Human

Barbara Albert studied directing and screenwriting at the Vienna Film Academy.  After introducing her  short  films  at  several  festivals,  her  first  feature film NORDRAND was internationally acclaimed at its screening in the competition of Venice International Film Festival in 1999.  In the same year Barbara Albert founded the production company coop99, together with Martin Gschlacht, Jessica Hausner and Antonin Svoboda. She worked as producer on GRBAVICA, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE, SLEEPER and LOVELY RITA. As a writer she has worked with the writer / directors Jasmila Zbanic, Andrea Staka, Ruth Mader and Michael Glawogger. After FREE  RADICALS,  FALLING  and  THE DEAD  AND  THE  LIVING,  which  premiered  in the competitions of San Sebastian, Venice and Locarno, MADEMOISELLE PARADIS is Barbara  Albert’s  fifth feature  film.  Her films have received numerous  awards.  She is professor at the Film University Babelsberg “Konrad  Wolf”  in  Potsdam and has been living in Berlin since 2010.

Joan Anim-Addo is a Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies. Her publications include the libretto, Imoinda, the poetry collections: Haunted by History, and Janie Cricketing Lady; as well as the literary history, Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing.

In 2016 she was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award for “invaluable contributions to literature and to literary and cultural studies” by the leading US literary quarterly journal, Callaloo.

Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. At present she is Visiting Professor at Stockholm University of the Arts. Educated as a theatre director (1981), with an MA from Helsinki University and a DA from Theatre Academy, Helsinki (1999), she was Professor of Performance Art and Theory 2001-2013, creating the MA programme in Live Art and Performance Studies, the first Head of the Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke) 2007-2009, and Professor of Artistic Research 2015-2016 at the Theatre Academy Helsinki. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research, site-specificity and the environment. Her artwork involves performing landscape by means of video or recorded voice, moving between performance art, video and environmental art.

Eugenia Arria (Maracay, 1993) is currently a PhD candidate in Spanish at Lund University, Sweden. She holds a BA in Humanities and Arts from the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain, and a MA in Spanish and Latin-American Studies from the University of Bergen. She is currently working on her research project named“Towards a Theory of Architectural Violence: A Study on the Wounding Houses of Current Venezuelan Literature (2010- )”, where she intends to understand the intertwined relationships between architecture, matter, violence and subjectivation through literary texts. She is also interested in writing poems and short stories, and for several years she has been an active member of the Maracay’s Culture House poetry group in her home country, Venezuela. Whilst carrying out her doctoral project, she is also working on two books of poems: El jardín profundo andEcos de Bergen.

Henric Benesch is an associate professor (docent) in Design at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, acting Dean at The Artistic Faculty and an associate of Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) at the University of Gothenburg. He is an architect interested in transdisciplinary and intersectional aspects of knowledge creation within and in relation to education and built environment with a particular interest in site-based and speculative methodologies. Recent publications include “The Right to Design” (2020), “What if a 1%-rule for Public Design” (2021) and “Co-curating the city: universities and urban heritage past and future” (2022).

Born in Gothenburg in 1957, living in Copenhagen since1984 and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1992.

Kerstin is recognized as a pioneer and prominent practitioner of a particular subdivision of site-specific contemporary art, called time-based participatory intervention. This practice implies that the artist maps out and affects the world around by formulating, poising and revising a process of questioning. With such inquiries Kerstin creates and develops relationships and collaboration between others – local people alongside professional groups and representatives. As she maintains these relationships durationally, Kerstin is enabled to produce a joint action force within each site that can enable real change. Through imagining possible common change, this practice targets a realized utopia. In her work, Kerstin rethinks and challenges the historic “license” that has traditionally given artists the right to work autonomously – understood as self-oriented, utopian and without direct applicability or determined usage. For almost thirty years, she has studied, expanded and turned the particular operational space of art inside out. Along the way, she has formed an artistic toolbox that is counter to that of the ‘autonomous artist’: one that opens to elicit, address and inform the underlying structures that always characterize any place and any context.

Kerstin’s projects include Trekroner Art Plan Project (Roskilde DK 2001-2011) including the Overview – the story of a city that is not yet (Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde DK 2003), Toying with Brochmanns Place (KOES museum of Art in Public Domain, Koege DK 2005), Twenty Days in Viborg – a Journey (Viborg Kunsthal 2, DK 2011) PARK LEK (Marabouparken Konsthall Sundbyberg SE 2010-2014), A NOW-TIME ZONE (Bristol City 2018) and PONTON (Stockholm Konst 2017.

She  currently realises Aproposeneng /Concerning a Meadow, which will be performed and published in a gradually updated homepage: www.aproposeneng.dk. (Copenhagen City DK 2019-2021).

Kerstin Bergendal teaches and conducts research at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Amelie Björck is a senior lecturer of Comparative Literature and Drama at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her previous animal studies research has concerned apes and monkeys in Northern European literature after Darwin. Her most recent project focused on narrative temporality (linear/queer) as decisive for the life and agency of farmed animals in different forms of literature and art. The book Zooësis. Om kulturella gestaltningar av lantbruksdjurens tid och liv was published by Glänta Produktion in 2019 (transl. Upcoming). In 2018 Björck co-founded the Ratatǫskr Research Group for Literary Animal Studies at Södertörn University.

Maaike Bleeker is a professor of Theatre, Dance and Performance at Utrecht University. She received her training in Art History, Philosophy and Theatre Studies from the University of Amsterdam, where she also obtained her PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Bleeker’s research focuses on processes of perception and meaning making in performance, dance, theatre and the arts, as well as in science and in public life. She combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory and cognitive science. She is partner in the project Performative Body Mapping (funded by the Australian Research Council) and project leader of Acting Like a Robot: Theatre as Testbed for the Robot Revolution (funded by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, NWO). She served as President of Performance Studies international (PSi), 2011-16. Her monograph Visuality in the Theatre was published by Palgrave (2008). She (co) edited several volumes including Anatomy Live. Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008) Performance & Phenomenology. (Routledge 2015), Transmission in Motion. The Technologizing of Dance (Routledge, 2016) and Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury 2019).

Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

She is the Principal Investigator for an interdisciplinary Wellcome-Trust project called SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters: shame.bbk.ac.uk), which explores medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence. In the past few years, her research has also focused on questions of humanity, militarisation, and pain. Her books have ranged from the social and economic history of Ireland, to social histories of the British working classes, to cultural histories of military conflict between 1830s to the present. She has worked on the history of the emotions, particularly fear and hatred, and the history of sexual violence. Most recently, she is the author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers and War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and researcher from New Orleans, LA. Her work investigates extractive financial, environmental, and labor practices to expose the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the crumbling societal foundations of the U.S. and Louisiana. Imani orients her practice toward the elusive flicker of justice on the horizon, knowing that our world will not find balance until reparations are won. Imani is the founder of Fossil Free Festival, a biennial gathering of art, music, food and conversations about the ethical contradictions of fossil fuel philanthropy; the Fest celebrates the foreseeable end of the Fossil Fuel Era. Imani received an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Presently, she is a Visiting Researcher at the CRA, a Visiting Lecturer in Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, and an Economic Inequality Fellow with Open Society Foundations.

Analía Ferreyra Carreres is a student at the MA in Literature, Culture and Media at Lund University. She worked as a journalist for a decade, writing, translating and editing for several media outlets in Latin America, and taught storytelling for the last five years. She was a contributor to the narrative journalism book A mí no me va a pasar. Cómo entender la trata de personas desde sus historias (It’s not going to happen to me. How to understand human trafficking through stories), (2015). Her research interests lie in the uses of literature as a tool for social change, narrative practices as a way to foster community, new materialisms, and the healing possibilities of storytelling in the context of extreme gender violence.

Neil Chapman is an artist, writer and researcher. His work explores material textual practices, questions concerning visuality, art-philosophy interdisciplinarity, collaborative method and the histories of these themes. In 2011 he completed a PhD at the University of Reading on the new currency of writing in art practice. His book Diagrams for Seriality(Copy Press, 2014) makes that research available for a wider readership and has been described as a “startling meditation on the relations of seeing to saying” (Simon O’Sullivan). Recently, he has published in E.R.O.S, Performance Research and Haunt Journal. For a number of years Neil Chapman has been working in collaboration with artist and writer David Stent (West Dean College). Their ongoing series of residencies entitled Writing As Occupation explore the effects of place and technology on writing. Neil Chapman is a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University, where he teaches Art Practice, Critical Studies and Art Research.

Paolo Cirio works with legal, economic, and cultural systems of the information society. He investigates social fields impacted by the Internet, such as privacy, democracy, finance, and intellectual property. He shows his research and intervention-based works through artifacts, photos, installations, videos, and public art. Cirio has exhibited in international museums and has won prestigious art awards. His artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets worldwide and he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading universities.

Tom Cubbin is a design historian whose work explores the role of making in material cultures of sex. Tom’s research project, entitled ‘Crafting Desire: An International Design History of Gay Fetish Making,’ is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2019-2021). The project uses design historical methods to explore what the development and mediation of skills, aesthetics, concepts and images in the gay fetish world can tell us about broader changes in the socio-economic status of gay men in Europe and North America since the 1960s. More information about the project is available here.

Tom’s previous work examined histories of critical artistic design practice in the Soviet Union, which culminated in a monograph entitled Soviet Critical Design: Senezh Studio and the Communist Surround (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

Since 2016, Tom has worked closely with education in the BA and MA programmes in design at HDK, and has been primarily responsible for implementing design studies within the curriculum.

Tom holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield, and an MA in History of Design from the Royal College of Art in London, where he has also worked as a visiting lecturer in the school of Critical and Historical Studies.

Jörgen Dahlqvist is a playwright and director. Since 2003, he has been the artistic director of Teatr Weimar. He held the position as the dean of the Malmö Theatre Academy between 2009 and 2012, where he now also works as a senior lecturer. He was the project coordinator for the research project Ögonblickets Anatomi (2012-2014) at Malmö Theatre Academy, funded by the Swedish Research Council. 

Julie Dind is a scholar and artist obsessed with obsession and the performance of the non-normative social body. She is a PhD student in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her work seeks to explore performance and performativity outside of the realm of language, expression and communication. Her practice deals with what the French poet and educator Fernand Deligny as her artistic and scholarly father described as the “place that is not the place of saying,” art outside the boundaries of language. She is proudly Autistic, and aims to use her time at Brown to “crip” performance studies. Her work is located at the intersection of performance studies, disability studies and philosophy. Her research deals with butoh and Art Brut, which represent two of her long-standing obsessions. She has dedicated the past ten years to learning butoh.

Is currently an MFA student at the Fine art department of Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg.

Their current enquiry focuses on the structural and political complexities of identity through self-representational works that include video, writing and performance. This archive of work is continually reframed and reworked to destabilise the performativity of self.

Andjeas Ejiksson (b. 1978) is an artist, writer and editor, living in Stockholm, Sweden. His practice is based on the interim spaces and transformations of language and the experiences that emerge in moments of translation. A special field of interest is the modalities of governance in the contemporary liberal democracy. The work is mainly text- and performance based. Ejiksson has been a researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2014), before that at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2008–2009), and at the moment he is a doctoral candidate at the Valand Academy in Gothenburg. Ejiksson’s most recent work is a film and performance work, Television Without Frontiers, for the Swedish Public Art Agency (2019).

Olle Essvik is an artist, publisher and senior lecturer working and living in Gothenburg. Essvik works with themes relating to the digital as well as to technology in a human context, touching on notions of everyday life, repetition, and time. The outcome of his art practice could be a book, a publication, or a sculpture, in which traditional materials and techniques like wood and bookbinding converge with programming and code.

Essvik have written books about the history of media art in relation to utopias within the research project Virtual utopias. Since 2014 he has been working with the art and research project The Enemies of Books, a project about bookbinding and publishing in relation to digital media, time and code. He has also been involved, as an artist and writer, in research projects about computer games and algorithms as an artform. Essvik has exhibited in national and international museums and have lectured and conducted workshops at various institutions. He also runs an experimental publishing house rojal.

Garðar Eyjólfsson holds an B.A (Honours) degree in Product Design from Central Saint Martins, London and a M.A (Cum Laude) Contextual Design from Design Academy Eindhoven. He mixes contextual, critical and narrative research in his work as a means to explore & translate zeitgeist topics. Utilizing a variety of mediums to manifest his voice, ranging from; artefacts, scenography, curation, fiction, video, performance, dialog and writing.

Garðar is the program director of MA Design Explorations & Translations program at the Iceland University of the Arts. Balancing academia with studio practices his work ranges from developing his own projects, curating exhibitions, advising in the public and private sector, project managing and conducting workshops. Garðar also writes in various publications and gives public talks across platforms, often in the form of lectures and dialog in conferences, symposium and radio.

Maryam Fanni is a PhD student in Design at HDK Academy of Design and Crafts since 2018. She is a graphic designer educated at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Apart from specializing in design for printed matter, a focus in her artistic practise is investigations of public space and rights to the city. Her latest solo show was in Västerås konstmuseum in 2019, on the topic of outdoor advertising companies and private-public partnerships.

Benj Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer working in video, film, and related public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, investigating methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. His projects emerge via multiple articulations from long-term research processes conducted in dialogue with activists,  trade unionists, architects, urbanists, geographers, and archival researchers. Exhibitions and screenings include the Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art (U.S.), New Museum (U.S.), Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Tate Modern. Publications include October, Public, The Journal of Aesthetics + Protest, Incite! and Rethinking Marxism. He currently leads a professor group and seminar on logistics and infrastructure at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Fredrik Haller is a playwright and director and part of the performance arts collective Teatr Weimar. He works as a senior lecturer in dramaturgy at Malmö Theatre Academy.

Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and artist, born 1973 in Oakland, California, today based in Gothenburg and New York. In 2018, she debuted with the poetry collection A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Poetry) and has translated poets including Athena Farrokhzad, Ida Börjel, and Burcu Sahin. Hayashida is since 2018 a doctoral researcher at Valand Academy, with the project Feeling Translation, which explores translation as scene and event in relation to race, the body, and the nation-state.

Ryan Hoover is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher actively addressing the impact of emerging technologies on our more-than-human world. Often operating at the intersection of digital and biological systems, he develops software, hardware, and biomaterials to create novel solutions to contemporary issues and open new understandings of our shared future. He teaches digital and biological fabrication at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is a member of the board at the Baltimore Under Ground Science Space. He is the lead developer of Xylinus, a tool for novel control of 3D printers, integrated into the Rhino/Grasshopper CAD platform. His current areas of research are developing biocement structures for oyster habitat restoration, studying how knowledge is created and exchanged in interdisciplinary teams, and centering ethics in unconventional biotechnology education. His work is exhibited, downloaded, and put to use in galleries, labs, and studios around the world.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World published by New York University Press, “Sexual Cultures” series. Her research explores the literary and figurative aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Professor Jackson is at work on a second book, tentatively titled “Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex-Gender.” Jackson’s work has appeared in Feminist Studies, e-flux, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience.

Monika Jaeckel is an artist, writer and performer based in Berlin and London. She has a background in artistic performance and new media and is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD within the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at Westminster University.

Esaias Järnegard is a composer and PhD student at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

Biography coming soon

Dr. Rahma KHAZAM is a researcher and art historian affiliated to Institut ACTE, Sorbonne Paris 1. She received her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in aesthetics and art theory. Her research spans the fields of contemporaneity, modernism, image theory, speculative realism and new materialism and she has published articles on these and other topics in exhibition catalogues, edited volumes and academic journals. She recently completed an edited volume on the work of the artist Franck Leibovici. A member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics), NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and EAM (European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies), she received the AICA France Art Criticism Award in 2017.

Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011. Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. They are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving. They have exhibited and presented work at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Serralves Museum, Porto; National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chiado), Lisbon; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstkraftwerk, Leipzig; and Digital in Berlin’s Kiezsalon series, Berlin, among others. They live and work in Berlin, Germany.

Lars Kristensen is a Senior Lecturer in Media Arts, Aesthetics and Narration at the University of Skövde where he teaches film history, dramaturgy and game analysis. His research focuses on Eastern European filmmaking and Marxist approaches to moving images. Current research topics include bicycle cinema, Marxism and the intersection between computer games and fine art. He is the editor of Art and Game Obstruction (Rojal 2016) and Postcommunist Film – Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of three essay collections on Marx and the moving image. He regularly reviews Russian films on the website KinoKultura and his articles has appeared in academic journals like Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Games and Culture and Eleven Thesis.

Onkar Kular is Professor of Design and Programme coordinator for PLACE (Public Life, Arts, Critical Engagement), Artistic Faculty, University of Gothenburg. His research is disseminated internationally through exhibitions, education and publications. He has guest-curated exhibitions for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Karachi and Crafts Council, UK. He was Stanley Picker Fellow 2016, Artistic Director of Gothenburg Design Festival 2017 and Co-Director of Luleå Art Biennial 2022.

Dr. Nobunye Levin is a filmmaker, scholar and teacher. Nobunye’s filmmaking practice and research is concerned with epistemologies from the Global South, feminist love studies, the politics of aesthetics and decolonial feminist and anti-racist thought and practice. Her work is informed by the epistemic, poetic and political possibilities of cinematic experimentation and tactics of feminist filmmaking. She is a Lecturer in Film Studies in the Film Studies Department at King’s College, London. Prior to this she was a Lecturer in the Film and Television Department in the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Decolonising Screen Worlds in the ERC-funded “African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies” project, situated at SOAS, University of London.

Marcus Lindeen is a director and a doctoral candidate in film and media at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Is currently an MFA student at the Fine art department of Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. 

In the past few years, Gloria’s artistic research has focused on questions about the neoliberal rhetoric concerning emotional capitalism and the new online models of productivity, affection and collectivity. Focussed on disruptive mechanisms of the cyber-utopia rupture in the light of the expansion of models of neoliberal capitalism in social media, her projects invite to question and rethink those vocabularies and their reproduction. Her outcomes have been exhibited in different locations in Spain and published in informative and academic journals as articles.

Tero Nauha is a performance artist, the professor in Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Finland funded postdoctoral research project ‘How To Do Things With Performance?’. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2017. He defended his doctoral research at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki in January 2016. He is the member of Performance Philosophy, Performance Studies International and the International Federation for Theatre Research. In 2015, he published his first fiction novel Heresy & Provocation for a Swedish publishing house Förlaget. His performance art projects have been presented at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Theatrediscounter in Berlin, CSW Kronika in Bytom, Poland, Performance Matters in London, and at the New Performance Festival in Turku, among other venues.

teronauha.com

howtodothingswithperformance.wordpress.com/

Sanne Kofod Olsen holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Art history from the University of Copenhagen. She has a Master of Business in Leadership Development from Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Kofod Olsen was the Vice-Chancellor at the The Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde and the Vice-Chancellor at Funen Art Academy.

Kofod Olsen has previously been employed by Statens Kunstfond/Kunststyrelsen in Denmark. In addition, she has worked as a curator and a writer. As an art historian, writer and curator, Sanne Kofod Olsen has been interested and engaged in Contemporary Art and Feminist Art, especially in the field of Performance Art.

Sanne Kofod Olsen has been a member of the Statens Kunstråd, now the Statens Kunstfond, and in the committee for Art history and Artistic research at Novo Nordisk Fonden. She is currently the chairman of Konstex, whose mission is to safeguard common interests for higher artistic education, as well as a member of the Bikuben Foundation’s committee for Academic Guest House in New York.

Evie is a researcher at the Department of Human Geography, University of Loughborough UK. Evie’s professional interests and activism have revolved around the theme of human mobility. She is the author of New Border: Hotspots and the European Migration Regime (London) Pluto Press.

For a period of six-months in 2020, Vijai Patchineelam together with the artist Adrijana Gvozdenović were invited to co-direct CONA Foundation and run the public programing of the space. CONA Foundation is a not for profit artist’s initiative, which was founded in 2012 by the artists Hemali Bhuta and Shreyas Karle in the north of Mumbai, India. 

In 2017, Vijai edited the book Samba Shiva: The Photographs of Sambasiva Rao Patchineelam, published by Zum/IMS (Instituto Moreira Salles), Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Samba Shiva, Vijai revisits the photographic archive of his father, a scientist who immigrated to Brazil at the end of the 1970s. The artist proposed to himself the role of the editor, while the authorship of the book is credited to Sambasiva. This displacement of roles is part of a larger project that Vijai pursues in his PhD.

Dr Pilvi Porkola is a post doc researcher, performance artist, writer and pedagogue.

2017-18 she was Professor of Artistic Research at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. She is the editor of Performance Artist’s 

Workbook: Essays on teaching and learning performance art (Uniarts 2017). Currently she is working as a post doc researcher in Finnish Academy funded project “How To Do Things with Performance?” in Theatre Academy, Helsinki, Finland.

Oliver Ressler lives and works in Vienna. He produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. He has completed thirty-two films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. Solo exhibitions: Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; SALT Galata, Istanbul. Ressler has participated in more than 350 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Venice (2013), Quebec (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017) and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST). Ressler was the first price winner of the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016.

Dr. Assunta Ruocco is an artist and researcher based in Nottingham, UK. Her practice focuses on the role of collaboration, technologies and spaces of production in the emergence of artworks. Ruocco works with painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, digital technologies, and the relationships between these media, creating transdisciplinary durational projects that invite the intervention of human and non-human collaborators at different stages within the creative process. Recent presentations include “Mirrors, Windows, Portals” (2024), a group exhibition curated in collaboration with Dr. Alison Lloyd at Project Space Plus, University of Lincoln; “Bad Sister: Death, Love, Instagram and the Photographic Archive”, a paper delivered at the PARSE “Powers of Love” conference 2023; and “Our Days of Gold”, a two-person exhibition with Daniel T. Wheeler at the Italian Cultural Institute in Hamburg, 2019. Forthcoming is a solo exhibition with TG Gallery, Nottingham, titled “Our Days of Gold (video)”.

Stacey Sacks is an actor/writer/director/researcher/clown and current PhD candidate in Performative and Mediated practices at Stockholm University of the Arts. Born in Zimbabwe, Sacks studied Performance and Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and completed the MA program ‘A Year of Physical Comedy’ at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Art in 2012. Sacks is the author, together with Nalle Laanela, of The Clown Manifesto (Oberon Books, 2015). 

Through a constellation of clowters (clowns/characters) the research project (de)composes intra-cultural, auto-ethnographic excavations and vivisections of Whiteness. It explores haunting intersections of history whilst performing, animating and satirising questions of W(w)hiteness, privilege and colonial logic. Through a series of trans-disciplinary corporeal, material and technological experiments the project draws on queer aesthetics of uncertainty and productive failure.

Lisa Samuels is the author of many books of poetry, memoir, and prose, including Symphony for Human Transport, a Guardian 2017 top ten poetry book. Her essays and editing work focus on experimental modern transatlantic and transpacific literatures, and her theoretical innovations include deformance, bioautography, and soft text. She also collaborates with composers, makes soundwork and visual art, and works with film, including Tomorrowland (2017, directed by Wes Tank and based on Lisa’s book). Professor of English and Drama at the University of Auckland in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samuels earned her PhD at the University of Virginia and is currently a visiting artist-scholar at VUB in Belgium. Her new book of prose-poetry and photographs is The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (Chax, 2019).

Erik Sandelin is a PhD candidate in Art, Technology and Design at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is co-founder of Malmö-based interaction design and innovation studio Unsworn. Erik is not allergic to cats anymore.

Gianfranco Selgas is a PhD student in Spanish, specializing in Latin American Literature and Culture at Stockholm University. In his research project, Selgas examines political and aesthetic features that have to do with tensions between materialism, culture, and nature, in a corpus of contemporary works by Latin American authors. He is Assistant Editor of Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Is currently an MFA student at the Fine art department of Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. 

Inga’s current enquiry explores possibilities of using the body as an autonomous site of provocation, problematising cis-heteronormative ideals while questioning the deeply rooted ‘myth’ of masculine desire. By borrowing and rethinking HC Andersen’s The Little Mermaid  through a queer and trans lens, Inga sets out to appropriate the narrative with the tool of autotheory. Unpacking their own troubled relationship with said norms and desires within a framework of self-representational body politics, body modification and politics of desire.

Biography coming soon

Dr Mercedes Vicente is a curator, writer and researcher. She is Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art in Critical & Historical Studies, London. She has held positions as interim Director of Education and Public Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Curator of Contemporary Art at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, and Research Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others. Her AHRC-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art focused on the work of early video artist Darcy Lange. Mercedes has curated numerous exhibitions at institutions such as Tate Modern, Ikon Gallery, Camera Austria and CCA NTU Singapore. Her extensive writing and editorial credits include books, exhibition catalogues and art journals. She is the editor of Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Ikon Gallery, 2008; Spanish edition EACC, 2012).