Issue #17 Citations Launch

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole (b. 1988, Nigeria) is based in Stockholm and London. She works with lens and non-lens -based photography presented in installations, performances and prints. At the core of her practice is an investigation into material processes that explore new forms within the framework of established techniques. She was selected to be an artist-in-residence for Becontree Hundred, part of the 2012 Olympic Games cultural legacy in 2015; the Multiplicidade Festival, Brazil, 2013; and was a British ambassador for UK/CHINA 400, an exchange of future leaders, 2009. Agunbiade-Kolawole has exhibited widely in Sweden and internationally. Her works are represented in the collections of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Göteborg konstmuseet, Stockholm Läns Landsting, Uppsala Läns Landsting, & Brucebo Foundation in Sweden, National Health Services, Barking & Dagenham Council and Kingston University, UK. Agunbiade-Kolawole is a graduate of Kungl. Konsthögskolan,//Royal Institute of Art Stockholm.

Mira Asriningtyas works as an independent curator and writer. She completed RAW Academie 6: CURA (2019) in Dakar and the De Appel Curatorial Program (2016/2017) in Amsterdam. The idea of learning from magic, ghosts and polycentric knowledge rooted in local contexts as an attempt to decolonise the knowledge system, promote ecological sustainability and further investigate the remaining trace of colonialism have been central to her current research practice.

She has curated exhibitions and public programmes off-site and in art institutions such as De Appel Art Center (Amsterdam), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), KKF (Yogyakarta), ISCP (New York), MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai) and Our Museum (Taipei), among others. Her writing has been published in books, online publications, exhibition catalogues, monographs and magazines from Indonesia, The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Australia.

In 2011, she co‐founded LIR Space, an art space that turned nomadic into LIR (curator collective), characterised by multidisciplinary collaboration to foster continuous transgenerational transmission of knowledge, memory and history. In 2017, she started a biennial site‐specific project titled “900mdpl” in Kaliurang, an ageing resort village under Mt.Merapi volcano. The programme invites local and international artists for a research residency and creates a socially engaged archive of the space presented as a multi-site exhibition and a transient museum. See www.miraasriningtyas.com, www.900mdpl.com and www.lirspace.net.

Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France. She speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva. She is a member of the online platform www.ehcho.org.

Dr. Myriam D. Diatta is an independent practitioner-researcher. Her practice explores the work of creative practitioners and their relationships with theories that are critical about socio-political conditions.

Léuli Eshrāghi (Seumanutafa + Tautua Sāmoan, Persian, Cantonese) intervenes in display territories to prioritise global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages and ceremonial-political practices.

As an artist, Eshrāghi premiered new work in 2023, commissioned by Aupuni Space (Honolulu), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tallawoladah), Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania (nipaluna), and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. In 2022, Eshrāghi presented new work at Tate Modern (London), the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) and the Centre d’exposition de l’Université de Montréal. Recent residencies include TRADES A.i.R./Aupuni Space (Honolulu), Institut français/Cité internationale des arts (Paris), and the University of Tasmania (nipaluna). Their work is held in the Royal Bank of Canada (Warrang/Tsi Tkaró:nto) and Fonds régional d’art contemporain (Carquefou/Nantes) collections, and in private collections in Australia, Canada and Norfolk Island.

As a curator, Eshrāghi has realised exhibitions at the University of Queensland Art Museum, MacKenzie Art Gallery, A Space Gallery, University of New South Wales Galleries, Vancouver Art Gallery, Artspace Aotearoa, Institute of Modern Art and Gertrude Contemporary. Eshrāghi holds a postdoctoral fellowship from Concordia University, a PhD in Curatorial Practice from Monash University and a Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Arts Management from the University of Melbourne. They are Curator of Indigenous Arts at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Curatorial Researcher in Residence at the University of Queensland Art Museum, and Curator of the TarraWarra Biennial 2023, ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili at TarraWarra Museum of Art.

Sindi-Leigh McBride is a writer from Johannesburg, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Basel, where her doctoral research explores the politics and poetics of climate change in South Africa and Nigeria. She is currently a research fellow at Creative Knowledge Resources, an interdisciplinary project at the University of Cape Town that seeks to document and study socially engaged art. She is also a research trainee at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), where she investigates structural barriers to youth livelihoods in Africa. Her arts criticism and short stories have appeared in Africa’s a Country, Artthrob, The Johannesburg Book Review, The Mail & Guardian and other outlets.

Marie-Louise Richards is an architect, lecturer and researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her work explores invisibility as embodiment, critical strategy and spatial category through methods of architectural and artistic practice, curatorial practice and writing. Current work seeks to imagine the discipline, practice and history of architecture “otherwise”, through citational practices, queer, Black feminist and decolonial methodologies, theories and approaches. Recent work includes “Pedagogies of Power” (September 2022) and “Rest in Public as Resistance” (July–August 2022), in the Architectural Review; Banana-Split a (Black) Power Walk, short film, Mossutställningar/Public Art Agency Sweden (2020); “Out of Line: Erasure and Vulnerability as Sites of Subversion”, in Archifutures: “Agency”, Vol. 6 (2020); “Hyper-visible Invisibility: Tracing the Politics, Poetics and Affects of the Unseen”, Field Journal: Becoming a Feminist Architect, Vol. 7 (2017).

The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is a full professor at the Institute of Social Justice at University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture, and Design (Melbourne, Australia). She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019) and Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022). Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018) and Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux.