Antonia Couling is a qualified garden designer and garden historian, and a certified horticulturist. She grew up in Brent, North London, but was born in Rome and comes from a family made up of several nationalities. This international background has informed her design journey over the years. Antonia has a special interest in the well-being potential of gardens and gardening and her passion for history led to a Masters in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research at University College London. She has recently compiled a research paper on the contested history of London’s green spaces and has been commissioned to write a book on the history of Gladstone Park.
Axmed Maxamed is a Khaniis Diasporic Somali activist, organiser, curator and book & music nerd. Axmed was born in Xamar, Somalia where he spent his early years until his family had to flee during the civil war and ended up in the Netherlands. Axmed is a co-founder of initiatives such as Dance With Pride, Queer Somali Pasts and Presents: A Storytelling and Archival Research and organized the first Somali LGBTQIA+ gatherings in the Netherlands as well as ongoing mutual aid fundraisers for Queer Somalis in different parts of the world. Through his writing and the workshops he facilitates, Axmed addresses systemic inequalities in Dutch society, in the underground dance music scene and beyond. And since 2021 joined the organizing and curation committee of Halloquium, a fully independent Trans and Queer led conference on nightlife.
Twitter: @axmedamiinmax
Various links to their work: https://linktr.ee/axmed
Ana Rocha (Porto, 1982) é produtora, curadora, coreógrafa, performer, dramaturga e por vezes escritora, uma espécie de canivete suíço. Resumindo, trabalha na área cultural e artística como mediadora há 20 anos. Ela estudou História da Arte, Arte Contemporânea e Artes Visuais. Co-dirigiu e fundou a MEZZANINE – associação cultural sem fins lucrativos. Integrou outras estruturas culturais e colaborou na produção de diversos festivais, como o Sónar+D’22 (Lisboa). Participou em projetos internacionais TRANSLOCA, CARE where? \ CAREZINE, Tranzfabrik. Apresentou os seus próprios trabalhos performáticos, Fraud by Nature (2012), Stabat Mater Furiosa (2017), LAVACURA (2019), Manual da Falla (2019), MudAres (2020), Entretanto(s) (2021) and OcioSAmente (2022). Participou de projetos de artistas visuais e coreógrafos como por exemplo Fabienne Audéoud, Isabelle Schad, Benoit Lachambre, Antonija Livingstone, Gretta Sarfaty e colabora com Renan Martins, Mariana Tengner Barros, Bernardo Chatillon, Xavier de Sousa, Meg Stuart, Phillipe Quesne, Elpida Orfanidou, Igor Dobrivic, entre outros. Obteve a bolsa DanceWeb – Impulstanz’12. Concluiu o SPCP de Deborah Hay, “Dynamic” (2012). Faz mediação cultural e programação (TAMANHO M, XXATENEUXXI, Cultura em Expansão, To School Out of School \ Colectivos Pláka, TanzKongress’19, CURADURA), colaborando junto a organizações informais para as artes e instituições como a Câmara Municipal do Porto. Foi associada do Ateneu Comercial do Porto, colabora como consultora da estrutura de artes performativas da Sekoia, entre outras. Foi membro do núcleo de organização da Ação Cooperativista.
Ana Rocha (Porto, 1982) is a freelance producer, curator, choreographer, performer, dramaturg and sometimes writer. In short, she has been working in the cultural and artistic field as a mediator for 20 years. She studied Art History, Contemporary Art and Visual Arts. Co-directed and founded MEZZANINE – a non-profit cultural association. Ana worked with other cultural structures and collaborated in the production of several festivals, such as Sónar+D’22 (Lisbon). Participated in international projects TRANSLOCA, CARE where? \ CAREZINE, Tranzfabrik. She has presented her own performance works, Fraud by Nature (2012), Stabat Mater Furiosa (2017), LAVACURA (2019), Manual da Falla (2019), MudAres (2020), Entretanto(s) (2021) and OcioSAmente (2022). Participated in projects by visual artists and choreographers, as for example Fabienne Audéoud, Isabelle Schad, Benoit Lachambre, Antonija Livingstone, Gretta Sarfaty, and collaborates with Renan Martins, Mariana Tengner Barros, Bernardo Chatillon, Xavier de Sousa, Meg Stuart, Phillipe Quesne, Elpida Orfanidou, Igor Dobrivic, among others. Obtained the DanceWeb – Impulstanz’12 scholarship. Completed Deborah Hay’s SPCP, “Dynamic” (2012). Ana does cultural mediation and curatorial programs (TAMANHO M, XXATENEUXXI, Cultura em Expansão, To School Out of School \ Colectivos Pláka, TanzKongress’19, CURADURA), collaborating with informal organizations for the arts and institutions such as the Porto City Council. She was an associate of the Ateneu Comercial do Porto, and collaborates as a consultant for different cultural projects as Sekoia’s performing arts structure. She was a member of Ação Cooperativista.
Anahi is a London based creative researcher, writer, producer, cultural worker and community organiser. As a creative practitioner her practice revolves around a creative research process that leads to creating anything from playlists and sounds to writing or
She is a collaborator at performingborders.
Instagram: @anahi_saravia
Anna Marazuela Kim is a hybrid of Spanish-Korean-U.S origin and migrant to London. A cultural critic, writer and activist, Dr. Kim brings wide-ranging expertise to bear on issues of contemporary concern, including iconoclasm and the image wars; the enchantments of technology; and role of the arts in civic thriving. The winner of many awards and prizes, since 2011 she has been a member of Institutes of Advanced Study and international, cross-disciplinary research groups in the U.S., Europe and the U.K. She writes for audiences as diverse as Frieze and NATO, and is often invited to speak on issues around art and conflict and the role of museums in the wake of crisis, most recently at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Blain|Southern. www.amkim.net
Alessandra Cianetti is a London-based curator, creative producer, and researcher. Her work explores notions and lived experiences of physical, cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, economic borders. She has worked internationally on multi-disciplinary live and visual art projects in partnership with arts organisations, institutions, and universities such as the Barbican Centre, the Live Art Development Agency, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, Bonington Gallery, King’s College London, Birkbeck University, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, City of Skopje, Ikona Gallery Venice, FEFÈ Project Rome. Her activities have been supported, among others, by the Arts Council England, the European Cultural Foundation, National Arts Council Singapore, and the Fire Station Artists’ Studios Dublin. From April 2014 to March 2018 Alessandra was co-director of the London-based arts organisation Something Human. She is the founder of the curatorial research platform performingborders. alessandracianetti.com
Anti-Cool is an interdisciplinary artist based in the UK, originally from Japan, working in the field of performance art, installation and now film. Direct interaction with people in different social/ cultural backgrounds is one of the most important elements of her work. Her artistic mission statement is how to overcome the socially imposed boundaries or rules with which people are surrounded or the limitations they place on themselves. Through various forms of art she aims to interpret these situations and pose questions about contemporary global society. art-gene.co.uk/people/anti-cool/
An* Neely (b. ‘93) is an artist working with poetry, live performance and time-based mediums to accelerate speculative autofictions investigating intimacy, desire and hegemonic body political narratives.
An has performed and shown work across Europe, including at Supernormal Festival, TATE Modern and The Yard Theatre (UK), Warehouse9 (DK), Teatro da Politecnica (PT), HAU Berlin and Kunst-Werke (DE). In 2014/15, they were a Soho Theatre Young Writer, developing the full-length play STILLNESS.
An maintains long-term artistic and intimate research collaborations with Libby Norman (Each Other’s Others) and Rowan de Freitas (In the end we’re all plurals/ I’ve only lived on Islands); these experiments have resulted in multi-disciplinary publications, hosted and archived online.
They are also a founding member of @ some point, a collective of artists and producers creating spaces for people to learn things from each other, make friends, make art, and queer neoliberal structures of higher education.
@somepoint have most recently created spaces at Youtopia Festival, The Green Rooms (London), Unlearning: London and Unlearning: Berlin, and DISKURS: no service (University of Giessen).
As a freelance performer, An has worked for artists and choreographers such as Liz Rosenfeld, Harold Offeh, Bojana Cvejić, Rosana Cade and Okwui Okpokwasili, amongst others.
They trained in Contemporary Dance at Tanzfabrik Berlin and hold a BA in Performance Art from RCSSD, University of London. itsandreneely.com
Amanda Coogan is an internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist working across the medias of live art, performance, photography and video. She is one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary visual artist’s practicing in the arena of performance. Her 2015 exhibition in the Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy, I’ll sing you a song from around the Town, was described by Artforum as ‘performance art at its best’.
Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative and always visually stimulating. In 2010 the Irish Times said, ‘Coogan, whose work usually entails ritual, endurance and cultural iconography, is the leading practitioner of performance in the country’. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its very essence and communicate it through her body. Using gesture and context she makes allegorical and poetic works that challenge expected contexts. Her works encompass a multitude of media; Objects, Text, Moving and Still Image but all circulate around her live performances. She is at the forefront of some of the most exciting and prolific durational performances to date. The long durational aspect of her presentations invites elements of chaos with the unknown and unpredicted erupting dynamically through her live artworks, She is first and foremost an embodied practionner. Her work often begins with her own body and challenges the expectations of the contexts, such as head banging to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, and signing the lyrics to Gill Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’. Her work moves freely between solo presented live performances, group performances and living installation. Coogan holds a degree in Sculpture fom Dublin’s National College of Art and Design. She was a Masters student of Marina Abramovic at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Braunschweig, Germany and received her PhD from the University of Ulster in 2013. She is an occasional lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin; Limerick School of Art and Design; The Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin; Dublin Institute of Technology and Crawford College of Art, Cork. www.amandacoogan.com
Ana Rodic (1971) is a Belgrade based writer, scriptwriter and copyrighter. From time to time she flirts with digital and live art.
Almir Koldzic is a Co-Founder and Co-Director of Counterpoints Arts. He has worked for over 12 years on developing creative strategies for engaging with refugee and migrant experiences. His experiences include leading on the development of a national strategy and identity for Refugee Week UK; initiating the Simple Acts participatory programme; developing Platforma – national arts and refugees networking project; curating and producing events, exhibitions and commissions; and developing lasting partnerships with a big number of organisations across the country, ranging from mainstream cultural organisations and inter/national NGOs to smaller arts organisations and community groups. His passion is literature. He has studied English literature (BA), Anthropology (MA) and Creative Writing (MA). counterpointsarts.org.uk/about/team/
Alesa Herero is an Italian artist-activist, based in Lisbon. She was a co-founder of the feminist, intersectional, anti-racist organisation INMUNE – O Instituto da Mulher Negra em Portugal (Institute of the Black Woman in Portugal), and currently works at Teatro Griot for the project Slate: Black: Arts: World, a new transnational partnership to promote the visibility and mobility of Black artists and professionals across Europe.
Instagram: @alesa_herero
Áine Phillips is one of Ireland’s established performance artists and the editor of ‘Performance Art in Ireland: A History’, published by the Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books UK in 2015. She has presented multi-media performance works internationally since the late 80’s and has created work for diverse contexts; public art commissions and communities, the street, club events, and gallery/museum exhibitions. Her work has been shown across five continents, in places such as Tokyo, Ljubljana, New York, Uganda, Brisbane, giving talks on her work at Tate Britain and IMMA. She has worked extensively as a curator of performance events in Ireland and the UK. Phillips is the Head of Sculpture at Burren College of Art and lectures at the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance NUI Galway. www.ainephillips.com
Abdul Abdullah’s (b. 1986, Perth, Australia) provocative, salient work addresses the politicization of the Muslim identity in our post-9/11 world. Drawing on his personal experiences growing up as Malay-Australian in suburban Perth, Abdul exposes the marginalization of the Muslim youth today. His distinctively dark oeuvre explores perceptions of cultural hybridity, ritual and ceremony, and the intimate aspects of self and identity that elucidate the human condition. Abdul’s works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, among others. He lives and works in Perth, Australia. www.abdulabdullah.com
; a place, of their own. is the art+spatial research practice of Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy. Through art and spatial practice, we interrogate and propose within entanglements of climate, capital, technology and politics. We operate as a collective, a couple, with our children, and through collaborations with others.
Paula is an artist/researcher/pedagogue currently Researcher, School of Arts, Digital & Material Artistic Research Cluster (DMARC), Derby University. Paula is interested in feminist, queer, postcolonial and multi-species interventions. Her work is situated at the intersection of contemporary art practice, performance and feminist philosophy. As part of her practice research with ;a place, of their own. she co-produces site-specific performance, video, installations, sound, and text. Paula has a PhD ‘Art, Maternal and Matrixial Encounters’ (University of Sheffield, 2013).
Sam is an architectural researcher/pedagogue and artist, currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Sheffield Hallam University. His practice and research with ;a place, of their own. explores xeno-architectures through critical engagement with social practices and experimental design. Through practice and writing he investigates politics of space and urban practice, with a focus on spatial self-organisation and autonomous politics and spaces as explored in his PhD from Sheffield University School of Architecture (2016). http://aplaceoftheirown.org
With a background in theatre arts, Annie Jael Kwan is a curator, researcher and facilitator working at the intersection of contemporary art and activism, with a focus on South/East Asian and diaspora practices in the UK and internationally. Her work explores migration and boundaries, movement and performance, archives, alternate histories, radical curating in collectivity and organising, and how to attend to embodied subjectivities (especially her own) in an age of global crises and eco-anxiety. anniejaelkwan.com
Anike Bello is a London raised Yoruba woman with a keen interest in education, heritage, mobility and people. She is a creative educator that curates spaces online and offline to teach about ancestry and culture linked to pre-colonial African societies through writing, interviews, videos and workshops. Anike is also author of the book, Connecting to Self Through Ancestry, a collection of essays exploring engagements between heritage and wellbeing. oronanike.com
Ashokkumar Mistry is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator working in the UK and internationally. His writing encompasses direct research and personal experiences relating to neurodiversity with a view to sharing experiences and changing attitudes. He is currently Associate Artist with Disability Arts Online and a Development Artist with The Spark Arts. Ashokkumar has been commissioned by the BBC and a number of galleries such as the Lowry and Southbank Centre to create artworks and exhibitions. As a curator, he has worked with AIS for a number of years developing innovative and thought provoking exhibitions. Ashokkumar has also developed a number of exhibitions in Taiwan for National Cheng Kung University and A-Glow space. ashokdmistry.com
Bridget Wooding is the Director of the Observatory Caribbean Migrants, a think tank carrying out applied research on migration, based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She is the author of the article Haitian Migrants and their Descendants born in the Dominican Republic (ORE 2018), and co-author of the bookFanm Nan Fwontye, Fanm Toupatou: Making visible the violence against migrant, in-transit and displaced women on the Dominico-Haitian border (2012). In 2018-2019 she has been the principal researcher in a pioneer study on the Dominico-Haitian border which examines the situation of unaccompanied children and adolescents on the move between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Brian Patterson is currently working as administrator and co-ordinator of projects for Bbeyond. He was involved in the setting up of Bbeyond in 2001 to promote performance art in Northern Ireland. From 1998 he has worked with Flaxart Studios mainly with the organisation of their International Residency Programme, since a fire destroyed the place in 2003 he devoted most of his time and energy to the overall re-organisation and relocation of the studios into a city centre location. Prior to this he worked on the management committee for Catalyst Arts from 1996-1998, an artist run organisation set up to promote an outlet for more innovative and experimental working practices. He graduated in 1992 and since then has taken part in numerous group exhibitions where his main interest was installation work. In 2001 he was one of the artists involved in the Routes project, set up to promote the work of the unions in keeping sectarianism out of the work place in Northern Ireland. In May 2005 he made his first performance in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. bbeyond.live/about/
Bojana Barltrop was born in 1949 in Skopje, Yugoslavia. She has an MA and MPhil from the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade, and PhD from Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. In Copenhagen, she attended specialist studies at the School for Art and Design (Skolen for Brugkunst) and the Royal Graphic Arts College (Grafiske Hojskule). During the 1980s she was the design programme editor at the Sebastian Gallery in Dubrovnik. She had solo shows at the Happy Gallery in Belgrade (1979, 1982); at the Museum of Applied Arts (1992), the Belgrade Cultural Centre (1992) and at Gallery ‘Legat Rodoljuba Colakovica i Milice Zoric’ staged by Museum of Contemporary Art at Belgrade (2017). Her work was included in the exhibition The Art of Photography and the Serbs 1893-1989 at Gallery at the Serbian Academy of Sciences (1991), also in Belgrade. Aside from performance and photography, Bojana Barltrop is involved with theoretical work, stage design and design. She lives and works in West Sussex, GB.
Boedi Widjaja (b. 1975, Solo City, Indonesia) lives and works in Singapore. The experiences of displacement, isolation, travel, and bridging multiple cultures have defined much of his practice. Due to ethnic tensions, the artist was sent to Singapore as a young boy, where he lived apart from his family. His works often refer obliquely to this autobiographical history or to the feelings of anxiety and estrangement. Widjaja trained as an architect and also has a background in graphic design; the techniques, materials and tools of drawing have subsequently become a defining element of his artistic practice. This is expressed through a broad range of media, from photography and text to architectural installations and ‘live art’, with an emphasis on process and bodily engagement.
The artist has shown in numerous exhibitions internationally, including: Singapore Biennale (2019) (upcoming); 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (2018-19); MAP1: Waterways (2017), Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale; Jerusalem Biennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016), China; From East to the Barbican (2015), Barbican, London; Infinity in flux (2015), ArtJog, Indonesia; and Bains Numériques #7 (2012), Enghien-les-Bains, France. His solo exhibitions include: Rivers and lakes, Tanah dan air (2018), ShanghART Singapore; Black—Hut (2016), Singapore Biennale Affiliate Project, ICA Singapore; Path. 6, Unpacking my Library 。书城 (2014), Esplanade, Singapore; and Sungai, Sejarah 河流, 历史, 源 (2012), YRAC S-Base, Singapore. boediwidjaja.com
Bill Aitchison is an inter-disciplinary artist who divides his time between China and the UK. He has presented his performances, soundworks and videos in galleries, theatres and festivals in Europe, Asia, America, Australia and The Middle East. He holds a practice-based PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a graduate of Ecole de Mime Corporel, he has published critical, creative and journalistic texts in several countries, made a number of works for radio, regularly mentors creative projects and teaches performance studies at Nanjing University. www.billaitchison.co.uk
Benedetta Castello, Italian born, is a versatile performer. She has been training and performing in Italy, New York and London. She has been involved in a variety of projects, ranging from conventional text-based theatre, to devised and physical theatre, site specific performances, and cross disciplinary and multimedia events. She has been actively collaborating with PartSuspended since 2017. She loves being onstage, and she is grateful to all her teachers and co-creators. www.mandy.com/uk/actor/benedetta-castello
Beatriz Viol (Barcelona, Spain, 1983) is a poet and social anthropologist. She is the author of two poetry collections. Los mapas perdidos (Lost maps, Diputación Provincial de Soria 2012) for which she received the XXVII Gerardo Diego Prize for unpublished poets; and Hallar la casa (Finding home, Endymion 2018) for which she won the Himilce Prize. Her work has been included in the poetry collection El árbol talado que retoña (El Páramo 2009). Beatriz has created the blog “La orilla de los pajaros” in which she hosts poetry in a variety of languages and shares her work. laorilladelospajaros.blogspot.com/
Barbara Bridger taught Theatre and Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts between 1990 and 2010 and is currently an independent writer, director and dramaturg. Barbara Bridger’s writing has been widely published, performed and screened. She was Prose Writer of the Year 2002 (Writers Inc.) and has been short- listed for several other awards including Asham and Raymond Carver. At Dartington, Barbara Bridger helped to develop Scripted Media. This explored experimental ap- proaches to script and scripting and her research also focuses on women’s writing and inclusive dramaturgical processes. She is currently dramaturg for companies and individuals operating across a range of performance practices. independent.academia.edu/BarbaraBridger
Burong (曾不容) is a Beijing/Brighton based Live Art practitioner-researcher whose work deals with the politics of intimacy, gut feelings and posthuman ethics. Burong’s co-authored book The Happening of the Contemporary Performance Art (2016) and a series of interviews with performance artists and curators have been published in China. Her monography consisting of four theatre plays is coming soon (2021). She also writes books for children. Currently, Burong is undertaking doctoral research on feminist new materialism in contemporary art at The University of Sussex. www.burongz.com
Bojana Janković is an Eastern European artist making work about immigration: national and displaced identities, migrant labour, cultural, economic and social practices, and structural discrimination of immigrants. Her performances, installations, texts, and non-denominational works have appeared in physical and digital spaces in the UK, Serbia, and internationally, including at Tate Modern (London), Center for Art on Migration Politics (Copenhagen), ODD (Bucharest), and in collaboration with Performing Arts Hub (Norway) and Home Live Art (Hastings). Bojana’s practice is rooted in engagement with marginalised audiences and disruptive of canonical aesthetics and modes of participation. bojanajankovic.com
Colin Cruise is from Northern Ireland but lives in Staffordshire, England. He studied painting and printmaking in London before undertaking degrees in Victorian Studies and English Literature. He has published in several areas, chiefly in art and literary cultures, gay studies and the history of drawing. He retired from university teaching in 2018 and spends his time walking, taking photographs and writing.
Clara M. García (she/her) based in London, comes from autonomous feminist traditions. Clara has been organising in cross-border feminist spaces for the past years. She is interested in horizontal and assembly spaces as political practices, in contaminating trade unions with feminist politics, and mainly drawn to thinking of radical care/mutual aid, vulnerability, grief, politics of food, and territorial legacies. At the moment, she is focused on trying to figure out how to grow lemon trees in her garden. @clariklaracler
The Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) is a nonprofit cultural institution whose work is based on critical thinking, and cultural and artistic production. Through cultural and social engagement, which has included thousands of people, CZKD articulates initiatives of politization and repolitization of public space, culture and art. www.czkd.org
Camille Barton (they/them) is a non binary artist, writer and somatic educator, working on the intersections of wellness, drug policy and transformative justice. Their art practice uses dance, improvisation, ritual, bass healing and Afrofuturism to weave new realities fusing pleasure and social change. Camille facilitates Embodied Social Change – movement sessions that fuse somatics and partner work to explore how oppression, such as racism and ableism, is rooted in the body; and how we can re-pattern it using mindful attention and movement. Camille serves ritual bass as DJ AfroOankali and is interested in the healing power of low end frequencies and polyrhythms. They are currently researching grief on behalf of the Global Environments Network, creating a tool kit of embodied grief practices to support efforts for intersectional, ecological justice. www.camillebarton.co.uk
Carolyn Defrin is a theatre and installation artist. Her recent work examines how vulnerability can be reframed so policy makers can listen better to the needs of marginalised communities. carolyndefrin.com
Critical Interruptions is a Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative exploring Live Art and performance criticism. With little regard for review, we search for critical forms and strategies in dialogue with Live Art and performance, wonder how to develop rigorous and relevant critical writing, and lure new writers into thinking about radical and experimental work. Critical Interruptions is a project by Bojana Janković and Diana Damian Martin. criticalinterruptions.com
Chandra Frank is a feminist researcher and independent curator who works on the intersections of archives, waterways, gender, sexuality and race. Her curatorial practice explores the politics of care, experimental forms of narration, and the colonial grammar embedded within display and exhibition arrangements. Chandra earned a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues, including Feminist Review, the Small Axe VLOSA catalogue, The Place is Here publication and the collection Tongues. She recently co-edited a special issue on Archives for Feminist Review. Her curated exhibitions include Re(as)sistingNarratives(Amsterdam/Cape Town), Fugitive Desires(London), and Proclamation 73 (Durban) (co-curated with Zara Julius). Chandra curated the 2016 Archives Matter Conference at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths. Currently, Chandra is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Centre at the University of Cincinnati. chandrafrank.com
Caitlin and Andrew Webb-Ellis are British/Canadian artist filmmakers. They use film, dance, music and installation to create work which offers ways to imaginatively access the sensual, primal and interior. Through an extended process of gathering and sifting, they bring diverse materials and concepts into dialogue to create new meaning. Coincidence and fiction play a significant role, and the subject matter is never fixed. Webb-Ellis have ongoing collaborations with artists, scientists, philosophers, family, friends and strangers. Addressing the political through the lens of the subconscious and the body, they explore human loneliness and how we live together. Webb-Ellis are facilitators of Philosophy for Children and recipients of the Jerwood Film and Video Umbrella Award 2019. They are currently working with Cement Fields on an extended educational project and new film funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. They live and work from a converted removal truck, continually moving from place to place. webb-ellis.org
Danitza Luna lives and works in La Paz, Bolivia. Luna is a cartoonist, illustrator, and graphic designer, graduated in Visual Arts from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Bolivia), specializing in sculpture. Since 2011, she has been part of the anarcho-feminist movement “Mujeres Creando”, one of the most important and influential political platforms in the country, which develops artistic projects and interventions in public spaces, as well as art workshops and educational programs in universities and women’s unions.
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Danitza Luna lives and works in La Paz, Bolivia. Luna is a cartoonist, illustrator and graphic designer, graduated in Visual Arts from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Bolivia), specializing in sculpture. Since 2011, she has been part of the anarcho-feminist movement “Mujeres Creando”, one of the most important and influential political platforms in the country, which develops artistic projects and interventions in public spaces, as well as art workshops and educational programs in universities and women’s unions.
Dimitra Adamopoulou paints and makes comics as long as she can remember herself. She studied painting at the Athens School of fine Arts and comics & illustration at Ornerakis School of Applied Arts. She has also participated in various exhibitions with her comics, illustrations and paintings. She teaches art at “To Spirto” art lab, and at Ornerakis School of Applied Arts.
Dilar Dirik was born in Antakya and grew up in Offenbach am Main. She is an activist, political sociologist, and writer, currently based in the UK. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge and currently researches and teaches at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the book “The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice” (Pluto Press, 2022). Her research and teaching focus on feminism and women’s resistance struggles, justice-seeking, autonomy, war, stateless liberation, and radical knowledge production. Twitter.
Dinis Machado (They, Ela, Hen) With a background in dance and visual art, Dinis Machado’s work is informed by how the sculptural construction of objects, spaces and bodies is reclaimed and worked as choreographic material. In a post-somatic perspective, and caring about bodies that do not conceive, perform or imagine themselves as they are medically described, Machado works with ideas of mutation and transformation – psychedelic bodies that they imagine, claim, and consubstantiate for themselves.
Born in Porto, Machado has been based in Stockholm since 2012. They studied MA Choreography DOCH (Stockholm), Independent Studies Program at Maumaus – Visual Arts (Lisbon), BA in Theatre by ESTC (Lisbon) and studied ballet and contemporary dance at Balleteatro (Porto) from 1994-2002. In 2020 Machado was awarded the Birgit Cullberg Stipendium by the Swedish Art Grants Committee / Konstnärsnämnden.
Their works Site Specific For Nowhere and Cyborg Sunday were part of Moderna Museet’s quadrennial Moderna¬utställning¬en (2018). Their work has been presented in Austria, Croatia, Uruguay, France, Sweden, Germany, England, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Portugal in contexts such as ImpulsTanz, Weld, Dance 4, Chelsea Theatre, FIDCU, NAVE, Festival Arqueologias Del Futuro, ZDB/Negócio, METAL, Chisenhale Dance Space, Colchester Arts Centre, Rivoli, CCB, Festival DDD, Citemor, AGORA, Reflektor M, among others. dinismachado.com
Dennis Kiberu is a radio presenter, PR practitioner, music producer, disc jockey and photographer originating from and based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has studied Journalism and minored in Film at the Multimedia University of Kenya, with a focus on broadcast media and photography. Kiberu is a co-founder of Untethered Magic dealing with project and administrative management, where he and Kibe Wangunyu run Sauti Msituni Radio, a diverse online radio station that seeks to explore the underground & alternative music scene within the African continent. @denniskibbz
Dana Olărescu. Driven by social (in)justice, environmental psychology, and ecofeminism, Dana works collaboratively between the boundaries of art and design. Her current project, Micro Life – an artist-led, Tottenham Hale-based community programme – uses knowledge empowerment and skills exchange to restore locals’ relationship to food, through sustainable microgreens cultivation. Seeing community resilience as vital for green counter-culture, she created the hashtag #MicroChangesCreateWaves, an online platform encouraging artists to rethink their material choices. Dana was previously half of performance company There There whose work on immigration and community exclusion was presented at Tate Modern, the National Maritime Museum, SPILL, Experimentica, CAMP (Denmark), and Tranzit (Romania). www.danaolarescu.com
Dominic Thorpe is an Irish visual artist who works primarily through the body in performance, drawing, video and photography. His work often involves contextual and relational based processes. He has shown and performed work widely internationally and in Ireland, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Bangkok Cultural Centre Thailand, Performance Space London, the Galway Arts Centre Ireland and the SASA Gallery Adelaide Australia. He has completed a number of commissions and residencies including at the Nordic Arts Centre and the Fire Station Dublin. He has received numerous awards and bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland, the Kildare County Council, Culture Ireland and CREATE. For Unit1 he has co-curated the work of over 60 Irish and International performance artists. He was the first artist in residence at University College Dublin (2013/2015), where he researched performance, memory, institutional abuses and images of perpetrators. Dominic currently works at the KCAT Arts Centre Kilkenny and the Creative Well art project Kildare. www.dominicthorpe.net
Diana Damian Martin is an artist and researcher, working at the intersection between writing, politics and performance. Her work concerns alternative critical epistemologies and feminist modes of exchange, interventionist and political performance and the ecological and representational poetics of migration, with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe.Recent collaborations include performing borders, The Albany, Dansehallerne, The Wellcome Collection and Tate Modern. She co-hosts The Department of Feminist Conversations and Something Other, and co-runs the Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative Critical Interruptions, artistic research committee Generative Constraints and is a core member of Migrants in Culture. Her recent publications include (states of)wake: Dedicating Performance and Critical Interruptions Vol 1: Steakhouse LIVE. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and once appeared in an issue of Private Eye, where her work was described as obscure, impenetrable and unclear. Twitter: @DianaADamian
Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader, born in Lima, Peru and based in London. Their work explores the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems with an emphasis on embodiment and ritual, through the mediums of performance, installation, conversation and text.
Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS 2018). Their prose has been published in various art and literary journals such as Lish, SALT. Magazine, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite amongst others. They’re currently developing the next stage of their project (be)longing, a series of immersive elemental rituals.
Valz Gen has been focusing the last two years on integrating their oracular practice with their art and poetry. They run monthly gatherings exploring poetics in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot.
Instagram: @daniella_vg | @sacredsongtarot| cargocollective.com/daniellavalzgen
Elif Sarican is a writer and organiser. She is a social anthropologist and worked with the late Professor David Graeber at the London School of Economics during her Postgraduate degree. She has guest lectured at a number of universities across Europe and North America on topics of feminism, radical politics and global history. Elif is Community and Partnerships Lead for the radical publisher the Left Book Club.Twitter.
Elvira Santamaría-Torres was born in 1967 in México City. In 1994 She participated in the Firs Month of Performance Art in the University Museum El Chopo with the piece One sleepless night. In 1994 she won the First Price of the 3de Performance Art Month Award with the piece Donation for an igneous force and she was also invited to the Rencontre International de Art Performance in Quebec. Since then, Elvira Santamaría has shown her artwork in Festivals, Art Centres, galleries, Museums and public spaces in Mexico, Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America, such as: Expo Hannover 2000; Nippon International Performance Art Festival Tokyo, 2002; Mercosul Biennale Brazil, 2005; National Review of Live Art Glasgow, 2000, 2005, 2007, and 20011 and In place of Passing, Bbeyond, 2006. Santamaría has been member of Black Market International performance art group since 2000. She has organized and curated various performance art events like the International Performance Art Encounter in Yucatán, 2002-2006; Actions on Route, Interventions in Mexico City 2001 and 2003; InterSER0, International Action Art Encounter 2009 in the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art. In 2007 She made Urban Actions project in Bogotá. Since 2010 she has been committee member of Bbeyond, Performance art Organization in Northern Ireland. She was nominated for the ARTRAKERS Award 2013, Awarding Creativity in Art and Conflict in London. Her artwork has been publish in books, catalogues magazines and Internet, such as: Inter Review, Art Actuel 2011; Revista Efimera publish by Acción!MAD in Madrid 2011; Art & Agenda, Political Art and Activism by Gestalten 2012 y Double Exposures 2014. www.elvirasantamariatorres.co.uk
Esther Planas (Barcelona 1960) is an independent artist and researcher with a recent MRes on Art Theory and Philosophy at CSM, London. She produces her online and Situationist des-educational project Escuela de Calor/School of Calidity, that was selected for the 8th Festival of Performance in Cali, Colombia, curated by Helena Producciones. Founding member of the London artists-led co-operative project Five Years since 1998. Her research focuses on notions of self-instituting practices across time and space and the power of utopias. She published, edited and contributed the magazine V.O. in 1984/5 in Barcelona now archived at MACBA Arxius. Planas studied contemporary dance at The London Contemporary Dance School (The Place) and at El Institut del Teatre, Area, Spai de Dansa, Barcelona. She started as a dancer as part of the renowned pioneering modern dance academy Anna Maleras in the 70’s. Her work as lecturer, performer, and sound artist has been presented in various art institutions such as Matadero (Madrid), South London Gallery (London), Beaconsfield (London), BCN PRODUCCIO\’10 La Capella (Barcelona), Tate Britain (London), MACRO Museo (Rome), Autocenter (Berlin). Planas’ work has been also shown at independent curators and artist-run spaces such as Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala), Polish Versaeger (Berlin), Beta-local (San Juan PR), The Barber Shop (Lisbon) and INCA (Detroit USA). As a writer, she has interviewed and reviewed artists’ works and published in cultural international magazines and fanzines such as Metal Barcelona, The Critical Friend and /Seconds, London with a published Novella at FROZEN TEARS. Her fanzine Dark Star/1998/2002 is archived at both MACBA Arxiu and PABD archive. Planas was nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Prize in 2014. www.estherplanas.com
Based in Paris and Tokyo, Emmanuel Guillaud creates labyrinthine installations, theatres of shadows that immerse visitors inside poetic and political wandering.
Sprawling series of installations until the sun rises was deployed over several in-situ installments at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2010), Singapore Art Museum, (2011), Pavillon Vendôme, Clichy’s Contemporary Art Center (2015).
Nominated for Pictet Prize, series Untitled (after Piranesi) is an exploration of subways as monstrous mechanism of control et was exhibited in space specific setting at Yumiko Chiba, Tokyo (2012), in collaboration with leading queer Japanese photographer Takano Ryudai, Tokyo Wondersite (2017) and a large projection in a garden installation at Institut français, Tokyo (solo show, 2017).
Among other works, Untitled (lines), was a homage to forgotten lesbian artist Moss (Point Ephemere, Paris, 2015) and Untitled (traces) was presented at ONE National LGBT Archives, USC, Los Angeles in 2015.
Burning abysees was originally created during a residency at La Plate-forme, laboratory for contemporary art, Dunkerque (2017, solo show) and exhibited, in new, site-specific versions at Chateau Coquelle, Dunkerque (2018) and Fondazzjoni Kreattività, Malta, part of the group show [To be defined] at the occasion of Valetta European Capital of Culture 2018.
Winner of Tokyo Wonderwall award for emerging artists (2005), laureate of Villa Kujoyama (2018), Emmanuel Guillaud is represented by Yumiko Chiba and Associates, Tokyo. instagram/emmanuel_guillaud/
EL Putnam is a visual artist and scholar working predominately in performance art, video, sound, and interactive media. Her work draws from multiple themes and sources, including explorations of the interplay of digital and corporeal gestures, which she investigates through personal and cultural lenses. EL actively presents artworks and performances in the United States and Europe, is a committee member of Bbeyond Belfast, and has been a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group since 2009. She is currently a resident artist at Digital Arts Studios, Belfast. Recent works of note include: Digital Bu(i)t, commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts at Boston City Hall in Boston, MA, USA, and Stakes in the Muck, presented at the 2017 Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale (organized by GradCAM). Originally from the United States, she currently resides in Co. Louth. elputnam.com
Eca Eps (UK/NG) work centers on imposition and the tension it produces, recurrently employing performative strategies to intervene on the shifting contest around rights and freedoms epitomised by territorial struggles. Performative actions are used to play with space and place, often combined with large-scale textile installations. Taking momentum from matters arising within the local, the artist looks outward to draw on the commonality of universal human relations. By drawing on the influence of multiple artistic traditions, Eca Eps also move beyond tactile forms to employ the use of text and speech as intervention in works such as boko, to interrogate penal codes enshrined in divine law, often sealed off from scrutiny. Since much of her process sets out to question and reconsider inherited ideas, Eca Eps’ approach remains expansive and multi-disciplinary, including photography, film, and print. ecaeps.com
Elena Marchevska is a researcher, writing extensively on the issues of belonging, the border and intergenerational trauma. Her artistic work explores borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. elenamarcevska.com
Fehras Publishing Practices was co-established in 2015 in Berlin. We are a cultural workers collective holding emotional capital, grandmother’s wisdom and loyalty to our ancestors. Our work engages in various participatory methods and artistic productions, focusing on the relationship between publishing and history-making. We examine the role of publishing as a tool to combat cultural domination, as well as a means to foster solidarity and deconstruct colonial power. Fehras serves as an observatory for publishing strategies and practices in relation to the geo-political transformations of southwest Asia and North Africa.
Our research is based on our intuition, desires and concerns. We utilize archival materials, including books, magazines, photographs, memoirs, letters, contemporary art publications, and the libraries of authors, publishers, and book sellers. We collect, organize, and re-curate these materials, placing them in diverse spatial and temporal landscapes. We enact publications and reflect their sorties with various mediums. We instrumentalise tools of architecture, design, performance, embroidery and our bodies to witness, protest, map, and investigate politics of (non-conforming) and marginalized bodies in urban spaces and the archives. Our method of demarking boundaries in front of the audience is based on extensive cohabitation and sharing bread and salt, a practice we call Moasherat.
Fehras upholds publishing as a means of creating, transferring, and disseminating knowledge. Consequently, we initiate projects in various forms, such as exhibitions, films, books, lectures, performances, and Moasherat. Our practices address issues that concern them; gender, collectivity, identity, migration, emancipation, funding, and institutions. Fehras Publishing Practices includes Kenan Darwich, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Sama Ahmadi and Sami Rustom.
Filippos Tsitsopoulos Born on 1967 in Athens, he started his studies in Higher School of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki and continued in Madrid, where he completed his PhD (1996). He is an artist that moves in the fields of painting, digital art, video theatre as well as installation art. He has also worked in the field of interactive experiential theatre, video theatre and artistic theatrical performance exploring the limits of theatre and painting since 1990. Filippos Tsitsopoulos video installations have been presented in many exhibitions and shows. He lives in London and Madrid where he worked at El Prado Museum for ten years. His installations and artistic theatrical performances are widely known in many exhibitions worldwide, as well as his performative interactions in institutions such as The Serpentine Gallery, FACT Liverpool, Bluecoat, Frieze Art Fair (London), Alte Nationalgalerie (Berlin), twice in Tate Modern, Toynbee Studios and Artsadmin, CGAC de Santiago de Compostela and Chelsea Theatre (London) among others. In 2018 his project “Is art Lonely?” was exhibited In Ostend, Belgium, selected by Jan Fabre and Joanna De Vos as part of the big exhibition Het Vlot. Kunst is (niet) eenzaam / The Raft. Art is (not) Lonely by Jan Fabre as “salut d’honor” to Jan Hoet that Filippos Tsitsopoulos was collaborating with him twice in the past. https://filippostsitsopoulos.com
Federica Mazzara is Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication at the University of Westminster. Her research revolves around migration in relation to cultural expression, with a focus on visual art. She is currently writing a book for Peter Lang on Lampedusa and the aesthetics of subversion. She has previously published on the literature of migration and on the relationship between literature and painting. Her recent publication include: ‘Spaces of Visibility for the Migrants of Lampedusa’, in L. Baracco (ed.), ‘Re-imagining Europe’s Borderlands: The Social and Cultural Impact of Undocumented Migrants on Lampedusa’. Italian Studies. 70: 4 (2015) 449-464; ‘Performing a Postmigration Cinema in Italy. Corazones de Mujer by K. Kosoof’. Modern Italy, 18.1 (Jan. 2013), 41-53; “Subverting the Narratives of the Lampedusa Borderscape.” Special issue. Crossings. Journal of Migration and Culture 7:2 (2016 forthcoming). This is a Special issue edited by Federica. www.westminster.ac.uk/mazzara-federica
Giulia Palladini is a writer, and curator currently based between Italy and Mexico, working in the field of performance and contemporary art both in academic and contemporary art contexts. Her work moves between different languages and fields of knowledge, striving for a situated and affective approach to both critical and creative practice. Her main interests are political imagination, the politics and erotics of artistic production, social reproduction, language and translation. She is an Alexander von Humboldt alumna, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London. She also taught in Germany, the Netherlands, Colombia and Spain, and presented her work in numerous art institutions in Europe and Latin America, such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museo Miguel Urrutia in Bogotà. Giulia collaborated as dramaturg and critical theorist with various international artists like Mapa Teatro, Forced Entertainment, Tara Irani. She led various research clusters fostering a dialogue between artistic practice and critical theory, such as Affective Archives (Italy 2011, Poland 2014), and Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience (UK/MX/Ecuador/Brazil 2021). In 2024, she curated the series Antidotes: encounters to think live arts in the political landscape (Centro de Cultura Digital, Ciudad de México) and Rumbos de vida (with Rodolfo Suárez Molnar, Atri, Italy,). She authored The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2017), numerous essays published in various languages, and co-edited Lexicon for an Affective Archive (Intellect, 2017, with Marco Pustianaz).
More information on Germinal can be found on their instagram: @germinalsemillerobolivia, and through a blog page on the Centro Cultural de España website here (as of August 2023 this was not available but should become available soon).
Tika Michel: I’m tika, I’m a graphic designer and interdisciplinary artist, my practices oscillate between walking, fiction and encounters. I’ve been working as an actress since 2004 and since 2013 I’ve been researching expanded artistic languages and performance. In 2018 I studied the Interdisciplinary Masters in Theatre and Live Arts at the National University of Colombia and as a sequel to this experience, in 2021 Germinal was born, a research space for the living: an undisciplined, horizontal, and collective space that continues to expand. I have worked with collectives in residencies and collaborations in several Latin American countries. I currently live in Cochabamba-Bolivia, carrying out collaborative projects and artistic research.
Tika Michel: Soy tika, soy diseñadora gráfica y artista interdisciplinar, mis prácticas oscilan entre el caminar, la ficción y los encuentros. He trabajado como actriz desde 2004 y a partir del 2013 incursioné en la investigación de lenguajes artísticos expandidos y el performance. El 2018 cursé la Maestría Interdisciplinar en Teatro y Artes Vivas de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia y como una secuela de esta experiencia, el 2021 nace Germinal, semillero de investigación para las vivas: un espacio de formación indisciplinado, horizontal y colectivo que continúa su expansión a la fecha. He trabajado con colectivos en residencias y en colaboraciones en varios países de latinoamérica. Actualmente reside en Cochabamba-Bolivia, realizando proyectos de intercambio e investigación artística.
Paulina Oña: My name is Paola Oña, I am the fifth of seven children, I was born in Bolivia after my parents and my older brothers and sisters migrated from Buenos Aires-Argentina, at the beginning of the dictatorship processes in South America and with them, inflation. I have a profession that I never got to practice (I’m a lawyer), but that made it possible for me to study the Interdisciplinary Master’s Degree in Theatre and Live Arts at the University of Colombia in 2017: I decided to migrate because I wanted to study. I am Paulina Oña, an interdisciplinary artist. My artistic practice is made up of a series of gestures that make up not only my sensitive sides, but also the spheres of resistance that constitute me as a migrant, a sudaca, the daughter of a plumber and a seamstress, a witch in a non-binary becoming (naming myself a woman makes me more and more conflicted). My artistic practice oscillates between the fiction of words and the generation of images and sensations, between the real and the virtual, and between theatricalities and performativities.
Paulina Oña: Mi nombre es Paola Oña, soy la quinta de siete hijos, nací en Bolivia después de la migración que hicieron mis padres con mis hermanos mayores desde Buenos Aires-Argentina, comenzaban los procesos de dictadura en América del Sur y con ellos, la inflación. Tengo una profesión que nunca llegué a ejercer (soy abogada), pero que me posibilita cursar la Maestría Interdisciplinar en Teatro y Artes Vivas de la Universidad de Colombia en 2017: decidí migrar porque quería estudiar. Soy Paulina Oña, artista interdisciplinar. Mi práctica artística está conformada por una serie de gestos que componen, no solo mis espacios sensibles, sino también aquellas esferas de resistencia que me constituyen como migrante, sudaca, hija de plomero y costurera, bruja en devenir no binario (nombrarme mujer me conflictúa cada vez más). Mi práctica artística oscila entre la ficción de las palabras y la generación de imágenes y sensaciones, entre lo real y lo virtual, entre las teatralidades y las performatividades.
Ghost and John are a Hong Kong multidisciplinary art duo best known for their innovative integration of performance and contemporary technologies; and collaborative approach to making socio-politically pertinent artworks. Drawing from their experiences of working in biology and computer science, they have developed a dynamic artistic practice that examines the intricacies of the body and nature, technological advances and folklore that accompany history. Their works have been presented internationally at Bloomsbury Festival and CCA Goldsmiths in London, ImPulsTanz in Vienna and Tai Kwun and Goethe-Institut in Hong Kong. They are co-founders of Hidden Keileon CIC – A multidisciplinary artist-led non-profit enterprise aiming at building inter-racial solidarity, creating the yet-to-exist and hard-to-imagine.http:www.ghostandjohn.art
Giulia Casalini is an independent curator-artist and transfeminist community organiser based in London. Her curatorial methodologies create multidisciplinary exhibitions and events across institutional and alternative spaces, with a focus on performance and audience participation.
She is a PhD candidate at the University of Roehampton: her study analyses queer-feminist live art from a transnational perspective, in an attempt to decentre the Euro-Anglo-American aesthetic canons and discourses. She has been co-founder and artistic director of the non-profit arts organisation Arts Feminism Queer (aka CUNTemporary, 2012-20), of the project Archivio Queer Italia and of the exhibition-cum-performance club night Deep Trash. She recently curated the festival Ecofutures (London, 2019) and has led ecotransfeminist talks/workshops at Lokomotiva (North Macedonia, 2022), Tate (UK, 2022), Bitef (Serbia, 2021), Centrale Fies (Italy, 2021). Recent residencies: pIAR (Kumasi, Ghana, 2022); DOMUS (Galatina, Italy, 2021). She sits on the advisory board of Mimosa House gallery (London) and she performs with Niya B as the InXestusous Sisters.
Greg Wohead is a London-based writer, performer and live artist originally from Texas. He make theatre performances, one-to-one pieces and audio works. He draws on a broad range of references and forms including autobiography, found audio, film, historical reenactment and fan fiction, and he prioritises a sense of the off-centre, the slippery, the queer. www.gregwohead.com
Georgia Kalogeropoulou is a London based researcher, musician and performer. Her academic interests are centered around Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of time. She is a multi-instrumentalist (playing piano, synthesizers, electric guitar, saxophone, trumpet and traditional Greek instruments), and she performs regularly with numerous bands and artists in London and in Greece. Her research in philosophy draws on her experience as an artist; she explores the notion of time in the crossroads between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and she aims to understand the aesthetic experience as an example of any individuating process.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based on the inland waterways. He is currently Designer and Researcher in Residence at V&A Dundee. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2023/24. Since 2006, Harun has collaborated with Helen Walker as part of the collective practice They Are Here. Harun has recently had solo exhibitions at Nieuwe Vide project space in Haarlem, Netherlands (2022) and Eastside Projects, Birmingham, (2021). He is currently exhibiting Dolphin Head Mountain at the Horniman Museum. This spring Harun will develop new work for the group exhibition Chronic Hunger, Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania, as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme. Harun continues to develop and repair a garden for Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Art Catalyst research programme Emergent Ecologies and is producing a card game, Environmental Justice Questions which will be circulated next year. Harun is an associate artist with Greenpeace Uk. harunmorrison.net
Hari Marini is an independent writer, performance maker, associate lecturer, and founding member of PartSuspended group. Her writing, practice and research are focused on poetics of spaces, performative architectures and women’s writing. Her bilingual book (Greek-English) entitled 28 Διαδρομές της/28 Paths of Her has been recently published (AΚΑΚΙΑ Publications, September 2019). Also, her work has been published in the academic journals Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, Journal of Greek Media and Culture and Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics. She has presented work in the UK, USA, Greece, Czech Republic, Serbia and Spain. Since 2006, Hari has been delivering workshops both in the UK and Greece and has been teaching performance at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). She holds a PhD in Performance from QMUL and an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice from Central School of Speech and Drama (London), funded by the Hellenic Scholarships Foundation (IKY). Also, Hari holds a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Patras. www.partsuspended.com/productions/current/spirals/
Helena Walsh is a Live Artist from Co. Kilkenny Ireland. She has been based in London since 2003. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. Over the last twenty years Helena has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. She has curated Live Art events and projects, alongside regularly presenting on her feminist performance practice. In 2013 she completed her practice-based PhD focussed on Live Art and femininity in an Irish context at the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London. Helena co-founded the pro-choice direct-action feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA, contributing to the groups’ performances, media campaigns and publications between 2013 and the successful referendum to repeal the 8th amendment in the Republic of Ireland in 2018. Alongside her creative and activist work, Helena writes on contemporary performance practice and teaches at the University of the Arts, London. www.helenawalsh.com
Harriet Hawkins’ research is focused on the advancement of the geohumanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically she explores the geographies of art works and art worlds, theoretically she is interested in the elaboration of core humanities concepts of aesthetics, creativity and the imagination from a geographical perspective. Her current research focuses on the underground as a site of /for the formation of much needed new environmental imaginations. Collaboration underpins her research practice and alongside written research she has produced artist’s books, participatory art projects and exhibitions with individual artists and range of international arts organizations including Tate, Arts Catalyst, Iniva, Furtherfield and Swiss Artists in Labs. pure.royalholloway.ac.uk
Anderu Immaculate Mali a.k.a Immy Mali. Immy from Arua, lives and works in Kampala Uganda. Using a variety of media including, text, video, sound, sculpture, installation, animation, her work attempts to unpack the complexities and entanglements of memory and existence in a neo/postcolonial Uganda. Notions of presence and absence, personal memories of childhood growing up in Uganda juxtaposed with current personal and collective
experiences of existence in shifting spaces also influence her work. Her ongoing project Letters to my childhood (2017-present) accords her the duality to engage with her past and present simultaneously. In 2013, she obtained a Bachelors degree in Industrial and Fine Arts from Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine arts, Makerere University, Kampala. She is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Netherlands
(2018-2019). Mali has participated in exhibitions, residencies and workshops in various countries including Kenya, Netherlands, India, Ethiopia, Denmark, Germany, USA, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, and Uganda. Her work has been published in art magazines including the Africa arts journal 2019. @immymali
Iulia Mărăcine is a performance artist and co-founder of the multidisciplinary collective, Ludic. Within the collective, she co-created, organised and performed in participative performances, audiovisual installations, somatic workshops, in spaces such as Batterstea Arts Center (Londra), 13Festivalen (Gothenburg), ARTHUB (București), KyivDanceResidency (Kiev), CLOUD@Danslab (Den Haag), Centrul National al Dansului din București, Seoul Dance Center (Korea), SKOGEN (Swe). In her research, Iulia explores various possibilities to alter and rethink of the self and its relation with the environment. She puts a strong emphasis on corporality, processuality and non-hierarhic collaboration between artists. At the present, she is undergoing an MA at CESI (The Centre of Excellence in the Study of Image), where she researches the possibilities of translating notions from animal and plant studies into the pre-linguistic realm of choreographic practices. www.ludiccollective.com
Instant Dissidence is a UK/Ireland-based company directed by me, Rita Marcalo. It is my way of bringing different artists together, in different combinations, to realise different ideas: through Instant Dissidence I invent ways of offering other people art experiences. My practice began in dance/choreography but eventually I became more interested in communicating concepts than in sticking to a particular art form. I began collaborating with others to create work in different media, and today I bring in people from different areas to solve creative problems. Instant Dissidence’s is also a socially-engaged practice where the company foregrounds the role that dance/choreography can play as a social engine: we are ‘artivists’ who believe in the power of connecting art and social consciousness. www.instantdissidence.org
Irini De Vos-Tzanetoulakou is from Greece and she lives in Antwerp, Belgium. She has a Master’s degree in classical singing from the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). She has also obtained a degree in drama (Contemporary Theater School, Athens, Greece), and a Biology Diploma in Patras University, Greece. Irini is a versatile performer who has performed in various performances (opera, theatre, dance theatre) in different countries: Greece, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Romania, Egypt and Australia. She often combines her classical singing with theatre and contemporary dance. She also has many years of experience in teaching. Since 2013 she gives singing lessons at conservatories and drama schools in Greece and since September 2017 in music academies in Belgium. www.irinitzanetoulakou.com
Istanbul Queer Art Collective was founded in 2012 to engage in live art, with a view that the documentation of performance is an art form in itself. The collective is currently based in London and is comprised of its two founding members Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul, who are firm believers in what Jack Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure” and what Renate Lorenz calls “radical drag”. Their performances range from the durational to the intimate and can morph towards other forms like sound art or instalation. IQAC has performed at various art events around the world among which are: House of Wisdom Exhibition in Amsterdam and Nottingham; If Independent Film Festival and Mamut Art Fair in Istanbul, Athens Sound Acts Festival in Greece, Zürcher Theatre Spektakel and Les Belles de Nuit in Zurich and Deep Trash, Queer Migrant Takeover and NSA: Queer Salon in London. istanbulqueerartcollective.co.uk
Jane is a photographer and a filmmaker. After moving to London from Hong Kong in 2021, she completed an MA in film and philosophy (distinction) at King’s College London. Her visual dissertation, ‘What My Video Remembers: Constructing a Floating Hong Kong Subjectivity with Home Movies’ has received Honourable Mention from the Department of Film Studies. She is also the awardee for the 2022/23 Architecture Photography Fund, and is working towards her first photography exhibition in July 2023. lamjane.com
John London is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Director of the Centre for Catalan Studies at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre (1997), Contextos de Joan Brossa (2010) and, as editor, Contemporary Catalan Theatre (1996, with David George), Theatre under the Nazis (2000), and One Hundred Years of Futurism (2017). He has translated plays from Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish by playwrights such as Sergi Belbel, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Federico García Lorca, Andreea Valean, and Pedro Vicente. John’s own published and performed texts include You Know How These Things Are (1998), Right (1999), The New Europe (2000), and Nex (2005). He completed The COVID Trilogy with Chris Danowski, from which Another Time This Time was produced in 2022.
Jack Ky Tan uses law, policy, social norms and customs as a medium of making art. He creates performances, sculpture and participatory projects that highlight the rules that guide human behaviour. In Jack’s social practice, he blurs the boundaries between art, governance and consultancy in order to help organisations reform and revision themselves using artistic thinking. Jack trained as a lawyer and worked in civil rights NGOs before becoming an artist. Jack’s practice-led PhD at Roehampton University explored legal aesthetics and performance art. He has taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art and University of Brighton, and politics at Goldsmiths.
Jemima Yong is a performance maker and photographer. jemimayong.format.com
Jumana Hokan is a Syrian/British multidisciplinary artist presently working in the UK. Her current practice involves creating varied interdisciplinary interventions that present narratives, which may question, challenge and explore the psychological and cultural impact of diasporas in communities and our fragile relationships between heritage, cultural and geographical identities, gender and societal evolution. www.jumanahokan.com
Joseph Morgan Schofield (b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) is the lead artist of F U T U R E R I T U A L, a performance and research project considering ritual and queer futurity. Joseph co-facilitates move close, with Es Morgan and Sara Sassanelli.
Joseph has performed throughout the UK and internationally. They make solo work, and work collaboratively with artists including Es Morgan, John King, Kate Stonestreet, and Nat Norland.
I understand performance and action as a site of encounter, between identities, bodies and ideas. These encounters are charged with the potential for transformation.
I work with ritual action and mythic forms, reassembling old stories and fashioning new ones to form a queer mythos of desire, memory and endurance for the age of the anthropocene.
My performances are acts of mythopoesis – embodying other ways of being, in other possible worlds. Ritualistic performance is the technology through which this transformation is attempted.
These rituals involve difficulty, duress and actions make visible the tensions and complexities inherent in human experience, such as that between violence and desire.
I do not ask you to be a witness. My work foregrounds the immediacy of the sweating, nude, bleeding body before you, but through this body I hope that you may process, desire, mourn or commune. josephmorganschofield.com
Jade Foster (b. 1996), is an Artist, Curator and Creative Producer of Caribbean heritage based in Nottingham, UK. Current research interests include contemporary art practices exploring institutional critique, queerness, sound and performance art. Foster is concerned with speaking, curating and making art in the public sphere. Previously they were a speaker, guest and panellist in public programming in the UK including Artist In Conversation: Jennifer Martin & Jade Foster, Primary; Concrete Jungle, In conversation with d’bi.young anitafrika, Nottingham Contemporary; BACKCRIT Crit Session, guest artist, Backlit Gallery; Contemporary Melanin Narratives in Sound and Music, The Tetley – an event organised by Marlo de Lara and supported by The Centre for Practice-Led Research in the Arts (CePRA), University of Leeds and Ladyz in Noyz. Alongside working independently, they currently hold positions as Assistant Curator at Primary and Creative Programme Coordinator at New Art Exchange (NAE) in Nottingham. jadefoster.co.uk
June Lam (b. 1990) is an Australian artist of Chinese and Vietnamese ancestry, living in London and working across sculpture, performance and dance. As a performer of live art, he has worked with modes of somatic learning and movement as a form of gender exploration. In his practice he wishes to challenge the Eurocentric gaze and find new ways of articulating desire as a queer Asian trans body in the world. He also frequently performs work by other visual artists, which has included the UK debut staging of A Life (Black & White) by Nedko Solakov (2020), at Tate Modern; the UK premiere of we shall run by Yvonne Rainer (2018) at London Contemporary Music Festival, Ambika P3 (2018); Tape Piece by Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells (2018) for Body as Archive, Slade Research Centre. junelam.net
Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (Nov – 10 Mar 2019) which toured to Humber Street Gallery ( July-sept 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. jademontserrat.com
Kostis Ntemos was born in Athens on the 2nd of January 1980. Through juvenile introversion and later nerdom he seeked to explore and explain how and why he was so attracted to fantasy and reverie. This corpus of dreamscapes led him to poetry and heavy metal for answers. He is currently preoccupied with astrophotography and medieval bookbinding.
Krishna Goswami works as an Assistant Teacher in a government sponsored higher secondary school in Kolkata, India. An avid learner, Goswami loves to tell stories through the visual medium of photography. The space and transition of time intrigues Goswami. The metaphorical rhythm of the chaos and silence of life get portrayed in the making of the images. She has been part of a number of national and international photo exhibitions. Goswami has been published in platforms like the erstwhile Yourshot National Geographic, 121clicks, sixfeet.photography and Better Photography magazine.
Kijo Agacu is a Burundian American artist based in New York City. She holds a degree in architecture and is finishing her MFA in sculpture at Bard College in New York.
Kibe Wangunyu is a self-taught Kenyan commercial photographer, cinematographer and digital artist whose work focuses on themes of human psychology, philosophy and day to day human interaction in relationship to culture, identity, and Kenyan colonial and pre-colonial history. @simonkibbz
Katherine Nolan is a contemporary artist working primarily in video, photography and performance. She is also a curator with MART, Livestock & Dublin Live Art Festival, and a lecturer in Digital Media at the Institute of Technology in Blanchardstown. Exploring tensions between the experiential and spectacular body, the artist turns a ‘trivial’ and ‘frivolous’ fixation with herself as image into a critical weapon, seeking to unravel narcissism and twist its clichéd terms. She employs strategies of pleasure, humour, complicity, resistance and intervention seeking to disrupt taken for granted cultural significations and trouble social agreements. She has performed and exhibited internationally in Europe, America and Asia. Recently at LACDA Los Angeles, Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm and the Freud Museum, London. She currently lives and works in Dublin. www.katherinenolan.net
Karmadavis (David Pérez) is a talented painter, illustrator, chef, and performance artist who moved to Guatemala in 2006 but whose work has continued to be inspired by the presence of a borderline on the island of Hispaniola. Amongst his most important individual and collective exhibitions, events, and projects are: Bienal de Arte Eduardo Léon Jiménez, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic (2019, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010, 2008, 2004), Our Land / Alien Territory, 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015); Karmadavis: Art, Justice, Transition, ESCALA, University of Essex (2013), Tumulus, Ultravioleta y NuMu, Guatemala (2013), Morisoñando caribbean recipes – gastronomy in conversation with other media (2013-), Exit Art, New York (2011).
Kai Syng Tan FRSA SFHEA is an artist, curator, consultant and academic. Marked by an ‘eclectic style and cheeky attitude’ (Sydney Morning Herald), ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ (Dr Alan Latham, UCL) and ‘positive atmosphere’ (Guardian), Kai’s work has been widely shared. She is Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Art and Visiting Artist at King’s College London. Networks she has founded include: RUN! RUN! RUN!, Neurodiversity In/And Creative Research, Running Cultures Research Group and Co-Founder and Member of Arts and Mobilities Network. She is also UK Adult ADHD Network Creative and Cultural Consultant, PsychART Advisor and Music In Detention trustee kaisyngtan.com
Kaur Chimuk is an independent curatorial decolonial methodologist exploring trans(non)binary viewership in collective research. Based in South-East Asia, they work between India, Bangladesh, and Sweden with Meteor International. Kaur co-founded TAC (Tracing A City) in India, facilitating collective research initiatives. They consult on cultural exchanges and curatorial programs, collaborating with platforms like Inventory Platform (UK), Bom Artist Residency (Sweden), and Zmayat (Bangladesh-India).
Lúcia Santos is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Reykjavík. After her BA in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, she has been focusing mainly on performative practices in her projects and further learning through masterclasses and workshops.
Alejandra Del Carpio is a multidisciplinary artist between the performing arts, performance, and visual arts, her work explores feminism, decolonization and the investigation of her ancestry. She is the founder of the Bienal Calle, and intends to continue to grow the project both in Bolivia and Brazil, and if possible, to expand the seed to other Latin American countries for future editions. She hopes that the capacity and resources for the event will get better and better, because the artists are excellent and the pieces presented are transformative.
Instagram: @calle.performance
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Alejandra Del Carpio, es una artista multidisciplinaria entre las artes escénicas, la performance y las artes visuales y su trabajo explora e investiga temas relacionados al feminismo, la descolonización y la investigación de su ancestralidad. Es fundadora de la Bienal Calle, y tiene la intencion de que continúe creciendo, tanto en Bolivia como en Brasil y si es posible, expandir la semilla por algún otro país de latinoamérica para las próximas ediciones. Espera que las condiciones para la realización sean cada vez mejores, porque los artistas son excelentes y las piezas presentadas son transformadoras.
Instagram:@calle.performance
Lara Khaldi is a curator, critic and artist living between Jerusalem and Amsterdam. Since 2019 she has been a member of the curatorial team of documenta fifteen. In recent years she was the head of the Media Studies Programme at Alquds Bard College, Jerusalem and a core tutor in the Disarming Design MA program, at Sandberg Institute, 2020-2022. Lara is a co-founding member of the independent educational platform School of Intrusions and the collective Question of Funding. Khaldi has been recently appointed as director of de Appel Art Centre in Amsterdam, starting January 2023.
Lynn Lu is an artist whose context-specific work explores intimacy, proximity, and personal histories to unearth the poetics of quotidian experiences. In her interdisciplinary practice, the sentient body is the main medium for perceiving and presenting (versus representing) meaning (versus message) through direct personal experience. Engaging vigorously with the present reality of all that is here-and-now, the meaning of her works often manifest in the resonant relationships created between herself and her audience, and between the audience themselves. An ardent border-crosser, Lynn has lived and worked in nine cities across four continents. Currently based between Singapore and London, she is a Visiting Artist at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, an Associate Lecturer at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, and an Associate Artist at ]performance s p a c e [. lynnlu.info
Lucia Palmero Resident of a border town, existentialist at heart, artist and activist. Deeply involved in the topic of migration from her origins to the point of actively participating in the tragedy of the migrants in Europe, Lucia investigates the concepts of border vs individual/collective identity through performances, flash mobs, paintings and videos cancelling out the boundaries of her field of research. www.luciapalmero.com
Lois Keidan is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Live Art Development Agency, London. From 1992 to 1997 she was Director of Live Arts at the ICA, London. Prior to that she was responsible for Performance Art at Arts Council of England, and previously worked at the Midland Group, Nottingham and Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh.
Lisa Alexander’s artwork and research explores the subjectivity of witnessing and artistic practice as a lens on social change. She has presented in the UK and internationally. Recent projects explored processes of coming together, poetic agency and shared narrativity. She curated Love Letters to a (Post-)Europe at BIOS, Athens as an artistic response to the situation following the Greek referendum in 2015 and is planning a book that re-frames the event for page. She created/performed If/Then commissioned by European Theatre Research Network, Inside/Outside Europe Research Network and Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Multilogue; in collaboration with Hari Marini and the voices and words of many in the period prior to and following the EU referendum in the UK. Lisa holds a PhD from Roehampton (2014).
Licia Cianetti is a politics researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, currently conducting research on “What Happened to the Multicultural City? Effects of Nativism and Austerity”. As part of this project, Licia is developing a dialogue–collaboration with four artists (Galas Mbengue, Farwa Moledina, Andrejs Strokins, and Alexandre Francisco “Diaphra”) in Turin, Birmingham, Riga and Lisbon. The work-in-progress, multimedia web-book that grows from this collaboration can be accessed at www.multiculturalcities.com
Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani is an independent curator, writer and lecturer of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Complemented by continuous dialogue with artists and art professionals, her research, fieldwork and curatorial practice revolve around critical social and political issues in Southeast Asia, advocating a counter-hegemonic and non-Western-centric discourse. Loredana’s current and recent exhibitions as well as engaged research projects that examine art and society at the periphery include Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia (2018) with MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand; Heads or Tails? Uncertainties and Tensions in Contemporary Thailand (2017) with Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York; The Game/Viet Nam by LE Brothers (2016) with Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok; and Architectural Landscapes: SEA in the Forefront (2015) with Queens Museum, New York. Loredana recently edited the publication Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia, published in conjunction with the exhibition, which includes specially commissioned essays by historians and subject-matter experts on topics related to migration, borders and diasporas. Loredana is based between London, UK, and Bangkok, Thailand. soas.academia.edu/loredanaparacciani
Lasse Lau (born 1974, Denmark) is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who looks into the spatial dimension of power to better understand society’s social struggles. His films have won Grand prix Nanook-Jean Rouch in France, the Golden Raven in Russia, World Cinema Doc at Kansas Filmfest, Nordic:Dox Award at CPH:DOX and 1st prize at Fokus Videokunst Festival. His work have shown at Beirut Art Center, Brandts Klædefabrik, British Museum, BOZAR, Cimatheque Cairo, Edith-Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Fotografisk Center, Green Lantern, Hamburger Bahnhof, Lumiar Cité, Malmö konsthall, Medrar for Contemporary Art, MOMA PS1, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea Lisboa, Museum of Resistance Torino, OCAT, Smart Project Space, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art and Westfälische Kunstverein. Lasse Lau was a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art ISP. lasselau.net
Moviendo Territorios is a collective formed by Eli Wewentxu (Wallmapu-Chile) and Sharon Mercado Nogales (Bolivia Andes), which was born with the intention of building relationships and activating spaces through the construction of greenhouses in different places and within different communities in Abya Yala. Moviendo Territorios creates a direct bridge with communities and spaces that are working the land, building self-sustenance, caring for the seeds, and through the recognition of their territory are fostering la resistencia del pueblo, the peoples’ resistance, without the promotion of conventional institutionalism. Since 2020, we have been able to collaborate with 3 territories: Chomio-Wallmapu, Cusijata-Bolivia, and El Chaco-Argentina. Through these connections, an alternative reality to the concept of “solidarity” opens up, questioning the power dynamics that diminish the role and voice of ancestral peoples in the face of the patriarchal institutionalism of NGOs, Foundations, and the State. Moviendo Territorios organizes Soli Fiestas in Berlin, Germany, with the intention to collect a significant amount of money. This financial support is used to pay for materials, transportation, refreshments, and other needs agreed upon with each community, ensuring that their needs and desires are met. All of this is made possible only through the network of friends, spaces, and collaborators who support us at every event we hold.
Moi Tran employs research, theatre, text, sound, installation, video, and performance to examine theorisations on emotional intelligence, the politics of audition and encounters of witness in events of fugitive performativity. Her interests in communication and analogue encoding/decoding have produced experiments for imagining and performing alternative narratives in repositories of information. She collaborates with sound makers, dancers, actors, community-performers to reimagine conventional performance making. Tran is currently commissioned by the Wellcome Collection and will contribute to ‘By the Means at Hand’ a project by Vlatka Horvat for the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – the 60th International Exhibition of Visual Art 2024 by invitation. She has presented and performed her work nationally and internationally, ‘Well Settled’ (LUX U.K & OutPost VN); ‘SLEEP’(Live Art Development Agency/Royal Court /Pushkin House); ‘Civic Sound Archive’ Solo show PEER (UK); ‘Reshaping the collectible’ Tate Modern (UK); Sign Chorus (Da Nang, Vietnam); ‘Sonic Signalling in Reverse’ (Gothenburg Biennale)’; ‘The Bolero Effect’ (VCCA Vietnam); ‘The Circuit’ (Prague Quadrennial Festival); ‘I love a broad margin to my life’ Solo show (Yeo Workshop, Singapore); Shy God Chapter Mot (Chisenhale)‘Shy God – A Chorus’ (SPILL Festival UK); Landing 1.2.3 (Mark Rothko Centre Latvia). www.moitran.co.uk
Madalena Bettencourt, sound enthusiast and self-proclaimed sonoplástica, is fiercely looking to interpret the world through the exercise of listening. Beyond sculpture, she covers any discipline that allows her to treat Sound as an entity. Recently in her projects, she has approached the act of writing, and performance – finding in these moments the opportunity to explore her time in a deeper way. Since her bachelor’s degree in Sculpture, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, she has been involved in a series of collective and individual projects, including: “Construção de uma Utopia” artistic residency by Penumbra collective (October 2022); project “Arts 4 People and Earth”, organized by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Washington DC and ARS, Fundão (2023); solo happening-exhibition “Hoje o mundo vê-se mais do que se Ouve”, in the Cistern of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Lisbon (May 2023); Biennial of Loures “Jov’Arte”, awarded with the third prize (November 2023); sound composition for performance “Duas páginas por Dia” by António Rivotti, at the cultural space “Casa Cheia”, Lisboa (January 2024).
Movimiento Maricas Bolivia is a community-based LGBTIQ+ organisation made up of people who self-identify as indian-indigenous-cholas as well as maricas-machorras-travas-cuir. It was founded in May 17, 2010 with the broadcasting of its first radio program called Soy Marica y Qué (2010 – 2010), broadcast through Radio Deseo in the city of La Paz. Subsequently, the program moved to the city of El Alto under the name Nación Marica (2016). In 2022, Movimiento Maricas Bolivia produced the audiovisual program and street interventions Nación Marica Callejera that has more than thirty-three programs recorded in public spaces across La Paz and El Alto, featuring thirty-three guests who reflect on social, political, sexual, and indigenous issues in the country. This program is broadcast through their Youtube Channel and is the only audiovisual program whose signature discursive approach and embodied identities are indigenous-chola, as well as marica-machorra-trava-cuir. Nación Marica has received the “Periodismo en Derechos Humanos” award (2016 and 2017) from Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir for the radio reports Nuestra venganza es ser felices: historias de amor y resistencia política homosexual (Joy is our revenge: love stories and queer political resistance) and Morir por ser mujer trans en Bolivia: Dayana Kenia, una historia tan lejos de la justicia (Dying for being a trans woman in Bolivia: Dayana Kenia a story far away from justice. They have also received the “Periodista Sin Riesgo” award (2018) from Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir and Alianza por la Solidaridad for the radio report ¿Abortan todas, abortan las lesbianas? Situación del aborto en Bolivia desde una mirada lésbica. (Do all women abort? Do lesbians abort? Abortion in Bolivia from a lesbian perspective.)
Movimiento Maricas Bolivia es una organización de base comunitaria LGBTIQ+ conformada por personas que se autoidentifican como indias-indígenas-cholas además de maricas-machorras-travas-cuir. Fue fundada el 17 de mayo del año 2010 con la emisión
de su primer programa radial denominado “Soy Marica y Qué” (2010 – 2015), emitido a través de Radio Deseo 103.3 F.M. de la ciudad de La Paz. Posteriormente, el programa se traslada a la ciudad de El Alto con el nombre de “Nación Marica” (2016), emitido en Radio FEJUVE 875 F.M. Asimismo, “Nación Marica” (2017 – 2020), se emite por Radio Líder 97.0 F.M., también en la ciudad de El Alto. Desde el año 2022 Movimiento Maricas Bolivia produce el programa audiovisual (intervenciones callejeras) “Nación Marica Callejera” que cuenta con más de 33 programas grabados en espacios públicos de La Paz y El Alto y 33 invitadas que reflexionan sobre problemáticas sociales, políticas, sexuales e indígenas del país. Este programa se emite a través del canal de YouTube Movimiento Maricas Bolivia y es el único programa audiovisual cuya impronta discursiva, corporal e identitaria, es india-indígena- chola además de marica-machorra-trava-cuir. “Nación Marica” ha recibido el premio “Periodismo en Derechos Humanos” (2016 y 2017) de Católicas por el Derecho Decidir por los reportajes radiales Nuestra venganza es ser felices: historias de amor y resistencia política homosexual y Morir por ser mujer trans en Bolivia: Dayana Kenia, una historia tan lejos de la justicia. También la recibido el premio “Periodista Sin Riesgo” (2018) de Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir y Alianza por la Solidaridad por el reportaje radial ¿Abortan todas, abortan las lesbianas? Situación del aborto en Bolivia desde una mirada lésbica.
Instagram: maricas_bolivia,
Website: maricasbolivia.wordpress.com
mother tongues is a transdisciplinary research-led project applying decolonial, feminist, and queer pedagogies to explore language and archival collections. Their practice responds to language’s impact on personal and collective empowerment through experimental archival research.
www.mothertoungues.co.uk
Michael MUI is an independent filmmaker from Hong Kong who worked as a visual director in the city’s largest television broadcasting company. With a background in stage performance and extensive experience in directing, editing, and screenwriting, Michael has become an all-rounded filmmaker with a unique voice who specialises in using creative visual representations to encapsulate mood and feelings. His films and documentaries have been recognised in film festivals and competitions such as Sundance Hong Kong, Gatsby Creative Awards, and Red Bird Film Festival. michaelmuifilm.com
Dr Marquard Smith is Programme Leader for the MA Museums & Galleries in Education at UCL Institute of Education, Professor of Artistic Research at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, and Editor in Chief, Journal of Visual Culture. Marq is interested in how institutions institute, and he knows that they can and should do better. To this end, he listens and learns, he teaches and researches and writes, he curates and edits and commissions, and he collaborates. A lot.
Twitter: @marq_smith
mandla is a Zimbabwean-born writer and performer. mandla’s work draws on the artist’s intersectional existence. Using words as a medium, the artist is heavily concerned with communicating the many sensations of being a person.
mandla uses names in place of pronouns, this is because mandla is agender and gendered pronouns do not exist in mandla’s first language, isiNdebele.
mandla is obsessed with words and uses their power both written and performed to carve out a mandla-shaped space in the world.
Twitter: @mandla_ndla
Instagram: @mandla.ndla
Meenadchi (pronouns: Meenadchi/they) is a facilitator and somatic practitioner whose work centers the softness of meeting our best self and deepening into our collective light. Using a blend of family constellation therapy and Non-Violent Communication, Meenadchi weaves group containers in which participants are invited to recognize and heal the entanglements of bad communication and ancestral trauma so that we can collaboratively become a set of bad-ass ancestors who nurture legacies of connection and joy – both for ourselves and the communities we love to serve. traumainformednvc.com
Manuel Vason is a transdisciplinary artist interested to explore the correspondence between the art of photographing and the art of performing. Vason believes the tension between the action and the image is a critical space of imaginative expansion. Manuelvason.com
Mihaela Drăgan is a multidisciplinary artist with an education in theatre who lives in Bucharest and works in several other countries. In 2014, she founds Giuvlipen Theatre Company, for which she is an actress and playwright, together with other Roma actresses. She also works in Berlin as an actress for Maxim Gorki Theatre, Heimathafen Neukölln, Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg. She is also a trainer at Theatre of the Oppressed, working with Roma women in Romania and has also worked with refugee girls in Germany.
She was one of the six finalists for The 2017 Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award from New York, an award which acknowledges the exceptional work of 20 theatre women around the world. In 2020 she is nominated again and she is the recipient of the Special Award of the League. In 2018, Drăgan was a resident artist in Hong Kong at Para Site Contemporary Art Centre where she was developing Roma Futurism – that lies at the intersection of Roma culture with technology and witchcraft. Her performance “Roma Futurism” has been showcased in art spaces as the Museum of Contemporary Art from Belgrade; at FutuRoma – collateral exhibition at Venice Biennale; at Critical Romani Studies conference at Central European University in Budapest and Romanian Cultural Institute in London. In the same year is acknowledged by PEN World Voices International Play Festival 2018 in New York as one of the ten most respected dramatists of the world.In 2019 is one of the playwrights selected for the acclaimed Royal Court Theatre International Summer Residency in London where she wrote a science fictional play about a future utopian society of Roma witches who control technology and fight neo-fascist politics in Europe. In 2021 she exhibits her first video installation ”Future is a safe place hidden in my braids” divided into 3 short films that depicts futuristic rituals for healing transgenerational trauma of Roma people and are projecting a safe future for the community. Mihaela-dragan.com
Michaela Crimmin is co-director of Culture+Conflict, a not-for-profit agency working to investigate and amplify the role and value of contemporary art produced in response to international conflict. Activities include research, discursive events, commissions, scholarships and a forthcoming artist’s residency at the conflict related archives at King’s College London. She is an independent curator; teaches on the Royal College of Art’s Curating Contemporary Art MA programme; and is an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins School of Art. Previously Head of Arts at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), a role that included initiating and directing the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre; and the ‘Fourth Plinth’ commissioned artworks, Trafalgar Square, London.
www.cultureandconflict.org.uk
Mengting Zhuo is a Chinese performance maker based in London. She received her MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London and her BA in English Literature. She is also a freelance writer and translator. She is constantly interested in the contingency of meaning, the process of translation and communication, and manipulation of technological tricks. As a director and a performer, she has made work for theatres, galleries and other spaces, including streets, a bar, and a residential flat. Her work has been performed/exhibited in international contexts including Migration Matters Festival (Sheffield), China Shanghai International Arts Festival (Shanghai), Beijing ONE Festival (Beijing), Celeste Prize final exhibition (London). A Celeste Prize finalist 2016. A Celeste Prize finalist 2016. www.zhuomengting.com
Mary Paterson is a writer and artist who works across text, visual art and performance. With Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin, she runs the experimental writing collectives Something Other and The Department of Feminist Conversations. With Roberta Mock, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation (Intellect and the Live Art Development Agency, 2020). www.marypaterson.wordpress.com
Marikiscrycrycrycry is a long-term choreographic project for Malik Nashad Sharpe’s artistic research. They were born and raised in the suburbs of New York City and their family comes from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. They have also spent formative time in Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto. They are Black, and have African, Black Carib, Asian, and Scottish ancestry. They are nonbinary and use they/them pronoun and their work deals with gender, race, sexuality, and processes of subjectivity, ontology, and meaning production. They work with dance with an expansive outlook, drawing influence from current Black dance forms, contemporary dance, ballet, butoh, and live action. Their choreographic practice treats performance more as a space where possibility meets its materiality, creating ephemeral frameworks for now and the future and with political edge. They graduated with a B.A. in Experimental Dance and Live Art from Williams College, and hold a diploma in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. maliknashadsharpe.com
Martin Bureau lives and works Québec City, Canada. Both a painter and filmmaker, Martin Bureau has presented his works at many events and gatherings around the world. Among them, the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto, the Chicago International Film Festival, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Québec City or the VIII Bienal de video y nuevos medios in Santiago, Chile. While his works are prized by collectors, they also enrich the collections of many public and private institutions in Québec Province. His work in painting and film continues to express aesthetic and social subjects while looking to provide a lasting testament of the present era and its stakes. www.martinbureau.com
Marilena Zaroulia is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the Department of Performing Arts, University of Winchester. Her research focuses on theatre, performance and the cultural politics of post-1989 Europe. She has published on contemporary British theatre, performance, affect and national identity, utopian performatives and the Eurovision Song Contest, and performance and migration. She co-convenes the Inside/Outside Europe Research Network and is the co-editor of Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She currently serves as the Secretary of Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). Encountering Europe on British Stages: Performances, Policies and Affects since 1990 will be published by Methuen Drama Engage. www.cssd.ac.uk/staff-profiles/dr-marilena-zaroulia
Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. She is the author of On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015; 2018), Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze (2009), and The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001). She is the co-editor of The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities (2013) and of Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (2013), the editor of Special Issue on Hispaniola After the Earthquake, BLAR (Bulletin of Latin American Research)(2013), and Agenda: Special Issue on Derek Walcott (2002-2003). She is currently working on a monograph focused on Derek Walcott’s engagement with the visual arts. essex.ac.uk/maria-cristina-fumagalli
Based in Dublin, Ireland Moran Been-noon‘s work critiques political aspects of everyday life through examining physical actions such as walking, talking, and touching, with a current focus on processes and psychology of acculturation. Her projects are not medium-specific and she works in any means that best serve the concept. Been-noon earned her MFA degree in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and her PhD at NCAD in Dublin. During her PhD studies, she developed a consistent curatorial practice and curated several exhibitions and art events. As a curator Been-noon is interested in exploring the possibilities in political art practice and particularly questions of the spaces and places art practice occupies. Been-noon is currently a co-director of Platform Arts in Belfast, and working as an independent curator, writer, and artist. moranb.art
Mohamad Ali “Dali” Agrebi is a Tunisian theatre artist and LGBTQI+ activist living in Malta. He collaborated with various international artists as a performer and co-creator. His latest creation Would You Like to Dance With Me? was an interactive street performance with a group of asylum seekers. Dali worked on different campaigns with minority rights organisations in Tunisia and Malta. He currently acts as a committee member of Malta LGBTIQ Rights Movement.
Nikos Kabasele was born in Athens in 1986 and grew up in Alexandroupolis. He was painting from a very young age. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts and from the École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image (Master BD,Angoulême). He has participated in various comics festivals and collective exhibitions as an artist. He has also had personal exhibitions of his paintings. His work has been published by publishers such as: Hestia publishings, Enati Diastasi, ADDART, Paratiritis tis Thrakis and by the Ethnological Museum of Thrace. He has collaborated with magazines such as: ANTI, Mple Komitis and Comic Cultura. His hobbies are: miniature painting, boardgames and mixed martial arts. He lives and works in Alexandroupolis, as an art teacher in SOS Children’s Village of Thrace and as a freelance artist.
Niya B is a transfeminist artist, working at the intersections of visual art and performance. She uses video, soundscapes, text, live acts and immersive installations to explore themes related to ecology, posthumanism, (trans)gender politics, class and equity in health and wellbeing. As a counteraction to political polarisation, Niya seeks to establish intimacy with her audience, creating a meditative space of vulnerability, affect and interdependence.
Niya has shown work in exhibitions, festivals, live art events and academic conferences including Tate Britain and The Yard Theatre (London), CCA (Glasgow), Performance Space (Folkestone), NEoN festival (Dundee); 5th Thessaloniki Biennale; 5th Moscow Biennale; International Print Biennale (Newcastle); Goldsmiths University of London; University of Leeds.
Her work has been featured in Dazed, Elephant magazine and Future Now / Aesthetica Art Prize. Niya has been supported by a-n, Jerwood Arts, Arts Council England, the British Council and the Cultural Institute Leeds among others.
Nima Séne grew up mainly between Berlin (Germany) and Wellington (New Zealand) they are Afro (Senegalese Fula)- German. Nima’s artistic practice is rooted in uncovering complexity and parody within stereotypes and mainstream media portrayals of cultural identity. Their practice is rooted in embracing a sense of belonging with the unknown and the unseen. A sense of serenity for them is within academic research into European African Diasporic Black identity in connection with Black US American identity and Afrofuturism. Nima identifies as a queer black womxn. Their experience lies in performing, in a devising making process as well as having worked as a facilitator. Currently they are one of six artists commissioned to work on the National Theatre of Scotland’s “Dear Europe” (29th of March 2019) project and they are in the second development of their solo collaborative show “Beige B*tch” with main collaborator Daniel Hughes (filmmaker) and Laura Fisher (creative producer) originally commissioned by Contact Theatre Manchester, Live Art UK & Diverse Actions. Previously they completed a foundation degree in Theatre Studies at Goldsmiths University of London in 2012, a BA(Hons) in Contemporary Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2016, proceeding to receive the BANNER Award scheme from Arts Admin & Live Art Development Agency London 2016-17 and leading into the Starter Artist residency with NTS’s Engine Room 2017-18. twitter.com/nimasene
Najia Bagi. Exploring the spaces within us: longing, waiting, transition, pause, breathing, Najia is an artist and curator who has worked internationally to produce installation, film, participatory projects and more recently embodied sound and movement work which explores her cultural identity. Najia uses rituals, gatherings, repetition and movement to connect herself and other to the spaces she creates. She works using her own and others’ singing voices along with film, photography and the gathering of people, to create environments that enable us to explore our relationships with ourselves and one another. Najia has delivered projects at Modern Art Oxford, HOME, Tate Liverpool, South London Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Whitworth Art Gallery, FACT, Goldsmiths College, The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She also works in the Creative Learning team at Modern Art Oxford and has significant experience as a project manager and creative producer. www.najiabagi.com
Núria Güell’s work analyzes how power affects subjectivity through submission, specifically by established legality and hegemonic morality. Núria’s resources for artistic intervention are based on flirting with established powers, complicity with different allies and the use of the privileges of the institutional art world as well as those granted socially for being a white woman, Spanish and European. Tactics that mingles with her own life develops in specific contexts, with the aim of cause a disruption in power relationships seeking a redistribution of enjoyment. She is graduated in Arts from the University of Barcelona (Spain), continued her studies in the Department of Behavioral Art in Havana (Cuba) under the direction of Tania Bruguera. Her work has been exhibited in biennials and museums of Europe, Latin America, Caribbean, Middle East and United States. She also collaborates with various self-managed social centers. nuriaguell.net
Natasha Davis is a performance and visual artist with over 40 solo and collaborative projects in a range of media including live performance, installation, film and publication. Her work has been shown in the UK (National Theatre Studio, Tate Modern, Chelsea Theatre, Birmingham Rep, Rich Mix London, Barbican Plymouth, Playhouse Derry, Capstone Liverpool, Christie’s, Science Gallery and many others) and internationally in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Serbia, USA, Australia, India, Canada and South Africa. Her performance Internal Terrains heads the British Library’s online digital performance collection and is used as its banner and twitter icon. Her work is featured in Traces, a public project about migrant artists significantly contributing to UK arts, also part of the Southbank Centre’s exhibition Adopting Britain, alongside luminaries such as Lucien Freud, Mona Hatoum and Frank Auerbach. Natasha’s artwork has been funded by Arts Council England, British Council, Tower Hamlets, Humanities Research Fund, Hosking Houses Trust, Transatlantic Fellowship and numerous commissions and residencies. She holds a doctorate from the University of Warwick and delivers lectures, talks and workshops across the world, from Buffalo to Tokyo to Grenoble to New Delhi. www.natashaproductions.com
Níamh Murphy is the DLAF Festival Director. She has made and curated live art in Ireland and internationally since 2004 and founded DLAF in 2012 as a way to unite and connect groups and individuals curating live art within the visual arts and beyond.
Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo is a poet, academic and translator. She has published her poetry in various magazines and anthologies in Spain and USA. Her collection of poems ‘Bloody Roots/Arrels Sagnants’ in bilingual edition (Catalan-English) is published by Francis Boutle Publishers, 2017. She has performed her poetry around UK and Spain. She has completed her thesis at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) on the poetry of Maria-Mercè Marçal published by MHRA (2014). She combines teaching with research on contemporary women’s poetry and gender studies at QMUL. She is a Fellow at the CCWW (Institute of Modern Languages, University of London) and a Fellow at the Centre for Catalan Studies and the Centre for Poetry at QMUL.
Noel Kelly is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, President of AICA Ireland, a board member of IVARO (The Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation), and a Member of the Royal Society for Aesthetics. His role is the strategic direction and day to day management of Visual Artists Ireland. Key highlights since joining VAI include the creation of Get Together the national day for Visual Artists; The Social, Economic, and Fiscal Status of the Visual Artist in Ireland Survey (Ireland and Northern Ireland); The Payment Guidelines for Visual Artists (Ireland and Northern Ireland); Show & Tell; The Common Room gatherings for artists in the local area; Speed Curating; Critical Writing for Visual Artists, and commissioning the Best Practice Guidelines for Internships. “It is impossible to take sole credit for these as the effort of every person working in VAI makes them happen.” visualartists.ie/noel-kelly
Nad MA is a graphic artist, community arts worker, performer, dissident geographer and massage therapist, centring free pedagogies focused on art/body/space/gender. They facilitate workshops on corporeal awareness, collective mapping, graphic and audiovisual arts, collective care in arts and drag performance. They belong to the Feral engraving workshop, DescuartizadoraHack and Red King Latinoamericana collectives.
osborn&møller is Emma Møller (Denmark) and Mary Osborn (UK), an independent curatorial duo unattached to any one organisation, city or even country, who have come together to create temporary spaces for performance encounters. We are interested in performance as a practice that can disrupt structures of oppression, re-think hierarchies, illuminate the slippery boundaries between bodies and offer a space for critical empathy. To date, we have worked with Wellcome Collection (London), City of Women (Ljubljana) and Warehouse9 (Copenhagen). Our first project, Bodies Beyond Borders (2017) was born in response to the very particular moment in summer 2016 when our collaboration formed and the border between the UK and mainland Europe began to be redrawn. The project looked at the way performance might rattle and unsettle physical, geographical and conceptual borders: borders between bodies, identities, art forms, places, and experiences, and our attempt to define these as human. www.facebook.com/osbornmoller
Oreet Ashery is a transdisciplinary visual artist who navigates established, institutional and grassroot art and social contexts. The work engages with biopolitical fiction, autoethnography, gender materiality and potential communities. Ashery’s practice manifests through distinct multiplatform large scale projects that span moving-image, live situations, performance, assemblage and writing. The work turns to costume, new music/sound commissions and activism. Ashery’s practice is often collaborative, participatory and questions the modes and conditions of art production.
Ashery’s won the prestigious Jarman Film Award in 2017 for her web-series Revisiting Genesis, interfacing documentary and fiction and looking at the emergent field of death, dying and the digital, http://revisitinggenesis.net. In this emergent context Ashery published her book How We Die Is How We Live Only More So, Mousse Publishing, 2019, including new writing by T.J Demos, Rizvana Bradley, Mason Leaver-Yap, Imani Robinson, George Vasey and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz. Expanding this field of enquiry, Ashery’s film Dying Under Your Eyes, 2019, captures moments of intimate surveillance and assemble a collage of daily experiences and rituals, both real and imaginary, leading up to the sudden death of her father in 2018. The film was commissioned by Wellcome Collection as part of the long duration exhibition Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence & Oreet Ashery, May 2019- January 2020.
In 2017 Ashery exhibited the sonic performance Passing Through Metal. For the duration of approximately two hours per concert, audiences are invited to pass through the sound of metallic-rain produced by forty local knitters who use eighty metal knitting needles, each attached to a pick-up microphone. The metallic sounds are interrupted by heavy sonic wall of growling vocal and instrumental doom from a local death metal band. The work was shown in LPS; Malmo, Donaufestival; Krems and Kettle’s Yard; Cambridge.
In 2013 Ashery created Party for Freedom, an Artangel commission, combining twenty-five live performances in domestic settings, offices and pubs, a ten-track Audio Visual album, largescale live concerts with originally commissioned music and activist public programmes People vs Freedom including Silvia Federici’s talk Land, Animals and Women. The project focused on freedom rhetoric by the far right as it collapses into the aesthetics of historical lefty artistic liberation movements.
Ashery is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Ashery’s work has been published in many languages in art, cultural and academic publications. oreetashery.net
Olga Lagun has been working as videographer for several years on a variety of short films, commercials and video art projects. Her work has been selected for London Short Film Festival and Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival. olgalagun.com
PartSuspended artist collective works in a variety of art forms and disciplines. In 2006, Hari Marini co-founded PartSuspended as a dynamic platform on which to foster performances, live art, installations, writing and collaborations with artists from a variety of disciplines. The collective creates artistic work starting from personal experiences, everyday life, social space and architecture. They draw on contemporary life for their material: questions, pleasure, anger, fractures, contradictions; they explore these with the audience. PartSuspended has presented their work to a variety of venues such as DAN24, Spatial Culture Festival, BAZA (Novi Sad); Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (Prague); Tate Modern | Tate Exchange (London); BIOS Tesla; National Theatre of Greece – Experimental Stage; Camden People’s Theatre (London); Peopling the Palace(s) Festival QMUL (London); Arcola Theatre (London); Southwark Playhouse (London); Emergency 2013 (Manchester); Siobhan Davies Dance Studio; ]performance space[; ZealousX (Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf); Railway Carriage Theatre (Athens); DVM Theatre (London); NoGrayInMyDay Gallery (London); You & Your Work (Bristol). partsuspended.com
Pelin Başaran is a curator and producer with extensive experience of developing and delivering high-profile contemporary performance projects across Europe. She is currently working as a programmer at Contact, Manchester. She was part of the founding team and senior producer at garajistanbul contemporary performing arts venue in Istanbul. In 2011, she founded and worked as director of PARC which supported artistic creation and the presentation of the contemporary performance in Turkey. She also founded and worked as the researcher and co-director of the project “Siyah Bant-Freedom of Expression in the Arts” in Turkey. www.contactmcr.com
Pao Houa Her (b. 1982, Laos) works across multiple genres and techniques of photography, and is renowned for her portraits of the Hmong people and her narrative of identity and belonging within the Hmong American community. Pao was born in the northern jungles of Laos. When the Vietnam War broke out, she with her family fled the conflict, like many others, by crossing the Mekong River as an opium-fed baby on her mother’s back. Her works have been shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Telemark Art Center in Skien, Norway, among others. She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. www.Paohouaher.com
Pankaj Tiwari (1990) is a theatre-maker and curator from Balrampur, India. He is currently a participant at DAS Theatre, Amsterdam. Between 2011 and 2018, he worked as creative director for ‘The Fotons’, a performance-based group from India. He is also part of a collective called ’The Inquilaab’, which consists of Amsterdam based India artist, Sarah Naqvi and Abhishek Thapar. Pankaj has been the founder of several community spaces. Sabarmati Cafe & Theatre (2017) and Meraki’s Kitchen & Theatre (2015) have been a few of his initiatives around culture and community building in India. On January 25th 2020, he initiated Current: a space, Amsterdam, which curates performances and works to build a new audience and a culture of Intersectionality. Pankaj uses theatre, food and farming as a medium for community building. He has worked as a theatre facilitator, consultant and educator with institutes and organisations like Ambedkar University, IIT Gandhinagar, Pearl Academy Delhi, Kranti Mumbai, Breakthrough India, Disha India etc. He was invited to be part of 4TH IETM Croatia (2018), Theatre Spektakel (2019), Bread and Puppet Theatre (2018), Imaginary School for the future of Performing Arts, Giessen (2019). He has been part of jury members and the advisory board for several national and international art residencies and festivals. Few of them include Belluard Theatre Festival Switzerland (2020), First playback Gathering Mumbai India (2019), Theatre of the Oppressed Residency Tejgadh (2016,17). Pankaj is invited to curate a space at theatre Spektakel Zurich (2020) and also performing with his collective Inquilaab, their new work Cow is a Cow is a Cow at the Spring Festival, Utrecht (2020). Pankaj is invited to work as co-curator for Zurich Gessnerallee from October 2020. He will be curating one season for Gessnerallee each year till 2024. He is also curating a festival around Object, Memory and Migration for University of Minnesota 2020-21. His selected directorial works are Carnival: the fest of Bodies (2013-17), 30 days in September (2011-16), Laal Batti Express (2014-18), The 7Inch State (2016), They do not move (2017), The souvenir (2018). www.pankajtiwari.net
Party Office is an anti-caste, anti-racist, trans-feminist, art and social space and time founded in New Delhi in 2020, which also manifests at satellite locations and as conceptual architecture. Through publications, grants, archives, conversations of life-lived, social gatherings, and more, they are building translation dialogues on empathetic futures, care community and radical agency. Party Office was founded and is directed by artist-curator Vidisha-Fadescha.
Party Office recently curated an exhibition Resonance Beyond Escape: Qworkaholics Anonymous III (June- October 2024, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy) as a collective chant towards a Free Palestine. In 2023, Party Office exhibited at ZK/U Berlin, Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award (Artist: Vishal Kumaraswamy), 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney; curated film-screenings with The One Minutes (Amsterdam, Tokyo, Rotterdam.) Party Office b2b Fadeschawere a lumbung artist at documenta fifteen, Kassel, 2022, where they presented Queer Time: Kinships & Architectures (curated by Vidisha-Fadescha & Shaunak Mahbubani), and curated the traveling exhibition Let no one mistake us for the fruit of Violence (2022–23, Dhaka, Kolkata, Pune & Chennai), they have worked with Cream Cake Berlin (2021), Collective Practices of Acud Macht Neu (2020-21), Nottingham Arts Mela (2020) and Paramatta Artists Studio, NSW, 2020.
Party Office publications include Towards a Dalit Structure of Archiving (2022, with anti-caste collective Samata Kala Manch), Consent of The Governed: Race, Constitution & Kink (2022, with performance and curatorial collective After Party Collective), Consent of The Governed: Gender, Constitution & Kink (2022, with performance and curatorial collective After Party Collective), Soil-to-Soil (2020, with urban kitchen The Millet Kitchen.)
Queer Art Projects is a London based independent production company, specialising in organising art events like exhibitions, performances, screenings, conferences, workshops, talks and parties. Queer Art Projects was founded by Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul, who have been partners for more than a decade. Some of the recent projects they have produced are: House of Wisdom Nottingham, an Arts Council England founded month long exhibition that brought 44 artworks from 40 artists to 4 different locations in Nottingham in 2018; Staying Out an archive exhibition for the LGBT history month at the University of Kent in 2019 and the Arts Council England founded 5 day queer festival Turkish Delight consisting of screenings, workshops and an art party with live performances and an exhibition, happening in five different venues around East London in March 2020. queerartprojects.co.uk
Rodolfo R. Suárez Molnar, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana- México. I am currently coordinator, with Philippe Olé, of the ICORN-UAM project for the foundation of refuge houses for writers, artists and journalists at risk, and I am also the coordinator of the Project Fronteras. (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), dedicated to social intervention through artistic devices on issues related to migration and exile.
I studied a degree in Psychology and a Master and PhD in Philosophy of Science. Throughout my academic career, I have carried out various research projects on the theory of history, collective psychology and popular culture. However, for the last 15 years, I have dedicated a large part of my work to projects and activities focused on the use of academic and artistic tools and devices for social intervention in different topics (migration, exile, forced disappearance, gender-based violence) in diverse social contexts (Mexico City, Sarajevo, Tijuana, Gaza, or Santiago de Chile). Some examples of this are the Project Ciudades Inmateriales that I developed with Ángel Hernández, the Bitácora del encierro (a book co-directed with Philippe Olé in which 180 writers participated with texts about the measures generated by COVID-19), the Diploma in Forced Disappearance in Mexico and Latin America, or the Cátedra Pensamiento situado (Museo Reina Sofía/UAM).
I was also the editorial coordinator – with Philippe Olé and Rodrigo Fernández – of the Selected Works of Antonin Artaud in Spanish and, with Giulia Palladini, the curator of the art exhibition Rumbos de vida (Atri, Italy) and of this project: Backpack
Ruth Asidi is a multidisciplinary dance artist based in North-West England. Her practice is process driven and co-creational with a focus on self-discovery, animism and the relations between the inner and outer landscapes of the body. In 2014, Ruth graduated from the University of East London with a BA in Dance, an experience which gave her a broad anthropological viewpoint of dance styles deriving from African, Asian and contemporary western influences. In 2018, Ruth completed an MA in Somatic Movement Education, the field of study interested in the Soma, the living body and its experiencing self. It is through this inquisitive and therapeutic way of understanding the body that Ruth develops her personal practice and works with others, perceiving every ‘thing’ to be alive, communicating and able to co-create. Ruth uses movement and drumming as a means for storytelling, exploration and research.
Rusanda Curcă is a cultural worker, eco and civic activist living in Hîrtop village. She is the co-directrice of the Center for Cultural Projects Arta Azi, with a focus on developing the theatre sector within the country. Also, Rusanda was recently elected the co-directrice of the Coalition of the independent cultural sector from Republic of Moldova, an umbrella organization that unites the representatives of the independent cultural scene in order to consolidate it and which aims to improve the legislation in the field of culture through advocacy activities.
Instant Dissidence is a UK/Ireland-based company directed by me, Rita Marcalo. It is my way of bringing different artists together, in different combinations, to realise different ideas: through Instant Dissidence I invent ways of offering other people art experiences.My practice began in dance/choreography but eventually I became more interested in communicating concepts than in sticking to a particular art form. I began collaborating with others to create work in different media, and today I bring in people from different areas to solve creative problems. Instant Dissidence’s is also a socially-engaged practice where the company foregrounds the role that dance/choreography can play as a social engine: we are ‘artivists’ who believe in the power of connecting art and social consciousness. www.instantdissidence.org
Raju Rage uses art, education and activism to forge creative survival. Their practice is expansive, combining print, sculpture, installation, writing, audio-video, anti/performance, workshops, culinary arts, curation + more. They are a member of Collective Creativity and Another Roadmap decolonial art-education collectives and a creative educator/independent scholar using radical pedagogy. Working transglobally, they have a theirstory in queer/transgender/people of colour social movements from which their creative practice draws on / from.
Riccardo Matlakas is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London. He has worked internationally often using the urban context as a stage, creating interventions in the forefront of current political, environmental and spiritual concerns. He received a degree in Sculpture and an MA degree in Social Sculpture from the Oxford Brookes University, whilst continuing his training in dance alongside. Riccardo has participated in several collective exhibitions and performance events in Europe but also joined several events internationally including Moscow Biennale for young artists in 2010 and Gwangju Biennale in 2014. Matlakas has been a guest of several residency programs in South Africa, Palestine, Armenia, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Myanmar, Mauritius and South Korea. www.matlakas.co.uk
Rachael Young makes theatre, live art, interactive installations and socially engaged projects. She likes to work in the spaces between disciplines and discover new languages for performance through collaboration.
Her current work is exploring notions of freedom and bravery and is inspired by autobiographical experience in relation to socio-political landscapes. For Rachael, making art is about creating a platform from where she can shout about the things that matter to her, it’s about uncovering hidden narratives, reading between the lines and attempting to explore that which is often brushed under the carpet.
Rachael recently presented work at The Lowry, Tate Modern, New Art Exchange, Contact, National Theatre of Wales, Battersea Arts Centre, The Yard, //BUZZCUT//, Derby Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse and has been supported by Arts Council England, Arts Connect, mac birmingham, Curve, Ovalhouse and BBC Performing Arts Fund.www.rachaelyoung.net
setareh fatehi (او) is an artist-researcher NoT based in Tehran or London. setareh looks at the formation of trans-local collaborative bodies among ‘distanced’ localities by conducting the practice of Parallaxing (i). This practice explores the ethics of hosting remote bodies that are dealing with the debilitating effect of limiting the notion of ‘presence’ to its colonial definition where the differences between (i) and the other was used to legitimise the existence of the borders that have been brutally separating them. setareh has finished her MA in choreography at the Amsterdam School for the Arts and is currently a PhD candidate for the collaborative doctoral award offered by RCSSD and performingborders.
Simon Persighetti is a member of Small Acts based in Cornwall, UK. working with people and places to create live participatory artworks and performances that invite audiences and participants to investigate their own relationships with the places in which they live, work and play. He is also a core member of Wrights & Sites, a group of performance-trained artists who produced international site-specific performances, walking projects, publications, and other artworks since 1997. Their latest Mis-Guide book, The Architect-Walker was published in 2018 by Triarchy Press, UK. more crucial than a ‘finished’ outcome
Sally Pomme Clayton, please call her Pomme! has been a pioneering writer and spoken-word artist for more than 30 years. She is author of 16 children’s books and associate artist at Omnibus Theatre. She creates, writes and performs stories for everyone, from: The London Gypsy Orchestra to The London Philharmonic Orchestra; Chelsea Physic Garden to West Norwood Cemetery; Rhythm Tree Festival, Isle of Wight to Edinburgh Literature Festival; Cambridge Junction to Kings Place; Edinburgh Literature Festival; Bloomsbury Festival to Hakaya Festival, Jordan; Thames Festival to Dhaka Lit Fest. She has made many innovative and pioneering pieces of work that combine music, narrative and digital technology. Most recently ‘The Frog Princess Punked’ along with Georgia Kalogeropoulou and Dawn Rose a feisty feminist fairytale with girl punk band and live projections.
Suparna Banerjee received her PhD in Dance Studies from the University of Roehampton, UK. She studied Bharatanatyam dance and Indian Classical music and has received numerous awards and grants for her works. Her choreographic works illustrate the intersection of theory and practice. She was invited to teach at Iowa State University and Pennsylvania State University, United States, and contributed to the development of India’s undergraduate dance curriculum at a liberal arts college. Her choreographies were showcased in numerous nations, including Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She has published her research in peer-reviewed journals and a book.
Sheila Ghelani is an artist of Indian/English mixed heritage, whose solo and collaborative performances, social art works, installations, texts and videos seek to illuminate and make visible the connections between identity, ecology, science, history and the present day.
Since 1995 her attentive, detailed and care ‘full’ practice has been cross-pollinating ideas, materials, people and places in order to un-settle dominant narratives and make space for those that are (or that which is) in-between, on the edge, in the middle, at the border.
Originally trained in contemporary dance, Sheila is interested in the relationship between art and science with particular focus on care and hybridity. She is an artist who champions making work for the passer-by.
She is also part of Land Body Ecologies the fourth collaborative residency group in Wellcome Collection’s Hub since 2014. sheilaghelani.co.uk
SAYANG is a Malaysian/British DJ, sound artist, producer and activist exploring race, queerness and accessibility in club and queer culture. A creator whose drive comes from self-exploration and community understanding, they develop ambitious, responsive and political sound experiences as a way to express themselves and unpick their story.
Sayang soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/sayang
Sayang instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saya.n.g/
In creating their sound, they look to their roots from Penang Malaysia, with field recordings and electronic emulations of familiar noises, and connect it to their British childhood and history in electronic music, from film soundtracks to live bands and dancefloors. They draw particular inspiration from artists including Green Velvet, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Terre Thaemlitz, Nine Inch Nails and Cabaret Voltaire.
Their DJ sets traverse raw noise and high voltage beats through mostly vinyl sets, while nods to a background in UK techno and dubstep add depth. Curveballs from their musical roots, alongside freak, fetish and oddball favourites elevate their DJ style. SAYANG’s tongue-in-cheek approach questions their place in the music they play while taking the reigns behind genres and tracks they weren’t always invited to.
Their activism is an extension of their sound, connecting audiences together through queer theory, explorative conversation and sound experiences. They bring together minds, bodies and thoughts from society’s intersections while centring and uplifting trans, non-binary and QTIPoC folx.
Founder of the QTIPoC, trans and disabled queer centred techno-fetish party and cause, Flesh in Tension, and custodian of Leeds KiKi House, House of Flava, Sayang has carved a home behind decks, on stages and in producing and facilitating queer space in music and the arts. They are a Rinse FM resident, Love Muscle resident and some of their recent highlights include playing SPIELRAUM Amsterdam, Off Location in Kyiv, releases with Dark Carousel and Obskur records and they were also booked for Dimensions festival 2020.
Sagar Shah has worked in comms for 15 years – as a co-ordinator, as an officer, as a freelancer, as an assistant, as an intern, as a manager and as a human being.
Sibonelo Gumede is a South African urbanist and researcher who is interested in the intersection of citizenship and city making processes in post-colonial urban environments. He holds a Masters in Development Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal and he is currently pursuing a MPhil in Southern Urbanism at the University of Cape Town. @hlangananigumede
Sonia Barret Of German Jamaican Parentage brought up in England, China and Cyprus, Sonia Elizabeth Barrett is a graduate of St Andrews University graduating with an MA in literature and the Transart Institute with an MFA in Studio Practice. Sonia is a MacDowell fellow and recipient of the Boss Harlan Foundation stipend and has been recognised by the Premio Ora prize, NY Art Slant showcase for sculpture and the Neo Art Prize. She has exhibited by the Museum for the Sea Italy, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Heinrich Böll Institute Germany. Her work has been shown at a number of galleries including the OCCCA California, the NGBK Berlin, The Format Contemporary in Milan and the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Philadelphia the Museum of Derby and the British Library. Her works have been published in the International Review of African American Art, Black History 365 Journal, Kunstforum International, the Contemporary & Platform, ELSE Journal and Protocollum. In 2017 she initiated AIPCC in Bavaria, a peripheral space centering and facilitating peripheral arts practitioners. @soniaelizabethbarret
Syowia Kyambi (b. Nairobi) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who works across photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture and performance installation. She holds an MFA from Transart Institute (2020) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). She is based in Nairobi and is of Kenyan/German origin. In Kyambi’s artistic practice history collapses into the contemporary through the interventions of mischievous and disruptive interlocutory agents who interrogate the legacy of hurt inflicted by colonial projects that still frame the wider political conjuncture of now. The work is complex, messy and uneasy. It requires its viewers and participants to bear witness to an embodiment of collective experiences, and the constant search for links between the now and the morphed now that is encapsulated in her work asks important questions about what is remembered, what is archived, and how we see the world anew. Rooted in her practice is a deep connection with the land, the earth and the idea of home. By working to eloquently blend the disparate concepts and elements she contends with through her process while avoiding excessive constraints or directing of the viewer, her audiences and participants watch and experience these ingredients react, interact and metamorphose.
Along with exhibiting her works throughout Europe, Africa and the United States, (in museums and galleries in Senegal, Belgium, Finland, Kenya, Mali, Sweden, Germany, Zimbabwe, France, Norway, United Kingdom, Mexico, South Africa, North America and Ireland.) Kyambi has received a number of awards and short-listings including the FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards (2016) and the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts Award (2004). Artist residencies include PRAKSIS, Norway (2019), CAD+SR Italy & Mexico (2018), HIAP, Finland (2018), IASPIS, Sweden (2013), and Delfina Foundation, UK (2016). In her curatorial work, she has collaborated with Ostrale Centre for Contemporary Art Biennale, Dresden, Germany (2019, 2016) and Goethe-Institute, Kenya (2012, 2010) as well as working with collectives and individual artists in East Africa. Her work is held in a number of private and public collections including the Robert Devereux Collection, London, the Kouvola Art Museum Collection, Finland, the National Museum of Kenya and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. syowiakyambi.com
Sim Chi Yin (1978) is a photographer and artist from Singapore, currently based in London. Her artistic practice integrates multiple mediums including photography, film, sound, text and archival material and performative readings. Combining rigorous research with intimate storytelling, Chi Yin’s works often explore issues relating to history, memory, conflict and the consequences of migration. While her practice is rooted in documentary, the artist experiments with different forms of production and presentation, allowing her intimate photographic stories on social issues to reach and impact a variety of audiences. Chi Yin was the Nobel Peace Prize photographer for 2017, and has shown her work in numerous exhibitions internationally, including the Istanbul Biennale in 2017, the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in South Korea and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has also been screened at film festivals, including Les rencontres d’Arles and Visa pour l’Image festivals in France and the Singapore International Film Festival. Her ongoing research project, One Day We’ll Understand (2018), is based on her family story – the story of her paternal grandfather had always been unspoken. One of tens of thousands of leftists deported to China by the British during the anti-colonial insurgency in Malaya – known as the Malayan Emergency (1948-60) – her grandfather was eventually executed by the anti-Communist Kuomintang soldiers in 1949, shortly before their surrender to the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. In One Day We’ll Understand, the artist takes her family history as a point of departure, and explores a largely hidden chapter of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, in the areas known today as Malaysia and Singapore. Through research and collecting oral histories, Sim Chi Yin has for the last six years been working on her grandfather’s story, as well as that of his generation of anti-colonial activists. The artist has created archives for a number of them, now spread out over multiple territories – China, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore. These stories, not yet recorded in any official archive, are counter-narratives to the available histories of this period so far constructed from British archives. While these narratives complicate and provide more nuance to this turbulent period, the artist also confronts further philosophical questions with regards to the fragility and fallibility of archives and collective histories. chiyinsim.com
Suzanne Walsh is an artist from Wexford, currently in residence in Fire Station Studios in Dublin. She works mainly with text, performance and audio, both in an art context and also literary and musical. She is an editor for Critical Bastards art criticism magazine and writes on art, as well as essays, fiction and poetry. Her work often draws on the lines between humans and animal world, and language. www.suzannewalsh.ie
Sebastian H-W (MX:UK) is a Live Artist based between London and the West Midlands whose work explores identity, memory, technology, participation and the body, through cutting-edge approaches to creating live performances, audience experiences, action-based interventions and immersive installations. He has made work across a range of sites, spaces and places including grand theatres, white cubes, black-boxes, historic watchtowers, city streets, quiet canals, the palm of your hand, and deep inside your mind.
Sebastian is attending the IETM Porto Plenary Meeting as part of the British Council Theatre & Dance BAME panel of freelance artists this April 2018. He currently an artist in residence at Camden People’s Theatre programme ‘Starting Blocks’ developing a new work for their Sprint Festival 2018, and a GLYPT (Greenwich and Lewisham Youth People’s Theatre) Generator development programme for d/Deaf and disabled artists. Sebastian was a former founding member, performer and project coordinator of CLUSTER BOMB [collective], and curator/producer for their LAUNCH PAD showcase events of [collective] artists and allies (2009 – 2015).
Sebastian is an associate artist at ]performance s p a c e [, an ACME studio artist, studio technician for Alice Anderson and a performer for Geraldine Pilgrim Company and ZU UK among others. He has performed on both a national and international level including the V&A Museum, Artsadmin, Battersea Arts Centre, Chelsea Theatre, The Wellcome Collection, Camden People’s Theatre, Arnolfini Bristol, Tempting Failure Festival, Sarean Centro Cultural Bilbao (Spain) Meinblau Gallery and Gruntaler9 Berlin (Germany), Grace Exhibition Space NYC (USA) and UABJO Oaxaca (México).
He has been funded by Arts Council England, Heritage Lottery Fund, British Council in Mexico, Jerwood Charitable Commission among other public and private funded bodies. Sebastian received a First Class BA Honours in Performance Writing with Sound Practices from Dartington College of Arts and Falmouth University and an MA in Contemporary Performance Practices at University of East London.www.sebastnhw.wordpress.com
Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and activist. Her writing, research and performance practice centre around intersectionality and narratives of otherness, isolation and the end of the world. Lately she has been thinking about authorship, authority and version control, and how we gesture toward an unruly future in an age of failed predictions. Her recent work has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary for Contemporary Art, Latvian National Museum of Art, Barbican Centre, and her first novel will be published in the UK by Little, Brown and the US by Harper Collins later this year. seasonbutler.com
Sara Zaltash is a British-Iranian live performance artist enacting her evolving engagement with political, philosophical and spiritual realities through boldly populist shows, projects and acts. Time, scale, song, poetics and the divine preoccupy her as she draws on her experiences in contemporary performance, theatre and dance, singing and music, spiritual practice, legal, philosophical and academic enquiry, and Persian literature and culture to craft disarming encounters for stages, sites, moments and legends. Sara has performed extensively in the UK and Europe. “Zaltash is electrifying… See her if you can.” – Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 2015. sarazaltash.com
Sebastian Aguirre is a queer human rights activist and theatre practitioner from the Chilean refugee diaspora living in the UK. Sebastian runs the Actors For Human Rights (AFHR) Project, an outreach programme that uses documentary and verbatim theatre to engage a variety of audiences across the UK on human rights issues. He trained in acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. As well as running AFHR, he is a long standing member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants. iceandfire.co.uk
The Question of Funding is a growing collective of cultural producers and community organizers from Palestine. By producing, documenting, accumulating, and disseminating resources, experience, and knowledge with their wider community, it aims to rethink the economy of funding and how it affects cultural production both in Palestine and the world.
The collective was formed in 2019 by a group of individuals engaged in different facets of the cultural sector, from working for non-governmental cultural institutions dependent on international funding (such as Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Grassroots Al-Quds, and the Popular Art Center) and foundations and cultural centers (including Al-Basta Theatre, Dalia Association, and Rawa Fund), to practicing as independent practitioners. Born out of informal and open encounters within Palestine’s wider arts community, The Question of Funding sought to question, debate, and find solutions to the prevalent constrictive international funding models on which Palestinian cultural institutions continue to depend. thequestionoffunding.com
teresa cisneros is a curandera and curator of people a Chicanx Londoner. Originally from the Mexico-Texas border, ‘La Frontera’, she practices from where she is from not where she is Senior Practice Manager in Culture Equity Diversity Inclusion at Wellcome Trust. Cisneros has worked with sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, cultural institutions and universities to explore care, policy making, colonial infrastructures, and institutional change. In 2018, she published document0 a publication exploring our inability to ‘diversify’ the arts. She is interested in reconstructing systems and institutions to work towards institutional justice by holding one another accountable. Cisneros centres her life and work practice in collaboration, care relations, and collectivity.
Twitter: @ChicanaEnLondon
Instagram: @heartswitch
Two Destination Language is led by Katherina Radeva and Alister Lownie – a Thracian woman from Bulgaria and a Scottish man. We make bold award-winning performance work which explores ideas of identity, belonging and boundaries. Our work tours in the UK and internationally and is touching, thought provoking and visually arresting. It can be seen on theatre stages, in village halls, in libraries, in galleries, in parks, along roads, in abandoned shops. We also create exhibitions, installations and print publications. Our projects working with non-professional members of the community have been transformative for those involved and for the places they live, shared with public audiences like any of our other work. Our curatorial projects take shape in festivals we produce and conversations we undertake. Dialogue is a key element in our working process. We foster dogs and make super rhubarb and ginger jam which we often share with other artists.
www.twodestinationlanguage.com
Twitter: @2destlang
Instagram: @2destlang
Thais Di Marco (she/they) is a theater director and choreographer specialized in art production in contexts under conditions of violence with 15 years of practice in performing arts and cultural politics. Thais was teacher during 6 years, of projects at Brasiliândia Cultural Center,
the only theater at the neighbourhood with one of the highest rates of state genocide in Latin America. Later, she shared her research in different contexts such as Ocupa Ouvidor, the biggest cultural squat of the Americas, in the festival Les Echos de Lobozunkpá in West Africa and at the space Bongah in Iran, on power issues and worked in social programs for democratization of the arts. Thais studied Lucha Libre at Escuela Arena México. Currently works with partners to either reform, or destroy the art market as a totem of neoliberalism, corruption, cosmological violence, heteropatriarchalism and white supremacy. Since she started working in The Netherlands, Thais was sponsored by AFK for the project Dr. Stranger Folks in partnership with the artist Ehsan Fardjadnya and the Prof. Judit Kende, and did Spreekuur modality for a duet piece. Thais was co-choreographer of the piece Omni Toxica in partnership with Paula Chaves, supported by Veem House for Performance and Theater Rotterdam, and was resident artist of New Adventures by Dansmakers, Nineties Lab by Nineties Productions, among others. She has been student external adviser for SNDO alumni students Karina Vilalfan and Raoni Saleh and for Das Theater alumni Rodrigo Batista and Mariana Senne. In the European context, Thais held projects with partners at Beursschouwburg – Brussels, Centrale Fies – Italy and Ballhaus Ost in Berlin and started the social movement for artists: The Octopus Artists Against Necropower and Neoliberalism.
Thais or Kaloyá, is Roma diasporic descendent and was born in an Afro-Brazilian community of Candomblé – in Brazil – where she holds the title of young xamã or Egbomi. Those communities integrate a huge range of African, Afro-latinas and Indigenous diasporic secret societies ruled by ancestors and carrying the legacy of quilombola struggle. Her first artistic education in contemporary art was within social projects led by artists to think how art could play a central role for democracy in countries under conditions of extreme violence. In their personal work, they present provocative, sensual, engaged and humorous art. www.thaisdimarco.com.br
Tuna Erdem is a London based artist, curator and producer. She is the founding member of Istanbul Queer Art Collective, which is predominantly engaged in live art and Queer Art Projects, which produces art events like exhibitions, performances, screenings and parties. She holds an MA in Film and Art Theory from the University of Kent and a PhD in Film, TV and Theater from Reading University. queerartprojects.co.uk
There There is a 50% Romanian, 50% Serbian performance company, founded in London by Dana Olărescu and Bojana Janković.
Our work explores immigrant and national identities, exclusion and heritage, and uses participation to encourage inclusive, alternative debates on migration. The questions of authorship and ethics shape the way we approach the process of making performances and installations. We strive to gather audiences whose diversity reflects the world outside the venue; audience development, focused on immigrant communities, is an essential part of our creative practice.
Over the last nine years, we have received regular support from Arts Council England, forged relationships with migration-focused organisations (Counterpoints Arts) and universities (University of Warwick, Open University), and presented our work in theatre, performance, Live Art, and visual arts settings across the UK and internationally, including at the Tate Modern, National Maritime Museum, Center for Art on Migration Politics (DK) and ODD (RO). www.therethere.eu
Tarik Elmoutawakil (he/him) is a producer and events manager. He’s become synonymous with The Marlborough having worked there since 2001. Starting out as casual bar staff, by 2008 he took an ambitious leap of faith to hold the reigns of running The Marlborough Theatre, and has never looked back.
In 2014, he returned to work on the bar, only this time taking the role as manager of the Marlborough Pub with David. He loves The Marlborough, and all the people that go there. Sometimes he talks to the bricks and mortar. www.marlboroughtheatre.org.uk
Tanja Ostojić is a Berlin-based performance and interdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator and cultural activist who studied art in Serbia, France, and Germany. From 2012 to 2014 she was a fellow at the Graduate School of the University of the Arts Berlin. She uses diverse media in her performative and artistic research, thereby examining social configurations, power relationships, feminist issues, racisms, economy, and bio-politics between others. She works predominantly from the migrant woman’s perspective, whilst political positioning and ethical participation define the approaches of her work.
Since 1994 she has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including: Lexicon of Tanja Ostojić, MoCA Belgrade Salon (2017); Feminism is Politics!, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York (2016); Busan Biennale, South Korea (2016); HOMOSEXUALITY_IES, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin (2015); Economy, CCA Glasgow (2013); Tanja Ostojić: Body, Politics, Agency, Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2012); Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2011); Integration Impossible? Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić 2000-07, Kunstpavillon Innsbruck, Austria (2008); Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2006); and Plato of Humankind, Venice Biennale (2001).
Ostojić has performed at, among others: Misplaced Women?, Art in Public Space Tyrol, Innsbruck, Austria (2018), 7a*11d – International Festival of Performance Art, Toronto, Canada (2016); Volksbühne Berlin (2016); KRASS, Kampnagel, Hamburg (2010 and 2016); Live action, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015); Spoken World Festival, Kaaitheater Brussels (2010); Re.act.feminism, AdK, Berlin, and Performa New York (2009); ICA, London (1999); and Manifesta 2, Luxembourg (1998).
Ostojić’s work maintains a high level of theoretical reference and has been acquired by a growing number of museum collections. She has given talks, lectures, workshops, and seminars at academic conferences and at art universities around Europe and in the Americas, including Misplaced Women?, at Live Art Development Agency, London (2016). She has published several books, including: Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, ed. by Ostojić (LADA: London, 2018); Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, ed. by Ostojić and M. Gržinić (Berlin: argobooks, 2009); Strategies of Success/Curators Series, ed. by Ostojić (Bourges and Belgrade: La Box & SKC, 2004). tanjaostojicshop.wordpress.com
Tania El Khoury is a live artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and its politics. Her work has been translated and presented in multiple languages across six continents. Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a Lebanon-based research and performance collective aiming at questioning our relationship to the city, and redefining its public space. Tania is a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. taniaelkhoury.com
The White Pube is the collaborative practice of artists Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which they write criticism, exhibit, and curate. It is based at thewhitepube.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @thewhitepube. Since its launch in October 2015, The White Pube have gained an international readership and an involved social media following due to their success in diversifying the identity of the art critic and empowering two writers as working class and a woman of colour. TWP write to demand artistic quality from practitioners and institutions, decolonise and democratise gallery audiences, and encourage subjective criticism as an accessible and relevant form of art writing.
Usha Seejarim is best known for her reinterpretation of ordinary and domestic objects. Making use of common materials such as safety pins, wooden pegs, irons and brooms, her work has a distinctly Dadaist influence. Her compositions result from repetitive acts of mark making alluding to themes related to time, chance, space and displacement.
Usha Seejarim was born in 1974 in Bethal, South Africa. Seejarim received a B-Tech Degree in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg in 1999 and a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at the University of The Witwatersrand (WITS) in 2008, both in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she currently lives and works.
Solo exhibitions and presentations include: Keepers of the Common at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018; Reasons for descending the staircase at Fried Contemporary in Pretoria, South Africa in 2017; Venus at Home – a travelling exhibition presented at the Durban Art Gallery, Kwazulu Natal, South Africa; NWU Gallery at the Northwest University in Potchefstroom, South Africa; the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) in Johannesburg, South Africa and the Atherstone Gallery at National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa (2015-2012); and Mine over Matter in 2009 and The Hole Truth in 2006, both at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg, South Africa respectively.
Seejarim has been included in many group exhibitions which include: The Red Hour curated by Simon Njami, for the Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal in 2018; Twenty: Art in the Time of Democracy, a travelling exhibition, curated by Gordon Froud and presented at the University of Johannesburg in Johannesburg, South Africa, Turchin Centre in Boone, USA and the Beijing Biennale in Beijing, China in 2015; Where do we migrate to? at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, USA in 2011; Another World, curated by Simon Njami for the 6th African Encounters of Photography in Bamako, Mali in 2005; How Latitudes become Forms curated by Philippe Vergne, Douglas Fogle & Olukemi Ilesanm and presented at Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, USA. Fresh in 2001 and Isinto, curated by Tumelo Mosaka and Zayd Minty, in 1999 at IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa respectively.
Seejarim has completed numerous public commissions namely: the public portrait for Nelson Mandela’s funeral in Qunu, South Africa in 2013; Figures Representing Articles From The Freedom Charter in 2008 in, Soweto, South Africa; and artwork for the facade of the South African Chancery in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2008) amongst others.
Awards include: the SCAC Marestaing & The Secular Solidarity Association Sculpture Award at the Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal and the Tommorow’s/ Today Prize, at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Cape Town, South Africa, both in 2018; the Ampersand Fellowship Award, New York City, USA in 2003 and the inaugural MTN New Contemporaries Exhibition Award (joint-winner) in 2001, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Seejarim’s work forms part of public and private collections such as the Iziko South African National Gallery (SANG), Cape Town, South Africa; the South African Foundation For Contemporary Art (SAFFCA), South Africa; the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), Johannesburg, South Africa; Fondazione Fiera Milan, Milan, Italy and Artbank, Johannesburg, South Africa. @ushaseejarim
Umama Hamido. Living on the border between many places and nowhere, Umama Hamido is a Lebanese artist who is currently in the UK. Through montages of performance, film, sound, and text she addresses experiences of loss, yearning, and remembrance. Her work unearths the ever-present human threads of resistance within seemingly insurmountable structures of power. @zarqalyamama
Vijay Mathew is the Co-founder and Cultural Strategist of HowlRound Theatre Commons based at Emerson College in Boston, USA. When using internet technologies, he is passionate about the intersections of accessibility, inclusion, the climate emergency, social change, and a post-carbon future. All of his work in these areas has been informed by a “commons” philosophy and social-justice values. Howlround.com
Warehouse9 (est. 2017) is an artist-led performance space and gallery located in Copenhagen’s historical Brown Meatpacking district. Warehouse9 is committed to building a space and responsible conditions for artists working with ideas relating to identity, sexual expressions and body representations. Warehouse9 has a cross-disciplinary artistic profile that embraces live art, choreographic work, installation art, music, site-specific work, conversations, artistic research, parties and activism. Warehouse9 strives to create a space for innovative artistic experiences and experimentation, with a particular focus on supporting work and artists rooted in queer and feminist discourse.
Warehouse9 curates and produces the annual international performance festival IPAF.
Paralell to its artistic programme, Warehouse9 has a community programme that works to support local activist initiatives from queer and feminist communities. Projects include: Queer Cut, Queer Yoga, Piano Bar, Community Vegan Pot-Luck.
Warehouse9 has spent 13 years developing its distinct artistic profile and stage facilities in a historic stable building in the heart of Copenhagen. After many years of struggle, 2017 marked the year when Warehouse9 succeeded in securing their building via a direct contract with the City. Since 2017, Warehouse9 has been working towards securing a fixed programming budget to deliver their long-term artistic and social vision for the space. Warehouse9 practices a horizontal organizational structure, and has a core team consisting of three members: Christian van Schijndel, Emma Møller, Jørgen Callesen.
Warehouse9 is also a key voice in conversations and debates around cultural policy and urban/city development in Copenhagen. As well as being active in local and international dialogues and networks dedicated to norm-critical leadership. www.warehouse9.dk
Whiskey Chow. London-based performance artist and Chinese drag king. Whiskey’s art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female and queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her performance is interdisciplinary, combining embodied performance with moving image and experimental sound pieces. Whiskey currently works as Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Guest Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Chelsea College of Arts. Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since 2011. She contributed to and performed in ‘For Vaginas’ Sake (2013)’ (original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues), and curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival, Lover Comrades Concert (2013), Guangzhou. Whiskey’s recent performances include: The Moon is Warmer than the Sun, Queering Now, Rich Mix, London (2020); Unhomeliness, Tate Modern, London; Whiskey the Conqueror, Tate Britain, London (2018); Purely Beautiful New Era (ft. Haocheng Wu), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Great Conversation, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2017). WhiskeyChow.com
Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening and sounding our sonic migrations: the resonances of geographical migrations. She is a Deep Listening® certified tutor, with a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation. Throughout her career, she has created telematic sonic improvisations and interfaces for relational listening, to understand sensorially migratory experiences. Her major works are Sounding Underground (IOCT-DMU, Leverhulme Trust, 2007-2009), the telematic sound performances’ series Networked Migrations (CRiSAP-UAL, 2011-2017), and INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening (RITMO-UiO, Marie Skłodowska Curie IF, 2017-2019). In Bath, with The Studio Recovery Fund 2021, she created the INTIMAL App© for people to explore their “migratory journeys”. Emerging from her INTIMAL project, Ximena leads a collective of Latin American migrant women – Intimal – who come together to listen to their migrations and expand their notions of femininity, territory and care. She teaches Deep Listening® at the Center for Deep Listening, and independently, with an emphasis on Sonic Migrations.ximenaalarcon.net
Xavier de Sousa is an independent performance maker, curator and producer based between Brighton and Lisbon. His practice explores personal and political heritage within the context of discourse on belonging, nationalism and migration. Through theatrical and durational work, he explores the dichotomies between the live experience and agency in the performance space, often working with personal experiences and political systems to explore how embodied experiences and representation of dissenting voices can influence the show’s form. He is currently developing a trilogy of works about belonging and national identity, kickstarted with his first theatre show, POST (touring), supported by METAL, LiveCollision Festival, Brighton Festival, The Marlborough Theatre, The Gulbenkian and HOME. As a curator, Xavier curates the queeringborders series of interviews and performingborders | Live events for performingborders. Throughout his career, he has often worked with artists such as Tim Etchells and Rosana Cade, and with institutions such as Latitude Festival, Tate Modern, Vogue Fabrics, Southbank Centre, The Yard Theatre, CITEMOR (Portugal), Operastate Festival (Italy), Onassis Culture Centre (Athens), Kalamata Dance Festival (Greece) amongst others. xavierdesousa.co.uk
Zoran Todorović is an artist born in Belgrade in 1965. He lives and works in Belgrade. He holds the position of an associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade. His Work often deals with issues of surveillance and control, shedding light on uncomfortable truths and concealed motivations. He is a representative of biopolitical performance, radical body art, interhuman performance art and politicized postmedia art. He works with affective individual and collective situations and representations of the borders of “human conditions”. Todorović has exhibited his work in numerous leading media art institutions and events in Europe and beyond. He is the author of the Serbian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. www.zorantodorovic.com
Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani. As a solo artist Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani works under the pseudonym Despicable Zee, creating wonky yet meditative lo-fi tunes, punctuated by biting rhythms. Working with her own vocal and lyrical content, she layers melancholy, lazy melodies to shape a sound that sits somewhere between poetry and quiet rap. The songs are steeped in issues relating to identity, heritage, relationships and change – they sound like echoes of something, partially forgotten. Zahra has been writing and performing for more than 15 years. As well as her own music Zahra is also the director of Oxford’s Young Women’s Music Project which is an educational charity that provides free workshops for women aged 14-21. www.zhfatehrani.com