/ FALL SEMESTER 2016 /
Federica Bueti
is an art critic, editor, researcher and occasional curator living in Berlin and Oslo. In 2011, she co-founded and is editor of …ment, journal for contemporary culture, art and politics (www.journalment.org). Her work explores economies of writing and reading, desires, class, and gender. She is currently working on her PhD on artists’ writing and feminist practices at the Royal College of Art, London.
Zachary Cahill
is an interdisciplinary artist who has been working on the long term the project USSA 2012, an exhibition-based fictional narrative relating to concepts of nation building, since 2009. He has had solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art; and Threewalls, Chicago, amongst other. His work has recently been included in The Works: Artists in and From Chicago at CAB Brussels, Belgium (2015), Magic Mountain at the MCA Santa Barbara (2015), the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014) and numerous exhibitions in the US and Europe. His writings have appeared in Afterall, Artforum, Frieze, and Mousse. Cahill is a regular contributor to Artforum.com
Biljana Ciric
is an independent curator based in Shanghai. She is co-curator of the 2015 Third Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, Russia) and she was curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris) where she recently curated exhibition Habits and customs of_____are so different from ours that we visit them with the same sentiment that we visit exhibitions. She also curated Encounters with Pompidou within exhibition Museum On/off, Centre Pompidou (2016). She is a research fellow for 2016 at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway. Her recent exhibitions include Just as Money is the Paper, the Gallery is the Room (2014) presented by Osage Art Foundation (Hong Kong), One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution, Us as Institution (2013) presented by Times Guangzhou Museum (Guangzhou), Tino Sehgal Solo Exhibition (2013) in UCCA (Beijing), Taking the Stage OVER (2011–12) presented in different institutions in Shanghai, Institution for the Future - Asia Triennale (2011) in Manchester, Alternatives to Ritual (2012–13) in Goethe Open Space (Shanghai) and OCAT (Shenzhen) among others.
Dora García
is an artist living in Barcelona now after almost two decades of residence in Brussels. She is a teacher in Oslo National Academy of the Arts and HEAD Geneva, and co-director of Les Laboratoires D'Aubervilliers Paris. She has exhibited her work since the late 90s and among these exhibitions she especially remembers Münster Sculpture Projects (2007) Venice Biennale (2011, 13, 15) Documenta13 (2012) and Toronto Power Plant (2015)
Allison Schifani and David Lyttle
Allison Schifani is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at University of Miami. She is the co-founder of the research and design collaborative, SPEC. She co-authored with Professor Katherine Kelp-Stebbins “The Medium is the Masses: Embodied Amplification, Urban Occupation,” Media Fields, Issue 10. August, 2015; “Alternative Sprawls, Junkcities: Buenos Aires Libre and Horizontal Urban Epistemologies,” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 1.3, September, 2014.
David Lyttle is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He completed a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona in 2013. His past research interests have included the evolutionary dynamics of sex in wild yeast, spontaneous pattern formation in spiking neural networks, neural "maps" of space in the hippocampus, and the dynamics of motor pattern generation in giant sea slugs. His current research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying episodic memory formation.
Gertrud Koch
is a Professor for Film Science at Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Sociology, Philosophy, German Studies and Education Science in Frankfurt. She was Lecturer and Guest professor in Germany and abroad.
Ramón Salas
is a researcher and curator. His work focuses on artistic research and education as well as art tendencies after the fall of modernism. He currently teaches visual culture and serves as the director of postdoctoral Art and Humanities program at University La Laguna in Tenerife, Spain.
Marcus Steinweg
is a philosopher. He teaches at UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin. His recent books include: "Behauptungsphilosophie" (Berlin: Merve 2006); "Duras" (with Rosemarie Trockel, Berlin: Merve 2008); "Politik des Subjekts“ (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes 2009); "Aporien der Liebe" (Berlin: Merve 2010); "Kunst und Philosophie / Art and Philosophy" (Cologne: Walter König: 2012); "Philosophie der Überstürzung" (Berlin: Merve 2013), "Inkonsistenzen" (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015), "Evidenzterror" (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015) and "Gramsci Theater" (Berlin: Merve 2016). Forthcoming: "Splitter" (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2016). Some of his books will be published in english by The MIT Press in 2017.
Andreas Töpfer
is a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and documentary drawing artist. He works for the Berlin publisher 'Kookbooks', which he co-founded in 2003 with Daniela Seel. Since 2014 he is the Visual Editor for the Norwegian Literature and Culture Magazine 'Vagant‘ for which he has been the House Illustrator. On his latest book ’Speculative Drawing’ (Sternberg Press) he has worked for more than four years with Armen Avanessian on the continuous dialogue between text and drawing.
Jamieson Webster
is a psychoanalyst in New York. Founding member of the psychoanalytic collective - Das Unbehagen. Author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and - with Simon Critchley- Stay, Illusion! (Patheon, 2013). She has published in Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, The New York Times, Playboy, and many psychoanalytic publications. She is currently working on a new book, Conversion Disorder (Columbia, 2017).
Lisa Marie Blackman
is a professor and researcher. She works at the intersection of body studies and media and cultural theory and is particularly interested in subjectivity, affect, the body and embodiment. She has published four books in this area. The most recent is Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation, (2012, Sage). Her work in the area of embodiment and voice hearing has been recognized and commended for its innovative approach to mental health research and it has been acclaimed by the Hearing Voices Network, Intervoice, and has been taken up in professional psychiatric contexts. She has just completed a manuscript Haunted Data: Transmedia, Affect, Weird Science and Archives of the Future. She is currently the co-Head of the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Victoria Ivanova
is a curator and writer living in London. Having previously worked in the human rights field, in 2010, she co-founded a multidisciplinary cultural platform in Donetsk, Ukraine, which critically explored the intersection between activism, education and artistic research. Ivanova is also one of the founding members of Real Flow—a research and development platform for socialising finance. Her practice is largely informed by systems analysis and her interest in infrastructures as mechanisms for shaping and (re)producing socio-economic and political realities. Ivanova's recent publications include ‘Art’s Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié' in Parse 2: The Value of Contemporary Art (2015), ‘Novelty Intermediation and the Future of Accelerationist Politics’ in Reinventing Horizons (2016), ‘Fractured Mediations’ in Der Zeitkomplex. Postcontemporary (2016).
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
is a curator and a writer. He has worked at a number of institutions including SMBA (Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam), DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) and most recently as Curatorial Fellow at TENT in Rotterdam. In September 2012 he founded The Office for Curating, which is currently based in Rotterdam. Recent exhibition projects include the group exhibition Spending Quality Time With My Quantified Self (2016) at TENT, Rotterdam; the solo exhibition Sliding under Traces (2016) by artist Paul Geelen at A Tale of a Tub in Rotterdam; The Earthbound, a screening series that took place at Cannonball, Miami (2015); the group exhibition The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (2015) at TENT, Rotterdam; the group exhibition Percussive Hunter (2015) at Akbank Sanat, Istanbul; the group exhibition John Smith, the Posthuman (2014) at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht.
Metahaven
Metahaven, founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, is a collective operating on the cutting blade of aesthetics and politics. An activist outfit across art, design, writing and filmmaking, Metahaven started working on speculative design projects in the early mid-2000s before officially becoming a studio in 2007. As activist designers, Kruk and van der Velden have worked with organizations such as WikiLeaks, Independent Diplomat, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and more recently, Sea Shepherd Global. Recent solo presentations include 'Information Skies', Auto Italia, London (2016), ‘The Sprawl', YCBA, San Francisco (2015), ‘Black Transparency', Future Gallery, Berlin, (2014), and ‘Islands in the Cloud', MoMA PS1, New York (2013). Recent publications include ‘Black Transparency' (2015), ‘Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?' (2013), ‘VOID MYSTIQUE DNA' in collaboration with Deterritorial Support Group (DSG), and ‘Uncorporate Identity’, co-edited by Marina Vishmidt (2010). Videos by Metahaven include ‘Home' (2014), and ‘Interference' (2015), both with musician, composer and artist Holly Herndon, as part of their ongoing collaboration involving 4AD and RVNG Int. Metahaven's first full-length documentary, ‘The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda)', premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2016; its successor is a short fiction film titled ‘Information Skies’ (2016).
Dorothea von Hantelmann
is an art historian and curator, based in Berlin. She was documenta Professor at the Art Academy/University of Kassel where she lectured on the history and meaning of documenta. Her main fields of research are contemporary art and theory as well as the history and theory of exhibitions. She is currently working on a book that explores art exhibitions as ritual spaces in which fundamental values and categories of modern, liberal and market based societies historically have been, and continue to be practised and reflected. She is author of How to Do Things with Art, a book on performativity within contemporary art and co-editor of Die Ausstellung. Politik eines Rituals.
Roc Laseca
is an art theorist and curator. His research lies on the prevalence of institutional thought, as applied to art, architecture and museums, on the creation and fall of contemporary communities. A doctor in Art Theory and Cultural Prospective, he studied at Universidad de La Laguna, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Helsinki University. Since 2013, he serves as Director of Los Encuentros Denkbilder, the biannual experimental artistic exchange program that takes place in the Canary Islands, for which he has devised each edition with Jannis Kounellis, Joseph Kosuth, and the directors/ academic directors of Tate Modern, London, École Nationale de Beaux-Arts, Paris and MoMA, New York. His most recent book "The Unstoppable Museum" has been published by Ediciones Metales Pesados.
Patrick Staff
is an interdisciplinary artist who works with film, installation, dance and performance to investigate dissent, labour and the queer body. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Chisenhale, London, UK; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. They are currently part of British Art Show 8, which tours venues throughout 2016, and their first US solo exhibition will take place at MOCA Los Angeles in 2017.
Ian F. Svenonius
is an musician, notable as the singer of various Washington, D.C.-based bands including Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Weird War, and Chain and The Gang. Between his numerous projects, Svenonius has released more than 19 full-length albums and more than 20 singles, EPs, and splits. Svenonius is also a published author and an online talk show host.
Lewis Warsh
is co-founder, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books. He is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, most recently Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 (Granary Books), A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil), and Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse). He is director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York.