesoamerican politics. As both an artist and an educator, she foregrounds research tools from feminist theory and radical theater to imagine new types of social engagement, encounter, and play.

AURORA RODONÒ is a freelance cultural worker in the fields of art, film, migration and anti-racism. She also lectures at the Institute for Art and Art Theory/University of Cologne. From 2012 to 2014, she was a project consultant at the Academy of the Arts of the World; from 2003 to 2006, a research assistant at the research and exhibition venture Project Migration (Cologne 2005). She participates in the initiative 'Unravelling NSU Complex' Tribunal.

ANETA ROSTKOWSKA is a curator, author, and researcher. She earned her master’s degree from De Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam and has worked for numerous galleries, particularly in Kraków and as part of the Baltic Triennale. She is the co-founder of various artistic initiatives that engage with the current socioeconomic situation of Kraków, and with Jakub Woynarowski has developed the concept of “gonzo curating.” From 2016 to 2018 she has been curator at the Academy of the Arts of the World. Since 2019, Aneta Rostkowska is the director of Temporary Gallery. She lives and works in Cologne.

GOSHA RUBCHINSKIY is a fashion designer, photographer, and filmmaker. Inspired by post-Soviet Russia and its skater subculture, he started his own street wear label, ГОША РУБЧИНСКИЙ, in 2008, that is currently a very successful fashion brand. He lives in Moscow.

GHALYA SAADAWI lives in Beirut. She lectures in modern and contemporary art theory, and art in Lebanon after 1990 at the American University of Beirut, The Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and the University of St. Joseph. She earned a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London in sociology titled Rethinking the Witness: Art after the Lebanese Wars (2015). Her dissertation underscores the tactics and considerations that inform a rethinking of witnessing, representation and ideology after the declared end of the civil wars. Against the classifying of all artistic practices under “postwar” and/or “contemporary art”, the thesis instead reads select practices through the historical and theoretical entanglements and discourses of the mid-20th century to the end of the Cold War, and through the lens of an extended political modernism. Some of her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of publications, anthologies, and artist’s monographs. Between 2015 and 2017, Saadawi was Resident Professor of Ashkal Alwan’s art study program, the Home Workspace Program. She is co-editor of Makhzin with founding editor and writer Mirene Arsanios and poet Iman Mersal, and is affiliated with BICAR, the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research.

SUSANNE SACHSSE is an actor and co-founder of CHEAP.

BELIT SAĞ is a video artist living in Amsterdam. She studied mathematics in Ankara. Her video-artistic background can be traced to collaborations with video-activist collectives in Turkey, where she co-founded the art space Karahaber and the archival project bak.ma. In 2014 and 2015, she completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam; in 2016 and 2019, she was in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. Her works have been presented at international film festivals in Toronto, Rotterdam and New York, in the EYE film museum in Amsterdam, at the MOCA in Taipei and at the Tabakalera Film Seminar in San Sebastián. In 2019, belit sağ is a Fellow of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy oft he Arts of the World).

TAMER EL SAID realized several documentaries and short fiction films and in 2007 founded the independent film production company Zero Production in Cairo. He is also one of the founders of the Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Egypt. He lives in Cairo. In the Last Days of the City is his first feature-length fiction film.

MARKO SALAPURA is an artist and architect working between Cologne and Belgrade. He works with installation, video and performance. He is also an exhibition architecture designer. He is interested in documenting the politics of spatial processes happening on a large scale. His current project deals with documenting the Floating University in Berlin and his participation there in 2018. His video installation Kairos, looking at the expansion of the red palm weevil and the revalorisation of modernist architecture in the Mediterranean region was exhibited at Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale in Tirana. He curated the Serbian pavilion at the International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014.

ANJA SALEH is the founder TAVII, a company that came out of an interest in the interplay of the culture and politics of memory and their influence on the future and visions of tomorrow. TAVII translates this research into handmade jewelry and art and brings together the stories of people who are part of the diaspora. Saleh is the director of an empowerment project for youths and young adults; she is also active in political educational work and as an independent speaker. She was initially active online as a poet. In her artistic work she deals with various themes, often focusing on identity, language, spirituality as well as issues of intersectionality in everyday life.

In his new performance Nothing Is Outside, Indian/Kashmiri artist INDER SALIM addresses what it means to live in a swathe of land that is being obliterated by irreconcilable territorial claims. India and Pakistan, between which Kashmir lies, have been fighting one another for 70 years. Salim examines the predicament of “being” in opposing worlds – a Kashmiri in India, a South Asian in the Western world, a performance artist in the neo-capitalist world order. Isolation versus openness, demarcation versus negative determination of in-between space: these not only define a charged territory that pulls itself in opposite directions but support its transgression into the unknown. As an intervention in space, Inder Salim positions his art practice against all forms of hegemonic endeavor.

SASKIA SASSEN is an American sociologist and economist. During the 1980s and 1990s, she emerged as a key author in urban sociology, who coined the term of the “global city”. Her work examines the impact of globalization, economic restructuring, and communication technology upon urban life and its governance. Sassen authored numerous books which have been translated into well over 20 languages. Most recent titles include Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014), Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012) and Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008). Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, New York, and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought.

AMELIA SAUL is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her work spans video, performance, and scriptwriting. She has exhibited and developed projects in New York at the Performing Garage, Momenta Art, BHQFU, and the Kitchen. Her last solo exhibition, Four Women, took place at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle in 2016. She has also shown her work in Berlin, Dresden, Taipei, and Hiroshima. She is currently developing a suite of videos that cross the boundaries of video art, music video, and art film.

ANNA SCHAPIRO studied Expanded Concepts of Art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under Prof Ulrike Grossarth, with whom she also completed her master’s degree. Schapiro also studied at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal. Subsequently she pursued Jewish studies at the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Stockholm. Anna Schapiro has taught at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. Her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Dresden; the Museum for Contemporary Art Wrocław; the Museum Vilha Velha, Vila Real, Portugal; and at GFLK Halle Süd, Tölz; among others. Schapiro is co-editor of the journal Jalta – Positionen zur Jüdischen Gegenwart and a member of the Ministerium für Mitgefühl.

KATRIN SCHAUMBURG is a research assistant at the Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany (DOMiD e.V.), where she works on museum, collection and participation concepts as an exhibition curator. Her PhD thesis deals with female agency in a South African township.

MARK VON SCHLEGELL is a science fiction author and cultural critic. His publications include, among others, the novels Venusia (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents 2005), Mercury Station (2009) and Sundogz (2015, both at Semiotext(e) / Native Agents). In addition he has written various theoretical works, including Realometer: Amerikanische Romantik (Merve 2009) and Dreaming the Mainstream (Merve 2013). Mark von Schlegell lives in Cologne.

ADRIANA SCHNEIDER ALCURE is an actress, theater scholar, anthropologist and independent theater director in Rio de Janeiro. She is Professor of Theater Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro UFRJ. Until 2019, as a CAPES-/Alexander von Humboldt fellow, she was engaged in her research project on the artistic, political and pedagogical strategies of puppet theater at the Institute for Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology in Bonn. She is a member of the Bonobando Collective and the Grupo Pedras de Teatro.

FÉLIX SCHOELLER is a creative technologist who operates at the frontiers of filmmaking, cognitive science and engineering. Since 2017, he has been collaborating with Monika Gintersdorfer and La Fleur, designing films and technologies to foster new forms of cultural exchange between Europe and Africa.

“The fascination for representational structures of the real is central in my formal research. The attraction for both interior issues and exterior situations, the variable border between public and private, between intimate/perceptional and social/narrative – all these subjects are fundamental themes of my work.”
SUSANNA SCHOENBERG is a film, media and performance artist based in Cologne. Her artistic production comprises films, photography, video installations, public actions and camera setups. Her media practice is focused on the idea of emergence (of reality and shapes of reality); the contingent waiving of technical and conceptual control is part of her ‘realistic’ (image giving) strategy.

RUTH SCHÖNEGGE studied film editing at the Konrad Wolf Film University in Babelsberg. She lives and works in Berlin as a freelance editor of feature films and documentaries as well as multi-channel video installations, music montages and art projects.

THERESE SCHULEIT is an artist, information architect and freelance curator from Cologne. Her works examine the perception, materials and acoustic descriptions of urban and social spaces in installations, narratives and dialogical performances. She is the founder of the Festival for Applied Acoustics, and as her alter Ego Elektronentoto member of AIC - Art Initiatives Cologne. She was also part of the collective Mühlenkampf und Raumfaltung, and board member of Opekta e.V.. Since 2009 she is collaborating with ZAM e.V.

ANNE SCHÜLKE lives and works as a media artist in Düsseldorf. She studied literature and philosophy and received her PHD on autofiction. Her work is based on observations of her surroundings, theoretical questions and has an autobiographical perspective. She develops videos, artist's books and installations. Her work is shown in the context of exhibitions and in public spaces. She often initiates projects independently and enters into collaborations. From 2019 to 2023 she is co-director of the exhibition space NKR – Neuer Kunstraum in Düsseldorf.

STEFANIE SCHULTE STRATHAUS is co-director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and head of the Berlinale section Forum Expanded. Schulte Strathaus has curated a number of film programs, retrospectives and exhibitions including Wer sagt denn, dass Beton nicht brennt, hast Du’s probiert? Film im West-Berlin der 80er Jahre (with Florian Wüst, 2006) and Live Film! Jack Smith! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World (with Susannne Sachsse and Marc Siegel in 2009). In 2010, she launched the ongoing Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice project. Schulte Strathaus, Bettina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitmann also founded the Film Feld Forschung (Film Field Research) project at the silent green Kulturquartier. She currently curates the collaborative project Archie außer sich and is working on a number of archive projects in the MENA region and in Nigeria. She is on the boards of the Harun Farocki Institut and the Master program Film Culture at the University of Jos/Nigeria.

KNUT SCHULTZ (aka Ruth Schultz) is a freelance theatre-maker and works in various contexts as a mixed media artist. After working as assistant director in Cologne and Bonn (at fringe ensemble, among others) and finishing literary studies at the University of Florence, she completed her studies in theatre directing at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen in 2011. She realises performative and film-based works, sound pieces, and documentary projects, finding joy in magical moments and the all too human media arts. She is artistic director and co-founder of the experimental music theatre production company Paradeiser Productions, which is active in the independent art scene and in municipal theatre.

Grit Schuster is a Berlin based visual artist playing in the fields of video art on stage and interactive media. Her works include live visuals, produced or interactive video content, video mapping, and installations that have been shown at events in and around Berlin. She enjoys exploring formats that enable participation and question the separation of authors and recipients. She is a member of Trial and Theresa, a feminist VJ collective experimenting in the field of live audio-visual performance with a special emphasis on the integration and visibility of women and queer people in the electronic arts scene. She frequently works with theatre groups and contributes design and visual content as well as technological solutions for customised input devices and recently an augmented reality implementation. Her latest work includes performances and installations at the 48 Hours Neukölln festival in 2019 and 2020 and at Transmediale: Vorspiel 2020, a facade projection during the Light Festival Berlin 2019 and collaborations with Anna Kpok in 2018 and 2020.

ŞENOL ŞENTÜRK has been the set design artist for the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP since 2006. In this work constellation he has realized the spatial concepts for numerous installations, performances and club events worldwide. As a freelance spatial artist he collaborates with many other artists like Benny Claessens, Phil Collins, Vaginal Davis, Bruce LaBruce, Ron Athey, Showcase Beat Le Mot, Susanne Sachsse & Xiu Xiu and Demir/Kılınçel.

The poet AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949–2001) grew up in Kashmir and immigrated to the United States in 1967. Ali penned several volumes of poems; individual works have also been published in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and in many other anthologies. As professor of creative writing, he taught at various universities and colleges in India and the United States. He also worked as a translator and editor.

BAHAREH SHARIFI works as an independent curator and activist on the criticism of discrimination, intersectionality and alliances for the Maxim Gorki Theater, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden and at Festiwalla 2014 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, among others. In the autumn of 2015, she organized a conference about strategies against discrimination in cultural practices at the Universität der Künste Berlin. She is currently working for Kulturprojekte Berlin as a curator of the Festival Interventionen – Refugees in Arts and Education. She is a member of the Bündnis kritischer Kulturpraktiker_innen (Alliance of critical cultural practitioners).

SHELA SHEIKH is a lecturer at Goldsmiths (University of London), where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy and co-chairs the Critical Ecologies research stream. She lectures and publishes internationally. She is currently working on a multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany and the politics of planting. As part of this, she has co-edited, with Ros Gray, The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions (Third Text special issue, 2018); and, with Uriel Orlow, Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018).

MARC SIEGEL is a film scholar and a co-founder of CHEAP.

MARTIN SIEMANN is a lighting designer and an engineer for stage technology. His work focuses on the interdisciplinary development of new spatial concepts for opera, theater and performance. He lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

POLA SIEVERDING is a visual artist working in the field of lens-based media. She lives and works in Berlin and studied at the University of the Arts Berlin, CMU Pittsburgh and Surikov Art Institute Moscow. She was a visiting lecturer to the Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2016 to 2020. With photography, video and sound she investigates the physical body as bearer of historical narratives that shape a contemporary discourse on the social body. By defining the body linguistically; as an alternative to words, she exploits the classical ideal of the body as locus of pleasure and power. She is attracted to extremes and socialized emotions, something felt when the body switches between looking and being looked at, touching and being touched. Her works are exhibited internationally.

BORIS SIEVERTS (*1969) studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Since 1997, he has been guiding locals and tourists through the grey zones of urban space with his Büro für Städtereisen (City Breaks Agency). He uses sophisticated sequences of space to create scenic contexts connecting otherwise extremely disparate environments. In addition to working with tourists, the agency develops visions and further interpretations of the environments under research, feeding them into spatial planning and the cultural sector.

JANEK SIMON is a multimedia artist based in Warsaw. Simon’s works are inspired by his travels, science history and the history of political ideas; he also deals with practical and ethical aspects of DIY culture. Janek Simon has been represented in various solo and group exhibitions in Poland as well as internationally.

JOSHUA SIMON is a director and chief curator at MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam. He authored the book Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013) and writes for Springerin, Frieze, Afterall, Modern Painters, and e-flux journal, among others. Simon is a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World and is taking part in its research project Perverse Decolonization. He lives in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

CLAUDIA SIMONS is currently Africa consultant at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, previously she worked as a research associate at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. In addition she is a freelance consultant for foreign policy and security in the African Great Lakes region.

HYE YOUNG SIN explores notions of sound in terms of materiality with her installation, score and performance.

The filmmaker and visual artist CHULAYARNNON SIRIPHOL lives and works in Bangkok. His works have been screened in many film festivals in Asia and Europe, including in the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hamburg International Short Film Festival and the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. His film Myth of Modernity was honored in 2014 at the Thai Short Film & Video Festival.

Social theorist and author JAN SOWA holds a PhD in sociology and a habilitation in cultural studies. His research assignments took him to several universities in Poland and abroad, recently to Warsaw University and University of São Paulo. Sowa is the author and editor of numerous publications, including the volume of essays A Joy Forever: Political Economy of Social Creativity. He lives in Warsaw.

ANDREAS SPEIT is a journalist and author who has specialized in right-wing extremism and neo-Nazism in Germany. He has been a regular contributor to the daily taz since 1991, focusing on right-wing esotericism, intellectual right-wing extremism, and German nationalism. He has authored and coauthored numerous books on the neo-Nazi and right-wing populist movements in Germany, most recently publishing Bürgerliche Scharfmacher. Deutschlands neue rechte Mitte – von AfD bis Pegida (Orell Füssli 2016), which examines the roots of Germany’s New Right at the heart of its political establishment. Speit lives in Hamburg.

Shapeshifting through vernacular worlds of sound and imagery, Milan artist and musician STILL (aka SIMONE TRABUCCHI)´s practice is defined by a nomadic approach. After developing his personal take on ‘folk’ music through a number of releases under the alias Dracula Lewis, his new moniker Still follows the unearthing of the minor histories that link his hometown to Ethiopia and Jamaica

PROF. DR. ANNE STORCH, University of Cologne, Institute for African Studies and Egyptology. Specialized in African linguistics, researches what language might be beyond structural linguistic concepts–secret, magic, interpersonal relationships. In addition she has written articles on sociolinguistics, the history of science, language description.

MARIE STRAUSS, studied fine arts at the University of Arts Berlin under Lothar Baumgarten. Numerous grants and awards include: DAAD postgraduate scholarship for Mexico City, Secretaria de Relaciones exteriores research grant (SRE) México, Edith Maryon Foundation project scholarship, Sculpture Space NY working visit. Exhibition Funding Goethe Institut Mexico, Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Work stays in Larvik / Norway, Mexico City, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Utica / NY, Sète. Exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne, Mexico City, Tijuana, Puebla, Utica NY.

SOLVEIG SUESS addresses the material politics across weather-stricken geographies where ecological shifts collide with infrastructures of migration, trade, computation and optics. Suess is co-founder of the project Geocinema, an episodic curatorial project focusing on various sensing techniques – from fragmented satellites and ground station data transfers to surveillance cameras and billions of cell phones.

SEFA INCI SUVAK is a radio journalist, author and cultural editor. Two of her radio contributions received the Civis Media Prize. Together with Justus Herrmann, she initiated and developed the migration-audio-archiv (maa) of Cologne. Nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2007, it is an oral history collection of narrated migration. She is also a co-founder of the Artradio.

KAROSH TAHA was born in 1987 in Zaxo. Since 1997 she has lived and worked in the Ruhr region. She studied English and History Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen as well as in Kansas, USA. During her studies, she received a fellowship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. In 2018, she published her first novel Beschreibung einer Krabbenwanderung (Descriptions of a crab migration); she was also a fellow at the Literary Colloquium Berlin and received the Young Artist Award from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2019, she held the Heinrich Heine Fellowship in Lüneburg. In addition, she has received a work scholarship from Kunststiftung NRW, a work scholarship from the German Literature Fund, the Hohenemser Literaturpreis, and the Rolf-Dieter-Brinkmann-Stipendium in Cologne.

KIDLAT TAHIMIK is a film director, screenwriter, and actor. He had his breakthrough as early as 1977 with his film Perfumed Nightmare and has since been considered the founder of independent Filipino cinema. His most recent film, Balikbayan #1, which he worked on for over 30 years, won an award at the Berlinale in 2015. Kidlat Tahimik lives and works in Baguio City, Philippines.