About
Khanabadosh, Mumbai, and Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), present Draft, a project, which collectively considers how contemporary art can initiate, invoke and contribute to public debates. A year-long undertaking, the project is anchored in nine cities—Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Mumbai, St. Petersburg, Zurich—and opens with a three-day conference in Mumbai.
Draft encounters and tests public spheres and the consequences of staking claim to them through contemporary art. In doing so, it also chalks out the relationship between the seemingly disparate contexts of these cities that are, in fact, always intensely entangled.
The opening conference—and the project at large—convenes a cross-disciplinary crew of artists, curators, philosophers, anthropologists and the like, who cooperate as collaboratives in wound up urban contexts.
Draft is imagined as a kind of agent provocateur; exploring our reality, such as it is, by hinting at the possibility of what else could be. If no context can ever be truly exhausted, then each exploration is a renewal of the promise of debate.
This longue durée project is, somewhat, bookended by two conferences; the closing conference takes place in Zurich in the summer of 2016. In the critical interim, a range of engagements, including research and workshops, will be realised in each of the cities. Expanding on the conference’s discussions they will set the pace for the site-sensitive artworks that will be realised in early 2016.
Draft is not ‘about’ the city but it mobilises this complicated ecosystem as a springboard for thinking through questions, claims, potentials and problems around an infinite spectrum of contemporary artistic and philosophical concerns and practices.
The project intends to do this in a transnational scenario of home-grown artistic interventions, which question the notion of identity in a world that is nothing if not hybrid. The project intends to do this in the scenario of public spheres, which question extant public spheres in an epoch where dissenting contexts are rife with the rumbling sounds of deep matter, deep memory, deep alienation and what have you.
Draft is a proposal because every context is equal parts potential, problem and provisional.
Partners: Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council, and Connecting Spaces Hong Kong – Zurich ZHdK
Supported by: artEDU Foundation and ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
Programme
Download Draft Booklet
Contributors
Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Mumbai
Zinnia Ambapardiwala studied physics, moonlights by day as a hairdresser and is a system administrator with CAMP, Pad.ma, and Indiancine.ma, since 2008.
> CAMP
Shaina Anand, Mumbai
Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist. She has been working independently in film and video since 2001, first as ChitraKarKhana, a small-scale unit for experimental media and from 2007 as part of CAMP. Her primary concerns are in producing images in a way that customary roles of subject, author and technology devolve to produce new movements. www.chitrakarkhana.net
> CAMP
Beirut, Cairo
Beirut is an art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo, Egypt. It was founded by Jens Maier-Rothe and Sarah Rifky in May 2012, with Antonia Alampi joining the same year. The initiative considers institution-building as a curatorial act. Its activities are centred around hosting artists, artworks, research projects and other institutions (local, regional or international) that wish to engage with shared questions concerning politics, economy, education, ecology and the arts. Mindful of the rapid changes Egypt and its surrounding regions are experiencing, Beirut provides room to contemplate and a place for response to contemporary life from the position of art. It acts as a forum through which the international community of artists and practitioners of multiple disciplines can share their affinities and social sentiments towards staking new grounds and take up critical positions that reflect upon this new and open situation. Recent exhibitions and programs include ‘How To Act: On Stages and Storytellers’ (2015) in collaboration with Jasmina Metwaly & Philip Rizk and ‘White Paper: The Land’ (2014) with artist Adelita Husni-Bey. www.beirutbeirut.org
> Jens Maier-Rothe
> Sarah Rifky
Giorgio Biancorosso, Hong Kong
Giorgio Biancorosso is Associate Professor in Music, School of Humanities, The University of Hong Kong. He is the author, most recently, of Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2016). He received a Ph.D. in Musicology at Princeton and was a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Columbia University, for three years. His work on the history and theory of listening practices reflects a long-standing interest in musical aesthetics, film music, and the history of global cinema. Biancorosso is also active in Hong Kong as a programmer and curator. www.music.hku.hk/about/staff.html
Héctor Bourges Valles, Mexico City
Héctor Bourges Valles is a member of Teatro Ojo since 2002. He coordinated an experimental academic project at the San Luis Potosí Arts Centre (CASLP) called the ‘Theatre and Social Imagination Laboratory’ in 2012. He is a member of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Theatre Management Advisory Board and the CASLP’s Performing Arts Area. He has a degree in political science from the Ibero-American University and a postgraduate degree in documentary cinema from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has worked with stage directors such as Héctor Azar and Juan José Gurrola. And as a teacher, he has worked at different institutions including the National University of Colombia, Bogoto, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid and AlhóndigaBilbao among others.
> Teatro Ojo
CAMP, Mumbai
CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Mumbai in 2007. It has been producing provocative new work in video and film, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP's projects have entered modern social and technical assemblies: energy, communication and surveillance systems, neighbourhoods, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as not having a fixed function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity. CAMP’s work has been shown in venues such as Khoj, Sarai, Lalit Kala Akademi and NGMA New Delhi; Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Gallery Chemould Mumbai; MoMA and New Museum New York; Serpentine Galleries and Gasworks London; Asia Art Archive and M+ Hongkong, Ars Electronica Linz, HKW Berlin, MoMA Warsaw, Askhal Alwan Beirut, Experimenter Kolkata and Documenta 13 Kassel; in the streets and markets of Bangalore, San Jose, Dakar, Mexico City, East Jerusalem, Delhi and Mumbai; in the biennials of Shanghai, Sharjah, Gwangju, Taipei, Singapore, Liverpool and Kochi-Muziris; at film venues such as the AV Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Viennale, Flaherty Seminar, Anthology Film Archives, and CAMP’s own rooftop cinema. From their home base in Chuim village, Mumbai they co-host the online archives Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma among other longue-duree activities. www.studio.camp
> Zinnia Ambapardiwala
> Shaina Anand
> Ashok Sukumaran
Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Mexico City
Helena Chávez Mac Gregor is a researcher at the Research Institute of Aesthetics and lecturer of Art History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UNAM with a thesis on the relation between politics and aesthetics. She has been Academic Curator at University Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC (2009-2013), where she developed the program in Critical Theory, Campus Expandido. She curated the exhibition ‘Critical Fetishes: Residues of General Economy’ at CA2M, Madrid (2010) and Museo de la Ciudad, Mexico City (2011) with The Red Specter, a Mexico City-based collective comprising Mariana Botey, Helena Chávez Mac Gregor and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The collective explores the intersection between artistic and theoretical practices from a political, post-colonial and poetic perspective. She also recently curated ‘Color Theory’ (2014-2015) at MUAC with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Alejandra Labastida. Her most recent essays include Occupying the Space, The Battle for Politics; Necropolítica, la política como trabajo de muerte; Políticas de la aparición: estética y política and The Revolution Will Not be Televised.
Chto Delat, St. Petersburg
Chto Delat (What is to be done?), a collective of artists, critics, philosophers and writers, was founded in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Russia, in order to integrate political theory, art and activism. Their activities are coordinated by a core group including Tsaplya Olga Egorova (artist), Artiom Magun (philosopher), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist), Natalia Pershina/Glucklya (artist), Alexey Penzin (philosopher), David Riff (art critic), Alexander Skidan (poet and critic), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher), Dmitry Vilensky (artist) and Nina Gasteva (choreographer). Chto Delat sees itself as a self-organised platform for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicising “knowledge production” through redefinitions of an engaged autonomy for cultural practice today. It organises art projects, seminars and public campaigns that can take the form of videos, plays, radio programmes, posters and murals. The collective has been publishing the Russian-English newspaper What Is to be Done? since 2003. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ (2014-2015) looking into issues around education at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, and ‘Art Turning Left’ (2013-2014) at Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom. www.chtodelat.org
> Tsaplya Olga Egorova
> Nikolay Oleynikov
> Dmitry Vilensky
Cosmin Costinas, Hong Kong
Cosmin Costinas is the executive director and curator at Para Site, Hong Kong, since 2011. He previously served as curator at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, the Netherlands from 2009-2011 where he curated ‘In the Middle of Things’ (2011), a solo exhibition by Moscow-based artist Olga Chernysheva and ‘I, the Undersigned’ (2010) by Lebanese theatre director, playwright, actor and artist Rabih Mroué which toured Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London, among other places. In 2013 he co-curated ‘A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, Ghosts Rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story’, exploring Hong Kong’s complex political, social, pop cultural and epidemiological history through the work of 27 artists. He was co-curator of the First Ural Industrial Biennial (2010) with Ekaterina Degot and David Riff and one of the editors of the ‘Documenta 12 magazines’. Most recently he was on the curatorial team of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014) led by Anselm Franke.
> Para Site
Gitanjali Dang, Mumbai
Gitanjali Dang is a Mumbai-based curator, writer and researcher. She is interested in shrinking distances between all manner of contexts—ideas, histories, philosophies, geographies, people, disciplines, and so on. By creating intimacy between contexts Dang hopes to make visible their underlying hybridity and question notions of identity construction. Past exhibitions and projects include the online intervention 'www.beam-me.net' (2010), 'Caution: Children at Work' (2011) Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai and 'Shikaar: The Hunt' (2011) Select City Walk Mall, New Delhi. She is currently curator of Khanabadosh, an itinerant arts lab she found in Mumbai in 2012. Her criticisms and articles have appeared in publications such as Art Papers, Frieze, Art Agenda, The Times of India and Nafas Art Magazine. She has lectured and presented papers at Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, among others. Together with Christoph Schenker, she is co-founder of Draft. www.khanabadosh.info
> Khanabadosh
Tsaplya Olga Egorova, St. Petersburg
Tsaplya Olga Egorova is an artist and filmmaker, and co-founder of the Chto Delat collective. Working across formal boundaries her work includes sound, lecture performances, radio plays and theatre performances and songspiels. She was a founder of the feminist group Factory of Found Clothes and participated in many performances and exhibitions with the group. As part of Chto Delat her exhibitions include: ‘Chto Delat? in Baden-Baden’ (2011), Staatliche Kuntsthalle, Baden-Baden, ‘Chto Delat? Perestroika: Twenty Years After: 2011–1991’ (2011), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, ‘Ostalgia’ (2011), New Museum, New York, ‘Study, Study and Act Again’ (2011), Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, and ‘The Urgent Need to Struggle’ (2010), Institute of Contemporary Art, London.
> Chto Delat
Laura Furlan Magaril, Mexico City
Laura Furlan Magaril is a member of Teatro Ojo since 2004. She studied performing arts at the Casa del Teatro AC, and later, at the Diplomado Teatro del Cuerpo under the direction Jorge Vargas. She holds a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from the Sciences Faculty, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has worked as an actress and assistant director with theatre artists: Rolph Abderhalden, Ricardo Diaz, Zbigniew Zsumsky, and Jean-Frédéric Chevallier. She is in charge of different educational activities for the philosophy of science seminars at the Faculty of Science, UNAM, since 2003. She has conducted several youth-oriented theatre workshops at the Casa Ernesto Meneses project by The Ibero-American University. Currently she is coordinator for the arts department at Colegio Madrid in Mexico City.
> Teatro Ojo
Sophie Goltz, Hamburg
Sophie Goltz is the artistic director of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg (curator for public art of the city of Hamburg) since 2014; a newly created position aiming to give fresh impetus to the project ‘Kunst im öffentlichen Raum/Art in Public Space’ that has existed since 1981. She has worked as a curator for Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) from 2008-2013. Goltz also lectures at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and writes regularly for magazines such as Texte zur Kunst, springerin and Art Agenda. Previously, she has worked as a freelance curator and art educator with Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004), ‘Projekt Migration’, Cologne (2004-06) and Documenta 12, Kassel, (2007). www.stadtkuratorin-hamburg.de
Rupali Gupte, Mumbai
Rupali Gupte is an architect and urbanist. She is founding member and trustee of Society For Environment and Architecture that runs the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), where she also teaches. She is also founder member of the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT), an organisation that works on research and practice in urbanism. In addition, she is also a partner in RRarchitecture101, an architectural design practice, and is associated with Cornell AAP and Kohn Pederson Fox, New York, the KRVIA Design Cell, Mumbai and the Urban Design Research Initiative (UDRI), Mumbai. Along with Prasad Shetty she is consulting Urban Management expert to the Town Administration of Mendefera, Eritrea. She also teaches at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture (KRVIA), Mumbai. Her interests lie in a cross-disciplinary investigation into the contemporary urban condition. She has been a Research Fellow with KRVIA and with Sarai-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and architect in residency at Khoj (New Delhi). Her works include a semi-fictional history of Mumbai titled Tactical City, Tenali Rama and other stories of Mumbai’s Urbanism (Cornell University, 2006); Architectural Fictions as part of ‘Jugaad Urbanism’ (2011), American Institute of Architects, New York and an installation titled ‘Pothole City’ produced for the Art-Architecture Residency at Khoj, New Delhi. www.sea.edu.in and www.crit.in
> Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty
Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty, Mumbai
Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty are urbanists based in Mumbai. They believe that the urban realm is incoherent, unbound, unstable and gets worked out through multiple and messy logics. Their conceptual journey has moved from an urge for mapping cities, articulating problems and developing corrective interventions to looking closely at urban conditions, formulating newer ways to speak about them, and developing engagements to live and find delight. Their work often crosses disciplinary boundaries and takes different forms—writings, drawings, mixed-media works, storytelling, teaching, conversations, walks and spatial interventions. Some of their joint works include Multifarious Nows (2007), Manifesta 7, Bolzano, a multi-media map of the textile mill lands in Mumbai and Studies of Housing Types in Mumbai (2007) produced for Urban Age, London School of Economics, the work is a compilation of twenty-one housing typologies in Mumbai with narratives on the contexts of their production, Gurgaon Glossaries (2013) a methodology to read cities, shown at Sarai 09 Delhi, Mumbai Art Room and the Sao Paolo Architecture Biennale and Transactional Objects (2015) an installation shown at the 56th Venice Biennale.
> Rupali Gupte
> Prasad Shetty
Ranjit Hoskote, Mumbai
Ranjit Hoskote is a cultural theorist, curator and poet. He is the author of more than 25 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006) and Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König, 2010) and Atul Dodiya (Prestel, 2014). Hoskote has translated the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded’s works as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). With Ilija Trojanow, he has co-authored Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West (Yoda, 2012). With Nancy Adajania, he has co-authored The Dialogues Series (Popular, 2011), a cycle of conversations with artists. With Maria Hlavajova, he is editor of Future Publics: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (BAK/ Valiz, 2015). Hoskote has been active as an independent curator since 1993. He curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). With Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor, Hoskote and Hyunjin Kim co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008). Hoskote was co-convenor, with Maria Hlavajova, Boris Groys and Kathrin Rhomberg, of the exhibition-conference platform ‘Former West Congress: Documents, Constellations, Prospects’ (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2013).
IFCAR Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich
The Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) was founded in 2005 to give impetus to artistic research and other closely related inquiries on an institutional basis. It’s a division of the Department of Art & Media, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The institute has two research focuses. In research field Art and Knowledge, artists explore specific forms and functions of artistic knowledge within contemporary cultures of knowledge. Although practice-based and subject-specific, the research also implicitly relates to theory of science. In the second research field, Public Art, artists investigate how their practices bring into view, reflect, and contribute to —particularly urban—social changes. In doing so, art develops its own means, tactics, and conceptions. The majority of IFCAR’s projects are carried out by interdisciplinary teams and through transnational cooperation. IFCAR is publisher of a monograph series, which comprises fifteen titles so far. IFCAR in collaboration with Khanabadosh is the co-organiser of Draft.
> Christoph Schenker
Rohit Jain, Zurich
Rohit Jain is an anthropologist and anti-racism activist. Currently, he is Scientific Officer at NCCR on the Move, the National Center of Competence in Research for Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Neuchâtel. His research has sought to understand and articulate how the representation and commodification of difference is engaged and contested in transnational spaces of colonialism and global capitalism. Jain has done research on the colonial Indological gaze of Max Müller on India, on the entanglements of racism and humour in Swiss TV comedy and on the connection of the Swiss public spectacle of Bollywood, yoga and IT with postcolonial anxieties. Jain’s Ph.D. thesis was focused on how persons of Indian origin, who grew up in Switzerland, negotiated multiple norms of assimilation, exoticism and global Indian modernity in transnational life-worlds and public spaces. His current aim is to find strategies to better understand, represent and appropriate the multiplicity of subject-making and the fractional translation of meaning in assemblages and hierarchies of postcolonial global capitalism, combining multi-sited ethnography and cultural studies with political interventions and collective transdisciplinary approaches. He most recently contributed a chapter to Swiss Colonial Encounters and Postcolonial Assemblages (2015, in print) edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné and Patricia Purtschert.
Ju Anqi, Beijing
Ju Anqi is an artist and filmmaker based in Beijing, China. Ju is a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy. His films have been exhibited in the Centre Pompidou, Paris and MoMA, New York City. His recent film Poet on a Business Trip (2014) premiered at the 44th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 where it won the Netpac Award. He directed the documentary There’s a Strong Wind In Beijing (2000), a documentary film reflecting the social and cultural anxieties within contemporary China. A strong advocate of reforms in Chinese media laws, in 2004, Ju along with six other independent filmmakers—including Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye—submitted a statement to the China Film Bureau identifying Bureau laws in need of urgent reform. He has participated in the Berlinale (2000) in Berlin and in numerous other film festivals across North America, Australia and Asia. His film Quilts had its world premiere at the 2003 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). www.poetonabusinesstrip.com
Khanabadosh, Mumbai
Khanabadosh is an itinerant arts lab founded in Mumbai in 2012 by curator, writer and researcher Gitanjali Dang. Persian for those who carry their homes with them, Khanabadosh thrives on latitude; not having a fixed address helps. Khanabadosh is committed to latent connections, combinatory play, interdisciplinarity, commons and engaging with the past in order to envision the imaginaries of the future. Recent projects include ‘Kairos’ (2013) Shedhalle, Zürich, a sequence of documentary screenings, which focused on disenchanted voices of the Indian subaltern and included works by Anand Patwardhan, Rakesh Sharma and Sanjay Kak and ‘The Age Of Re:discovery’ (2014), a nine-month long online workshop by Compasswallah which accessed the history of science through the urban situation. Khanabadosh in collaboration with Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is the co-organiser of Draft.
> Gitanjali Dang
knowbotiq / Christian Hübler and Yvonne Wilhelm, Zurich
knowbotiq is an artist group based in Zurich, Berlin and Lisbon. They have been experimenting with forms and medialities of knowledge, political representations and post digital agency since 1992; formerly as knowbotic research with Alexander Tuchacek. In the context of their artistic research, the group has realised various projects in urban public spaces. knowbotiq is currently working on post-digital constructions of history in the context of the 100 years of Dada Zurich, focusing on the uncertainties of technologically traumatised landscapes, such as the coal mining in the Ruhr area in Germany, and human-machine landscape hybrids related to the agricultural policies in Tyrol, Austria. They have participated in the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), Seoul Biennale (2002), Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (2007), Biennale Rotterdam (2009), Moscow Biennale (2011), Salon Suisse at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and exhibited at Museum Contemporary Art, Helsinki (1994), Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg (1995), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2000), New Museum, New York (2002), and MOCA Taipei (2004). Awards include: the Prix Arts Electronica (1994 and 1998), the International ZKM Media Art Award (2000) and the Claasen Prize for Media Art and Photography (2001). www.krcf.org
Daniel Kurjakovic, Paris/Zurich
Daniel Kurjakovic is a researcher, curator and writer based in Paris. He curated exhibitions and collaborative projects on sound, installation, performance and public art. In the past, he has been a co-director of the Zurich publishing company Memory/Cage Editions (1995-2002), assistant curator at the Museum of Art Lucerne (1999-2001), and the head of the exhibition programs at Kunsthof Zurich, the associate exhibition space of the Zurich University of the Arts (2002-2008). From 2008 - 2014 he curated, amongst other projects, the multi-regional exhibition and research project Quadrilogy, which he had been developing for the Burger Collection, Hong Kong. He is presently preparing a publication of Lawrence Weiner, and a in-depth conversation project with British writer John Berger amongst others. He is also co-editor of Torrent magazine, a magazine on source materials by artists. Daniel Kurjakovic acted as Academic Observer at the Draft conference in Mumbai.
Li Zhenhua, Beijing/Zurich
Li Zhenhua is a curator, multi-media artist and producer based in Beijing, China, and Zurich, Switzerland. He is founder and director of Beijing Art Lab, a virtual and physical platform for art, research, and exchange. He managed the first international new media art festival MAAP at the Beijing Millennium Museum (2002), followed by ‘onedotzero’ at the Beijing Today Art Museum (2002). He contributed to the exhibition ‘Communicate: British Independent Graphic Design since the Sixties’, (2004-2005) Barbican Centre, London, the exhibition toured four major Chinese cities. Since 2010, he has been nominator for the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern, Switzerland, as well as for The Prix Pictet, Switzerland. He was a member of the international advisory board for the exhibition ‘Digital Revolution’, Barbican Centre, London (2014). Li Zhenhua has edited several artists' publications, including Yan Lei: What I Like to Do (2012) and Yang Fudong: Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009). A collection of his art reviews has been published under the title Text in 2013. www.bjartlab.com and www.msgproduction.com
Lawrence Liang, Bangalore
Lawrence Liang is an Indian legal researcher and lawyer of Chinese descent, known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. A graduate from the National Law School, he subsequently pursued his Master’s degree in Warwick, England. Over the years he has emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of intellectual property, and has developed an interest in laws regarding technology and culture in India. He is a founder of the Alternative Law Forum, which engages in alternative methods towards maintaining sustained legal intervention and resolving judicial disputes. A keen follower of the open source movement in software, Liang has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. He is also working closely with Sarai, New Delhi, on a joint research project called ‘Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons’. He is the author of A Guide to Open Content Licenses (Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, 2005). He was visiting scholar at the School of Information and the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan as part of the Hughes Fellowship in 2014.
Qinyi Lim, Hong Kong
Qinyi Lim is a writer and a curator at Para Site since 2012. Previously, she has held curatorial positions at the National University of Singapore Museum and the Singapore Art Museum. Her research is focused on a plurality of vocabularies conditioned by exigent circumstances, drawing from fields of anthropology, history and sociology, not dwelling on the sanctity of the object but rather what the cracks in the sanctity or historicization mean. She holds a MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore and a BA in Art History from the University of Queensland, Australia. Past exhibitions and projects include ‘Eros’ (2014) with Sumesh Sharma/Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, ‘Para Site; Present/Future’ (2013) Artissima 20, Turin, ‘And The Difference is. . .’ (2008) Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, ‘Telah Terbit: Out Now’ (2006), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, ‘Why Stay If You Can Go?’, Stedelijk Museum (2011), Amsterdam, and ‘Three Artists Walk Into A Bar . . .’ (2012), de Appel, Amsterdam. She is currently working on the exhibition ‘A Luxury We Cannot Afford in Singapore’ (expected in September 2015) at Para Site.
> Para Site
Iris Long, Beijing/Shanghai
Iris Long is a media artist, writer, and translator based in Beijing and Shanghai, China. Long is part of I & C, a Beijing-based artist duo, with Cedar Zhou founded in 2013. Their work combines elements of computer science, visual art and storytelling, using real-world generated data to create multi-sensory experiences. Her research and artistic practices are focused on how technology-based archives and databases can fit within current exhibition spaces, museum knowledge transfer and aesthetic experiences, pointing to creative representation and artistic revelation. As part of I & C, Long curated ‘Information In Style: Information Visualisation in the UK’ (2013), CAFA Art Museum, Beijing. They also developed the first interactive archive data visualisation on Chinese contemporary art in 2014. The archive was exhibited in ‘CCAA Fifteen Years’, at Power Station of Art, Shanghai. As a writer and translator, Long has worked with Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA), Sotheby’s Hong Kong and CAFA Art Museum among others. She is currently translating Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media published by MIT Press into Chinese. She was shortlisted for the 2014 International Awards of Art Criticism (IAAC).
Jens Maier-Rothe, Cairo
Jens Maier-Rothe researches, writes and makes exhibitions. He is currently based in Berlin and Cairo, where he co-founded Beirut in 2012. He has written for and edited numerous publications and magazines. He attended the Critical Studies program at the Malmö Art Academy and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York. Recent collaborations include 'The Magic of the State' (2013), Lisson Gallery, London; 'Tape Echo' (2013-2014), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; 'Here Today Gone Tomorrow' (2014), Stedelijk Museum and Trouw, Amsterdam; 'A Guest without a Host is a Ghost' (2014-2015), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. Most recently, his essays have appeared in Camera Austria International No. 126 (Graz/Berlin, 2014); Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, London, 2014); Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press/New Museum, 2015).
> Beirut
Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mexico City
Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian with a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art from the University of Essex. He is currently Chief Curator of MUAC, University Contemporary Art Museum, in Mexico City. He was the first Associate Curator of Art Latin American Collections at the Tate Modern, London (2002-2008). He curated the Manifesta 9 Biennial (2012) in Genk, Belgium, with Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades. He collaborated on Francis Alÿs’s ‘When Faith Moves Mountains’ (2002). Exhibitions include ‘20 Million Mexicans Can´t Be Wrong’ (2002), London, ‘Francis Alÿs. Diez cuadras alrededor del estudio’ (2006), Mexico City and Teresa Margolles’ project ‘What Else Can We Speak About’ (2009) for the 53rd Venice Biennale’s Mexican Pavilion. He co-curated ‘The Age of Discrepancies, Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997’, (2007-2008) in Mexico City. Publications include South, South, South, South. 7th International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory México (Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2010) and “Entries” (in collaboration with Francis Alÿs) in Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception (Tate Publishing, London, 2010). In 2012, Medina became the sixth recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement instituted by the Menil Foundation.
Jasmina Metwaly, Cairo
Jasmina Metwaly is a visual artist and filmmaker. She co-founded the 8784 project and is also a founding member of the Mosireen media collective. Having studied painting, over time her interest shifted to the intersection/division between single-channel image, video and documentary filmmaking. Metwalyʼs work has been exhibited at local and international art venues and festivals including Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2010), Cairo Documenta, Cairo (2010/2012), IFFR, Rotterdam (2012), and Berlinale Forum Expanded, Berlin (2014).
> Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk
Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, Cairo
Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk are an artist/filmmaker duo working together since 2011. They formed the video collective intifadat intifadat in 2011 and produced the series of videos ‘Remarking January 25’ (2011). In 2015, Rizk and Metwaly released their first feature film Out on the Street in which they engage with performativity and theatre in a piece with non-professional actors exploring the social and political landscape in Egypt leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The film premiered at the 2015 Berlinale and a work around the film is presented at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). In collaboration with the exhibition space Beirut, they presented ‘How To Act: On Stages and Storytellers’ (2015), a program of film screenings, talks, and discussions, inspired by their on-going research, which uses as a starting point the conditions of work, labour and revolt.
> Jasmina Metwaly
> Philip Rizk
Alia Mossallam, Cairo
Alia Mossallam has been teaching at The American University in Cairo since 2014 and the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS) since 2015. She is currently holding a series of workshops for ‘Reclaiming Revolutionary Histories’ with activists and artists, often on remote islands in Egypt. Disguised as an academic, Mosallam spends most of her time listening to people tell stories, and experimenting with ways to re-tell them. Her recent focus has been on stories behind popular movements and revolutions that make nationalist histories but are seldom told. She continues to look for these stories, and songs, in an attempt to recover a lost history of popular movements; in hopes that one-day, we may write our own. Her recent work—including her 2012 Ph.D. thesis, Stories of Peoplehood—revisits experiences of the workers and resistance fighters behind the 1952 coup d’état in Egypt while another traces a peasant uprising before the 1919 revolution in the form of a play called Whims of Freedom. She is now engaged in projects, which endeavour to create spaces for youth inside and outside of academic institutions in Egypt (and beyond), and to search their personal and communal histories with the intention of exploring the idea of retellings. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/687/1/Mossallam_Stories_of_peoplehood.pdf
Riason Naidoo, Cape Town
Riason Naidoo is a South African curator. He has curated several exhibitions on the work of veteran Durban photographer Ranjith Kally (b.1925), which have been shown in Johannesburg and Durban (2004) and travelled to museums in Mali (2005), Austria (2006), Spain (2006), and Reunion Island, France (2007). ‘The Indian in DRUM Magazine in the 1950s’ followed in 2006. The project was curated out of 500,000 negatives from the Bailey’s African History Archive; in 2008 he published a book by the same name. ‘1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective’ has been his most ambitious exhibition, showcasing a century of South African art via almost 600 artworks at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2010). The exhibition sparked debate and controversy not only nationally but in reviews in New York, London, Berlin and Amsterdam as well. In 2012, he was one of three curators of the 10th edition of the Dakar Biennale of contemporary African art in Senegal. He also curated exhibitions on the works of legendary South African artist Peter Clarke in Dakar (2012), London (2013) and Paris (2013).
Reza Negarestani, Bridgeport
Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer. He has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures, as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct. Negarestani is known for pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re:press, 2008). It was listed in Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. Negarestani has been a regular contributor to Collapse as well as other print and web publications. In 2012, Negarestani collaborated with Florian Hecker on an artwork titled Chimerization (2012) that was included in the Documenta 13. He has given various lectures at PERFORMA 13, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2013), University of Pennsylvania (2013), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2013), and Curatorial Hub, New York (2013) among others.
Nikolay Oleynikov, Moscow
Nikolay Oleynikov is an artist, activist, member of Chto Delat based in Moscow. He is co-editor of the newspaper Chto Delat?, a member of the editorial board of the Moscow Art Magazine, co-founder of the Learning Film Group and May Congress of Creative Workers. He is also a member of the Arkady Kots band. Since 2013, he has been a tutor at School of Rose, a project initiated by the Chto Delat under the aegis of their pedagogical project School for Engaged Art. He is known for his murals and graphic works within the tradition of the Soviet monumental school, comics, surrealist-like imaginary and punk culture. Oleynikov is author of the book SEX of the OPPRESSED (Moscow, 2013-14).
> Chto Delat
Para Site, Hong Kong
Founded in early 1996 as an artist run space, Para Site was Hong Kong’s first institution of contemporary art and a crucial self-organised structure within the city’s civil society, during the uncertain period preceding its handover to Mainland China. It was founded by Patrick Lee, Leung Chi-wo, Phoebe Man Ching-ying, Sara Wong Chi-hang, Leung Mee-ping, and Tsang Tak-ping. It produces exhibitions, publications and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society. Over the years, Para Site has evolved into a professional contemporary art centre, engaged in a wide array of activities and collaborations with other art institutions, museums, biennials and academic structures in Hong Kong and the international landscape. Throughout its history, Para Site's activities have included a range of different formats, such as P/S magazine (1997-2006), a bilingual publication, which was Hong Kong's first visual arts magazine and a central platform for the development of art writing in the city and the Curatorial Training Programme (2007-2010). Since 2012, Para Site has been running an International Art Residency Programme. www.para-site.org.hk
> Cosmin Costinas
> Qinyi Lim
Jay Pather, Cape Town
Jay Pather is a South African curator and choreographer. He is Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Director of UCT’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) and Artistic Director of Siwela Sonke Contemporary Live Art, Cape Town. Pather is also curator for the Infecting the City Public Art Festivals and The GIPCA Live Art Festivals, he serves as a juror for the International Award for Public Art and is on the Board of the National Arts Festival of South Africa. Using choreographic conventions to disrupt and subvert ‘intimate’ encounters, Pather’s work brings slippery notions such as nationhood, love and violence to the fore. He has collaborated with visual artists, architects and urban planners, taking his inter-cultural performances into public spaces and working with the architecture of Johannesburg, Durban, London, Zanzibar, Amsterdam, New York, Barcelona, Mumbai, Muscat, New Delhi, Copenhagen, Koln and Cape Town. He has received choreographic commissions from the British Council, The World Economic Forum, the Consul General Of India and World Social Forum amongst others. Productions include Afrocartography (Barcelona, 2009); Blind Spot (Copenhagen, 2009), and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, which opened the 2015 Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg.
Alice Peragine, Hamburg
Alice Peragine is an artist living and working in Hamburg, Germany. Utilising performative installations and site-specific interventions her work examines social, visual and institutional structures. Space, body, and image are crucial parameters in her performances and video installations. Questions concerning the relationship between the audience and the work, the beginning and end of a performance and structural power relations within institutional ensembles are central to her approach. After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Art History at the University of Greifswald, she moved on to study Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg with Michaela Meliàn in the department of Time Based Media in 2010. Currently she is involved in several collaborative projects in Hamburg such as PLATEAU, a web based publication for the performing arts that aims to create more visibility for experimental approaches to performance and social practices in urban spaces by providing a platform for interdisciplinary discourse through the production of texts. www.plateauhamburg.de
Richard Pithouse, Durban
Richard Pithouse lectures at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, where he teaches contemporary political theory and urban studies and runs an annual semester-long postgraduate seminar on the work of Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. His recent academic work focuses on emancipatory political theory and popular struggles in contemporary South Africa. He is also a widely published journalist who has written about music, poetry and politics. He sustains a lifelong commitment to active participation in popular struggles.
Sarah Rifky, Cairo
Sarah Rifky is a curator and writer. She is the co-founder of Beirut, directs CIRCA (Cairo International Resource Center for Art), and was curator of the Townhouse Gallery (2009-2011). She co-directed the MASS Alexandria independent studio and study program (2010-2012). In 2007 she received her MFA in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Sweden. She has been an agent for Documenta 13, and was the co-editor of the artist book Reloading Images: Damascus / Work in Progress (2008). Recently, she has also contributed to numerous publications and newspapers, including Egypt Independent (Al Masry Al Youm), Bidoun, Mousse, Flash Art, Spike Art Quarterly and Art Agenda.
> Beirut
Philip Rizk, Cairo
Philip Rizk is a filmmaker and activist. He studied Philosophy and Anthropology and has been working with video since 2008, with the primary intention of engaging with community struggles in Egypt. His first film was the short documentary This Palestinian Life (2009). In 2010, Rizk completed the short film series ‘Sturm’, a two-channel articulation exploring rural and industrial ruin in Egypt. Rizk’s films have been screened at numerous festivals including the Berlin Biennale (2012) and IFFR (2012). Rizk is a member of the Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debt and the Task Force Against Torture. Rizk's texts have appeared in various collected volumes, such as the Journal of Human Geography and on the sites jadaliyya.com and roarmag.org.
> Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk
Karla Rodríguez Lira, Mexico City
Karla Rodríguez Lira is a member of Teatro Ojo since 2002. She holds a MA in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with public space and its social construction as her research focus. Educated in performing arts at the Dramatic Art Centre AC (CADAC), Mexico City, she has worked as a stage designer and producer with several theatre artists such as Juan José Gurrola, Jean-Frèderic Chevallier, Jorge A. Vargas, Mariana García Franco, and Héctor Bourges. She has been teaching at the Architecture School, as well as the Theatre School at UNAM since 2007. Currently she coordinates many cultural-artistic activities as part of the Faculty of Architecture’s academic program.
> Teatro Ojo
P. Sainath, Mumbai
P. Sainath is an Indian journalist and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermath of globalisation in India. He was Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu before resigning in 2014. He has published over 150 investigative reports on India’s agrarian crisis in The Hindu alone, the largest journalistic body of work ever on India’s farming communities. Sainath is perhaps the most influential voice in the public discourse on agriculture. He set the agenda for investigative rural reporting—photographs taken by him accompany all his reports—in particular with his groundbreaking work on farmer suicides, wherein he located the suicides within a larger policy driven agrarian crisis afflicting the Indian peasantry. Since late 2011, he has been working on People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) of which he is the founding editor. In June 2011, Sainath was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (DLitt) by the University of Alberta, their highest honour. Sainath has won over 40 global and national awards for his reporting. He was one of the recipients of the Magsaysay Award in 2007 and was the first reporter to win Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Prize in its inaugural year in 2000. He was also the first Indian reporter to win the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Prize for human rights journalism in 1995. Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin India, 1996) has remained a non-fiction bestseller for years. An exhibition of Sainath’s photographs, ‘Visible Work, Invisible Women: Women and Work in Rural India’ has toured India and countries such as Canada, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland and U.S.A. and is now available online. www.psainath.org
Christoph Schäfer, Hamburg
Christoph Schäfer is an artist working on urban everyday life and the production of spaces for collective desires since early 1990. This interest is reflected in a wide range of works, which often reflect and sometimes intervene. Schäfer is decisively involved in Park Fiction, a community driven public space in Hamburg. As a member of Park Fiction, Schäfer is interested in the exchange between different subjectivities and the collective redefinition of a public space. With Park Fiction Schäfer was part of Documenta 11, Kassel (2002). Schäfer is a founder and part of the team of PlanBude that currently organises the participation in the planning process for the new Esso houses in St. Pauli, Hamburg. He has authored The City is our Factory/Die Stadt ist unsere Fabrik (Spector Books, 2010) and recent exhibitions include ‘Bostanorama’ (2015), Selekta Studio 1, Hamburg, and ‘Sleeping Producers’ (2014), Charim Galerie Wien, Vienna. www.christophschaefer.net
Christoph Schenker, Zurich
Christoph Schenker is Professor of Philosophy of Art and Contemporary Art at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He has been head of the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR), part of the university’s Department of Art & Media, since 2005. His main research interests are artistic research as well as public art. Under his direction, IFCAR produced public art research projects by Harun Farocki, Bethan Huws, Ken Lum, Shirana Shahbazi, Lawrence Weiner and Sislej Xhafa in Zurich and Engadine, Switzerland. He co-edited MIND THE GAP, Kunsthof Zurich, Materials and Documents 1993 – 2013 (2013), a publication tracing the exhibition history of the outdoor exhibition site Kunsthof Zurich, which he established and conducted between 1993 and 2005 in close collaboration with art students. Furthermore he has co-edited Kunst und Öffentlichkeit, Kritische Praxis der Kunst im Stadtraum Zürich (2007), a research publication on public art and its contexts in Zurich, and most recently Künstlerische Forschung, Ein Handbuch (2015). He is co-directing Draft together with Gitanjali Dang. www.ifcar.ch
> IFCAR Institute for Contemporary Art Research
Prasad Shetty, Mumbai
Prasad Shetty is an urbanist and founding member of the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT). He also works with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region – Environment Improvement and Heritage Conservation Society and teaches at the Rachana Sansad’s Academy of Architecture, Mumbai. His work involves research and teaching on contemporary Indian urbanism including architectural practices, studies of post-industrial landscapes, housing types, archiving post-liberalisation developments, entrepreneurial practices and urban property. He has also been a lecturer at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA), an Independent Fellow at The Sarai Programme at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi and a Consulting Urban Management expert, together with Rupali Gupte, to the Town Administration of Mendefera, Eritrea. His recent works include De-Mapping (2011), an installation emerging from the hyper-mapping tendencies of urban study practices and Bombay Talkies and Other Stories of Malad (2013) comprising research on the land politics in the suburbs of Mumbai. www.cityscans.wordpress.com
> Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty
Studio X Mumbai
Studio X Mumbai is an open space for experimental design and research run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University. It opened to public in February 2011 with ‘Architecture of Consequence’ an international traveling exhibition about the role of architecture in social innovation and sustainability. Since then Studio X Mumbai has become a major hub of vibrant debate. As a research space, Studio X Mumbai explores the built environment of the city by hosting a variety of events—including talks, exhibitions and workshops—that address issues such as contemporary architectural practice, sociology, public art, and the impact of technology on the city. As part of GSAPP’s network, Studio X Mumbai moderates the exchange of ideas on culture, the arts and education in relation to urban development in the city. Globally connected, yet regionally specific, Studio X Mumbai is a place where ideas are ‘negotiated’ and a variety of relationships are fostered with the intention of redefining the role, responsibility, and capacity of globally collaborative modes of education, research, response and action. Rajeev Thakker is the curator of Studio X Mumbai. www.arch.columbia.edu/studio-x-global/locations/studio-x-mumbai
Ashok Sukumaran, Mumbai
Ashok Sukumaran is interested in everything, but especially things that disappear from our sensibility, and then our intelligences. He has been trying to assemble recall mechanisms and provocations for the future from such diverse materials as electricity, leaky phone taps, neighbours and unlikely collaborations. He co-founded CAMP in 2007.
> CAMP
Teatro Ojo, Mexico City
Teatro Ojo is an artistic collective founded in 2002 by Héctor Bourges Valles, Karla Rodríguez Lira, Laura Furlan Magaril and Patricio Villarreal Ávila. Their work addresses the power of the gaze as a site for the production of the visible. The gaze as a bridge allowing perception of invisible relations and behaviours within the public, private, intimate and unconscious spaces we live in. In their site specific artworks, performances and urban interventions they dwell on and question memory, city, violence, community, modernity, education, pre-language, or the post-human. At the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, they were awarded Best Work in Theatre Architecture and Performance Space for Within a Failing State, which brought together works done by the collective from 2007 to 2010. They participated in the first BiennaleOnline (2013) curated by Jan Hoet. Their work was part of the exhibition ‘Playgrounds’ (2014), Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and ‘El Contrato’ (‘The Contract’ 2014-2015), AlhóndigaBilbao. They have also performed and exhibited their work in Spain, Greece, Czech Republic, Serbia, Switzerland, Colombia, Argentina, and India. www.teatroojo.mx
> Héctor Bourges Valles
> Karla Rodríguez Lira
> Laura Furlan Magaril
> Patricio Villarreal Ávila
Dmitry Vilensky, St. Petersburg
Dmitry Vilensky is an artist and educator. He works mostly with collective practices and focuses on developing large-scale architecture constructions, educational seminars, plays, graphic work, and films. Не is a founding member of Chto Delat. Vilensky is also co-editor of the Chto Delat? a bilingual newspaper in Russian and English published by the collective and main facilitator of the School of Engaged Art, a pedagogical project initiated by the collective, in St. Petersburg. He has participated with Chto Delat in their recent exhibitions and performances including the Sao Paulo Biennale (2014), the Summer Festival at Kampnagel, Hamburg (2013), and ‘FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects’ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2013), Berlin and the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2012).
> Chto Delat
Patricio Villarreal Ávila, Mexico City
Patricio Villarreal Ávila is an artist working in performing arts and theatre; he has been a member of Teatro Ojo since 2005. He graduated from Casa del Teatro AC, Mexico City and the Latin American and Caribbean International Theatre School (EITALC). He has taught at Centro de las Artes de San Luis Potosi Centenario, University of Hidalgo, and The Ibero-American University, Mexico City and more. He has worked on several publications, and participated in workshops, seminars and art projects with Ileana Dieguez, Victor Varela and Teatro Obstaculo in Cuba, Eleni Tzirtzilaki and Network Nomadic Architecture in Greece and LUPE Arte and the Austin Latino Theater Alliance (ALTA) in USA, among others. In 2009 he studied stage direction in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with artist Emilio García Wehbi.
> Teatro Ojo
Samson Young, Hong Kong
Samson Young is a sound artist and composer who studied music, philosophy and gender studies at the University of Sydney, and holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton. Young received an Honorary Mention in Sound Art at Prix Ars Electronica 2012, and in 2013 was named Artist of the Year in Media Arts by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. He participated in the Asia Triennial Manchester, the Moscow Biennale of Young Art, and also at group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland, Today Art Museum, Beijing, and Taipei Contemporary Art Museum, Taiwan. Recent projects include Liquid Borders (2012-2014) and Pastoral Music (But It Is Entirely Hollow, 2014-onging). Liquid Borders is an archive of sounds that form the audio divide separating Hong Kong and the Mainland, comprised mainly of recording of vibrating fence wires. In Pastoral Hollow, Young combines his research into Hong Kong’s involvement in the Second World War and artists’ roles in warfare, into sets of military strategies described through musical notation. www.thismusicisfalse.com