Remco de Blaaij is a cultural producer from The Netherlands who focuses on the development of autonomy/heteronomy in the visual field connected to implications of urbanism researching motivations on complex mobility and possibilities in collaborative working. Next to curating exhibitions like Towards Confluence in Ghent, Belgium, 2009, together with Kamila Wielebska and Double Infinty in Shanghai, China in 2010 he also currently works for the Amsterdam based artist Praneet Soi setting up a visual research programme in Calcutta, India. He has worked in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands since 2007, where he worked in the team of Be(com)ing Dutch, a two-year elaborate project in the museum that dealt with residues and beginnings of globalisation, national identity and immigration. Currently he takes part in the programme of Research Architecture with Eyal Weizman.
Auditors
Independent curator and writer. He received his MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Roberto Cavallini is currently Visiting Tutor and PhD student in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also founder and member of BIS, independent research media collective based in London, UK. Interests: The notion of critical inheritance in the artistic and cultural field and its relation to the question of the 'political' in the work of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Contemporary Visual Cultures and politics of memory, the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Bridget Crone is a curator, writer and lecturer working in London and South West England. She is the Artistic Director of Media Art Bath – a publicly funded commissioning organization that champions contemporary art and ideas through the development of bold new work collaborating with artists and partners locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. And since 2008, she has been an Associate Lecturer at Chelsea School of Art and Design, University of the Arts London teaching on the MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice. Bridget is interested in the expanded field of artists' film and video – that is, work that engages with performance, installation, sound as well as film and video. Her curatorial work can be typified through its enquiry-based approach working through an engagement with ideas and practice that considers them co-joined. Examples of this practice can be found in her work such as the conference, Imploded action, dissonant affects: Towards a new politics of non-relationality?, which she convened with Amanda Beech (2010) to explore anti-humanist impulses in current contemporary art practice; and also in her ongoing curatorial research projects, A theatre to address: a festival of textual form – concrete, material, scripted and performed (2010) and The Sensible Stage (2008-9), which each take a radically difference position from which to address ideas of affect, participation, staging and performance. Bridget enjoys working closely with artists and she has recently commissioned work from artists such as: Gail Pickering, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Clare Gasson, Tom Nicholson, Juneau/projects, Melanie Gilligan and Maryam Jafri. Bridget has written for a range of catalogues and magazines and has a forthcoming article “Disaffect in the theatre of representation” appearing in the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. Interests: Affect – Spinoza, Deleuze and theories of the affective body; Alan Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and the event, the interruption and the distinct; Jacques Rancière and staging, participation and performance; the current conditions and operations of the image in regards to relational and anti-relational possibilities, war and violence; lens-based and moving image work, sound, performance and the theatrical in contemporary art practice.
Writer, curator and artist based in the UK, Alfredo's work explores the relationship between reality and representation across TV, radio, publishing, critical writing, photography and exhibition curating. Co-curator (as CPS), Manifesta 8 European Biennial of Contemporary Art; Curator, QUAD Derby; Co-curator of the collectives CPS Chamber of Public Secrets and AGM Annual General Meeting; Editor, Critical Photography at Intellect Books. Recent publications include the books Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing (2009), Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness and The Blind (both forth. 2010). Interests: Over the past five years Alfredo Cramerotti has written about the aesthetic merger of contemporary art and the news media. By adopting the ubiquitous tropes of interviews, graphic mapping, and Magnum style photography an increasing number of artists have borrowed from these visual languages to present their work into a context closely aligned with investigative journalism. By addressing this topic Alfredo seeks to answer a number of questions including: Does such an integration of art and journalism emancipate art from a closed sphere of discourse allowing it a more social and political dimension? Does the use of an investigative methodology within contemporary art practice shift an understanding of truth and subjectivity? By borrowing from forms of news media, what new modes of exhibition practice are artists, curators, and writers enabling to develop cultural relationships between the global relevance to local issues?
Curator, Founding Director of DAL – The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. She is co-editor in chief of Maarav – an online art and culture magazine as well as a teacher in Tel Aviv University at the Department of Film and Television. She is currently an advisor for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as well as member of the artistic director board of "Amanut Haaretz" annual festival for young Israeli art.
Emily Pethick is the director of The Showroom, London. From 2005-2008 she was the director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. From 2003-2004 she was curator at Cubitt, London. She has contributed to numerous catalogues, which include essays on Stephen Willats, Dave Hullfish Bailey and to magazines, such as Artforum, Frieze, and has edited books, such as Casco Issues X: The Great Method (2007), with Peio Aguirre, and Casco Issues XI: An Ambiguous Case (2008) with Marina Vishmidt and Tanja Widmann, and Hidden Curriculum by Annette Krauss. Interests: Interests include participation, collaboration, group dynamics, conversational and process-based practices
Has read, listened, written and talked a bit about art around Italy, in Madrid and London. He has curated a couple of shows in Bolzano, London and Tokyo. Interests: Current research project is based on a few housewives talking from one balcony to another, and trying to engage with the question: where and what is political activism?
Born in Jerusalem, living in Jerusalem and Sharjah. Curator and producer, founder and director of Anadiel gallery, the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem and XEIN Productions. Artistic director of the Sharjah Biennial’s 8th and 9th edition and head curator of its 7th edition, UAE. Curated several exhibitions locally and internationally, among them: reconsidering Palestinian art in Cuenca, Spain 2006, disorientation – contemporary Arab artists from the Middle East, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2003), in weiter ferne, so nah, neue palastinensische kunst, ifa galleries in Bonn, Stuttgart and Berlin (2002), in addition to the official Palestinian Representation to the XXIV Biennale de Sao Paulo. Directed and produced several events locally and internationally, most recent: the Palestinian Cultural Evening at the World Economic Forum in the Dead Sea, Jordan (2004), the Geneva initiative, public commitment event in Geneva (2003), the Millennium Celebrations in Bethlehem, Bethlehem 2000 project (2000). Produced a series of short films and videos: ‘A Ball and a Coloring Box’, ‘my son’, and ‘the last 5 short films of the millennium’ with a group of Palestinian filmmakers.
Curator, producer and writer based in London but working regionally and internationally. She completed her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths and has worked for the National Trust (UK) OCAT Contemporary Arts Terminal (Shenzhen, China), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Longplayer/Artangel (London) Hayward Gallery (London). In 2007, as part of a fellowship with the ICA, London, Claire Louise instigated Inheritance Projects. A non-profit curatorial organization that acts as a lens through which projects are instigated, Inheritance seeks to interrogate museological schemata, expanded notions of institutional critique, heritage and historicity through exhibitions, collaborations and publications. Her own research interests focus on temporal contingencies, ‘New Towns’, migrancy and newness as conditions for art making.
Born 1975, independent writer and curator based in Brussels, Belgium and Vancouver, Canada. She holds degrees in International Relations (BA) and Art History (MA) from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. For the past three years, she was assistant curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and an instructor at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, where she continues to teach in the Critical + Cultural Studies Department. Apart from several exhibition projects, numerous catalogue contributions, as well as reviews and critical essays for publications such as A Prior (Ghent), Art Papers (Atlanta), C Magazine (Toronto) and Fillip (Vancouver). Interests: I wish to contribute to the evolving discourse about exhibition making or ‘the curatorial’ with an expansive consideration of the salon as an exhibition model. This model can be situated within contemporary debates about the social possibilities of exhibition making and within historical examples of the social function of salons.
Signe Meisner Christensen is an art historian and PhD student. She is based in Aarhus, Denmark, where she presently teaches at Department of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University. In her research project she studies the relation between art museums and contemporary art. Her main interests are critical theory, art theory and contemporary art practice. She has written articles about documentary video art and visual culture.
Sanjay Seth is Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is a founding editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and his recent publications include Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Duke University Press, 2007 and Oxford University Press, India, 2008 and Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995.
Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1974. He studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts of Leipzig (prof. Astrid Klein). He received numerous international awards including the Kunstpreis der Böttcherstrasse in Bremen, Germany (2005), the VG Bildkunst Award for Experimental Film and Video–art, Munich Film Festival, Germany (2002), the Marion Ermer Prize, Leipzig (2002).
He lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany.
Köken Ergun is a Turkish artist currently based in Berlin. He takes public ceremonies as the impetus for his artistic production, addressing the aesthetics and politics of contemporary rituals. His recent project consists of a video selection from the archives of B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, based in Jerusalem. Since 2007, B’Tselem has given cameras to Palestinian families in high-conflict zones, and trained them to shoot daily cases of human rights violations committed by Israeli soldiers and settlers. In turn, B’Tselem collects the footage and uses it for advocacy campaigns in Israeli and international media, and also as evidence in court cases. As a result of his research in the B’Tselem archives, Ergun selected videos that don’t document violent conflicts or attacks, but rather capture personal and unexpected moments. Ergun presents this project in the form of public talks and posts their transcripts on http://btselemarchiveproject.blogspot.com.
Ifor Duncan is a London based writer, researcher and lecturer. He is a current Visual Cultures MPhil/PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has an MA from the Centre for Multidisciplinary & Intercultural Inquiry (CMII) at UCL, and BA in Literature and History from the University of Leeds. His research concerns global and temporal scales of climate injustice. Ifor is currently Research Assistant for the Natural History of Memory research project, which considers the ways environments and ecologies register and mediate catastrophe and injustice. Ifor is a regular auditor of Curatorial / Knowledge Seminars.
Research project: His current doctoral research centres on climate imaginaries with a specific focus on theoretical, cultural and aesthetic considerations of sea-level rise and flooding. Using both memory and future imaginaries he engages with the spaces, materialities and traumas of climate events.
Sarah Charalambides: I'm a graphic designer, teacher and researcher. I received my BDes in Graphic Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and have been working as a freelance graphic designer in and around the field of modern and contemporary art. During my BA in Art History at the University of Amsterdam, I was introduced to forms of academic research on the object and notion of art. To further develop my studies I pursued an MRes in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, combining the study of contemporary art practice with critical theory, philosophy and cultural studies. In 2014 I enrolled on the PhD in Visual Cultures, working on a project working-titled ‘Self-Precarisation and Becoming Common’. I'm an associate lecturer in the department, teach Visual Arts at Buitenkunst in the Netherlands and work as a content manager and editor for projects that include Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Tsarino Foundation and PaperWork Magazine.
Research project: In the current conditions of governance, cultural producers seem to willingly subordinate themselves to the dispositions of power, by aligning to the neoliberal model of labour through the adoption of entrepreneurial self-practices. The strong desires for freedom and autonomy driving those who work freelance or self-employed can lead to a process of subjectivation that political theorist Isabell Lorey has called ‘self-precarisation’. My PhD explores how this highly ambivalent notion is debated and negotiated through Kamera Läuft! (Rolling!), a video project made in 2004 by the Berlin-based feminist research and activist group kleines postfordistisches Drama (small post-Fordist drama). Situating the everyday lived experiences of cultural producers in a mediatised public sphere, kpD problematises the possibilities for critical agency and collective resistance under the conscious and voluntary acceptance of precarious labour in the 21st century. Comparing kpD’s radically open-ended methodology with other feminist cultural practices that provoke discussions about common precarisation – such as Helke Sander’s film Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit: Redupers (The All-round Reduced Personality: Redupers) (1977), Precarias a la Deriva’s publication and video project A la Deriva, Por los Circuitos de la Precariedad Femenina (Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminised Precarious Work) (2002), and Tatjana Turanskyj’s Eine flexible Frau (The Drifters) (2010) – I investigate to what extent self-precarisation challenges dichotomous distinctions between the individual ‘I’ and the collective ‘we’, in order to create new socio-political alliances between precarious subjectivities in fragmented and individualising societies.
Research interests: Aesthetics and ethics of the precarious; (histories of) feminist theory and practice in modern and contemporary art; methods of militant research, situated knowledge, non-hierarchical, collaborative and participatory modes of art and knowledge production; relationships between micro- and macro-politics in contemporary culture; notions of (self-)precarisation and the feminisation of labour in neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism; the coming together of art and activism around issues of subjectivation, (self-)care and reproduction; theories and politics of identity, re/presentation, in/visibility, intersectionality, institutional critique and globalisation within the fields of art history and visual culture.
Paula Lopez Zambrano. Curator and researcher; current MPhil/PhD student at Goldsmiths University London; previously studied an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at Royal College of Art, London and BA in Art History at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. She has worked in museums, private galleries, non for profit projects, research centres internationally: including the Contemporary Art Museum of Oaxaca (Mexico), Curare, Critical Space for the Arts (Mexico City), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge), Carpe Diem Art & Research (Lisbon), among others. Recent projects include the curatorship of Cuts to Violence, a moving image programme presented to the annual festival Fuso (Lisbon, August 2015); a public programme entitled What One Can Be... presented at The House of St Barnabas as part of Social Art 15 festival (London, September 2015); and Out of Site, an exhibition for JosédelaFuente Gallery (Cantabria, Spain, November 2015). She is also a writer and member of the Student Forum at the ICA London.
Research project: My research is focused on the concept of contingency in contemporary art and curating. I’m interested in exploring and constructing exhibitions that propose alternatives to a human-centred and subjective arrangement of works of art with contingent means. Under this premise, I seek to develop experimental curatorial projects and research on art theory and contemporary art practices that challenge, represent and provoke aspects of contingency; including topics such as violence and accidents; synchronicity and anachronism; structural violence and transgression.
Ronny Hardliz is an independent practicing artist and researcher holding a Degree of Architect (Master of Arts MA) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Lausanne. He was teaching assistant at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, artistic member of the Swiss Institute in Rome, research assistant at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and associate member of the doctoral degree program SNSF ProDoc Art&Science at ETH Zurich. He is the inventor and curator of the World Ornamental Forum at the Kirchner Museum in Davos. Currently he is candidate for a mixed mode PhD at the Art & Design Research Institute (ADRI) of Middlesex University in London, and Swiss National Science Foundation DocMobility fellow at the doctoral degree program ‘Curatorial/Knowledge’, Department of Visual Cultures, at Goldsmiths University of London.
Research project: His PhD research in the cross field of art and architecture focuses on a practical, philosophical and curatorial questioning of the economic circular opposition of creation and destruction. In his dissertation entitled ‘wall sandwich’ – The Architectonic in Art Practices from Destruction to Non-Construction the neologism non-construction works as voiding rather than avoiding, as touching construction rather than opposing or completing it. He explores practices of writing, building, reading, and drawing, their relations to knowledge, and their political implications for contemporary cultures, with the aim of voiding (neoliberal) indifference, of making an indifference as such.