Bianca Turner

Bianca Turner (Brazil, b.1984) is a multimedia artist, holds a BA in ‘Performance Design and Practice’ from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (2011, London, UK) and a Master of Arts in “Scenography” from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (2013, London, UK).

She exhibits regularly since 2014. A special mention should be made to the individual exhibition “Memory, body as resistance”, at Airez Gallery, (Curitiba, Brazil) in 2018; Among her collective exhibitions the most relevant is at Mostra Verbo of Performance, at Vermelho Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil. She also exhibited in São Paulo at the Red Bull Station, Galeria Ponder 70, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Itaú Cultural, Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, SESI Digital Gallery, DAHAUS, among other collective exhibitions. In New York at the residency ‘Arts, Letters and Numbers’, in Leipzig at the residency ́Pilotenkueche ́.

Her research is on the subjectivity of memory: Is memory material or immaterial? Is memory embedded in objects? – A quest that doesn’t have the intention to be solved but yet to be the source for many artworks. ‘My work explores the documentation of the ephemeral. I explore the immaterially of an object or a place; the invisible, the subjective, and the unspeakable. I think of memory as built in the present rather than something from the past; and I am interested in traces and layers as textures of memory and nostalgia.’

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Neja Tomšič

Neja Tomšič (1982) is a visual artist, poet, and writer whose interdisciplinary practice merges drawing, photography, poetry, and performance. By uncovering overlooked and often hidden stories from history, she aims to rethink dominant historical narratives, research into particularities, and create situations where new understandings of the present can be formed. She approaches histories as maps of starting points and links. Performative elements in her projects explore possible projections of history into the subjective present of individual visitors.

Her project Tea for Five: Opium Clippers, a performative essay in the form of a Chinese tea ceremony, has toured 11 countries and was performed more than 55 times. Her artist book Opium Clippers was awarded as best Slovenian artist book in 2017/2018 and the best book design in the category Book as Object at the Slovenian Book Fair. She is a member a Nonument Group, an art collective that maps, archives and intervenes in forgotten, abandoned or demolished 20th century monuments, public spaces and buildings, that have undergone a change in meaning.

Neja also works as a curator and producer and is a co-founder of MoTA (Museum of Transitory Art), a Ljubljana-based research and production platform devoted to transitory art. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Image 1: Tea for Five: Opium Clippers, Glej Theatre, September 2018, photo: Jaka Babnik

Image 2: Tea for Five: Opium Clippers, Azores Fringe Festival, Pico Island, July 2018, photo: Neja Tomšič

Image 3: Opium Clippers artist book, photo: Jaka Babnik

Image 4: Nonument Group: From Nowhere to Noplace, The Pioneer Railway, May 2019, photo DK

Tyler Matthew Oyer

Called an "interdisciplinary gospel immortalist" by Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Tyler Matthew Oyer is an artist, writer, organizer, and educator based in Los Angeles. By researching diverse modalities of activism (ACT UP, queer theatre, Brechtian theatre, surrealism, underground cabaret, and punk) his performance works generate an intergenerational dialogue around politics, seeking new ways of articulating the connection between various systems of oppression from the past to the present in an attempt to grapple with our collective political future.

Oyer has performed at MoMA PS1, REDCAT, The Getty Museum, dOCUMENTA (13), Hammer Museum, Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, Munch Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach, Bergen Kunstall, Rogaland Kunstsenter, The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, High Desert Test Sites, Highways Performance Space, Human Resources LA, Silencio Paris, MIX NYC, and the Orange County Museum of Art. He has written works of performance including CALLING ALL DIVAS, GONE FOR GOLD, Shimmy Shake Earthquake, La Bola Negra, and 100 Years of Noise: Beyoncé is ready to receive you now. Oyer is the founder of tir journal, an online platform for queer, feminist, and underrepresented voices. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2012 and has offered workshops and lectures at CalArts, Bard College, Occidental College, University of Southern California Santa Barbara, Penn State University, Southern Exposure, and Grand Central Art Center. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga is a performance artist and provocateur. Known for her public arts activism and provocative public speaking, she performs many different roles. Her performance work deals with umsebenzi of protest practices and asks questions about ritual and rape. Nondumiso is also an independent arts’ writer and academic.

Syowia Kyambi

Kyambi’s practice probes issues of race, perception, gender and memory. Her work examines how contemporary human experience is influenced by constructed histories, creating installations that include a performative practice to narrate stories and activate objects, exploring cultural identities, linking them to issues of loss, memory, race, and gender.

Based in Nairobi and of Kenyan and German origin, Syowia Kyambi has received commissions by the Kenya Institute of Administration, the National Museum of Kenya and the Art 4 Action Foundation in Kenya. She is an alumnus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been the recipient of several awards and grants, including most recently the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, being shortlisted for the Financial Times Emerging Artist Award and recipient of the Art in Global Health Grant from the Wellcome Trust Fund in the United Kingdom.

Her work has been exhibited in museums in Belgium, Finland, Kenya, Mali, Sweden, Germany, Zimbabwe, France, United Kingdom, Mexico, South Africa North America and Ireland

Olga Grotova

Olga Grotova (b. 1986, Saint-Petersburg) is an artist based in London. Grotova takes family history, landscapes and experience of displacement as starting points for multi-layered paintings, videos and performances. Her multidisciplinary practice connects repressed narratives to ecosystems through the contemporary female body, movement, text and mark making. The paintings are made using traces of studio debris and plants with cameraless photographic processes. In Grotova’s installations ambivalent historical and political material is re-established and re-articulated in the present.

Grotova graduated from MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2016. Previous exhibitions include: Centrala (Birmingham), 2019; Mimosa House (London), 2018; Osnova (Moscow) and others.

Elenie Chung

Elenie Chung is a filmmaker born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago and currently based in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Her films bring the everyday into sublimity and the unfamiliar to the everyday. Before attending the University of California: Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in Film Directing/Production, she worked at Women Make Movies, a non-profit feminist media arts organization based in New York City and also served as an assistant for artist Karina Skvirsky. At UCLA, she was a recipient of the Edie and Lew Wasserman Production Fellowship.

http://eleniechung.net

Noor Bhangu

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg.

Her written work has appeared in academic and public journals, including Black Flash, gal-dem, Moveable Type: The University College London English Journal, Public Parking, Uncommon Sense, and C Magazine. Her curatorial practice includes projects: Overlapping Violent Histories: A Curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge (2018), womenofcolour@soagallery (2018), Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art (2018), and Digitalia (2019). In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York University in Toronto.

Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin

Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin (b. 1981) is a curator, freelance writer, translator, producer, and occationally an exhibition guide and mediator.

She contributes regularly to the camera-based art magazine Objektiv Journal (OJ), her latest project; a review-series at OJ with ArtConstructs that runs through February 2020. The platform ArtConstructs launched the fall of 2018 as an IG account promoting futurity by combating white washing in the arts.

Lisa Andrine is also the programme curator for the inaugural contemporary art exhibition 2020 at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.

Ayman Alazraq

Ayman Alazraq makes films, photos, and mixed media artworks. His short film The Passport was screened at the National Museum of Cinema in Turin (Italy), Cologne International Video Art Festival (Germany), among other places. His video and photography installation You From Now On Are Not Yourself was screened in venues in Spain, Norway, Denmark, and the Gaza Strip. In 2015 Alazraq’s short film Oslo Syndrome was presented in the autumn exhibition in Oslo, Dubai International Film Festival and London Palestinian film festival. His collaborative work with Emanuel Svedin was shown at Svedin has been exhibited at Galleri Podium in Oslo and Theaterhaus Jena in Germany in 2017. Alazraq and Svedin were awarded a permanent public art installation at Høgskolen på Vestlandet, which was inaugurated in 2018.