Diana Taylor is university professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, whose mission is to create, research, preserve, and circulate socially engaged performance throughout the Americas. Taylor’s books include ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2016), Acciones de memoria: Performance, historia, y trauma (2012), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) for which she was awarded the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture; Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1997); and Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991).
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a writer, artist, and scholar. Rooted in Black feminist theory, she has developed a research-based and process-oriented investigative practice that often deals with archives, specifically with the voids in public archives and collections. Interlacing the documentary with the fictional, her works manifest themselves through a variety of media and dissect the present of an everlasting colonial past: a past without closure.
Dr Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specialising in cultural and social history of Eastern Europe, with a particular interest in refugee and migrant history. During her doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Manchester, she focused on Displaced Persons in the early Cold War period in the global perspective. She is currently completing her first monograph, entitled Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria, 1945-1952. She has published on the history of gender, refugees, and diaspora.
Nisrine Boukhari is a conceptual artist, lives in Vienna and Stockholm. In her art-based research projects, she uses language to invoke a distinctive mind’s energy on discovering a new terrain of the imagination implicating the body as well as the mind in an immersive poetic and conceptual experience by using conceptual writing, fragmentation and deconstructed narrative. Her artistic practice emerged from the study of the art walking through the mental driven movement of the body into different aspects. In recent years, she uses the drifting mind as part of her long-term research on the state of Mind-Wandering where she investigates the effects of trauma on the human psyche.
Tanja Schult is an art historian and scholar at the Stockholm University and is currently guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Science. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory, on how monuments renegotiate questions of identity and participation, and how art’s efficacy can be captured through audience reception.
Already in her doctoral thesis, Schult started to investigate how democratic ideas have affected monuments’ themes and designs, and demonstrated how the genre shows a significant capacity to rejuvenate, producing new designs which can stimulate self-reflectiveness and critical thinking. By using performativity as a theoretical concept, she was able to identify what characterises a ‘democratic monument’ in terms of content, design, coming into existence, and its being in the world, and how these factors mutually interrelate. Her current research investigates the relationship between democratic ideas and monument making in the 21st century further.
Steven Cohen is a visual and performance artist, staging interventions in the public realm as well as in gallery and theatre spaces. He has performed extensively on the festival circuit, at such prestigious venues and events as the National Opera of Bordeaux; Festival d’Automne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival; the National Arts Festival in Makhanda; Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris; Montpellier Danse; Festival d’Avignon; Munich Opera Festival, Bavarian State Opera; Festival Escena Contemporánea, Madrid; Bozar in Brussels; Oktoberdans, Bergen, Norway; and Canadian Stage, Toronto.
Martina Gimplinger is a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her primary research interests include
contemporary performance, memory theory, and the philosophy of time. Her project WAS UNS ANGEHT: Das Nachleben westlicher Gewaltgeschichte wahrnehmen is funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Stiftung Zeitlehren in Karlsruhe. She holds a master’s degree in Szenische Forschung from Ruhr-University Bochum and a diploma in African Studies from the University of Vienna with a thesis basedon the work of contemporary dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula. She lectures within theatre,
holds artist talks, and works with independent artists.
Israel Martínez is a visual and sound artist. He seeks to generate a social and political critical reflection, and often explores stealth as a communicative situation. Martínez’ works have sound as a starting point to create pieces and projects usually materialized in multichannel audio installations, video, photography, actions or performances, texts, publications, and interventions in public spaces. In 2007, he was granted an Award of Distinction in Prix Ars Electronica, and in 2019, he was a winner of the CTM Radio Lab Call in Berlin. He has had solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MuseumsQuartier, MACBA, Moscow Biennale, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, daadgalerie, Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, MUAC, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Museo Arte Carrillo Gil, MUCA Roma, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, among others.
ORGANIZERS
Kathrin Heinrich is an art historian and critic based in Vienna, Austria. She studied art history and comparative literature at the University of Vienna and is currently a researcher and PhD candidate at the department of art history of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her writing has been published in newspapers and magazines like Der Standard, Süddeutsche Zeitung, springerin, Eikon, PW-Magazine or Arts of the Working Class. She has worked as a writer, editor, and translator for institutions like Kunsthalle Wien, Art Basel, Salzburg Museum, Künstlerhaus Wien, Biennale für Freiburg, Kölnischer Kunstverein, and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. In 2018, she was awarded the AICA Austria Prize for Young Art Criticism.
Frida Robles is a Mexican curator and artist based in Vienna. She reflects on interconnectivity, the subversive power of imagination and contextual specificity. Her artistic practice has varied from public art installations to performances to textual work. She has continued her practice through exhibitions, several artist in residence programs, and fellowship programs like the RAW Academy and the Young Creators Program of FONCA. A member of [Applied] Foreign Affairs in the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and of the editorial board of the Mexican journal Fractal. Frida is a PhD candidate in the Art History department at the same university (with support from the JUMEX Contemporary Art Foundation and the Marietta Blau Stipendium). She is currently a research fellow at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Eva Kernbauer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of the Department of Art History at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research focuses on Artistic Conceptions of Political Agency; History and Historicity in Contemporary Art; Historical and Contemporary Conceptions of the Art Public, of Art Exhibitions and Criticism. Her most recent book is Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions Since 1990 (New York: Routledge, 2021).
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Annija Česka is a multidisciplinary graphic designer based in Vienna. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen, and has been studying Graphic Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2020. Find her work on Instagram @annija.ceska and on her website.