The Festival Guests
Viktor Brim (born 1987 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan) is an artist and filmmaker. In his works he deals with cinematic spaces, urban phenomena and the concept of power. The physical manifestation of power structures and their territorial extension is central to Brim's video installations, films, and publications. His work has most recently been presented at the Edith-Russ Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg, Kunst im Tunnel Museum Düsseldorf, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.
Elena Conradi is an art historian and gallery owner. The first video artist Elena Conradi talked to about his work was Tony Oursler. In 1997, right after studying art history, she had spent a few months in New York for an unpaid internship, where her first boss instructed her to get cookies for the artist's dog and bring them to the interview. Back in Hamburg, she later organized an exhibition series with an art award, whose focus she shifted from painting to video art in 2015 - a decision with which she overstretched the goodwill of her sponsor though, and which put an end to the overview show after fifteen years. Time-based media are a fixed and essential part of the program of her gallery, which she has run together with Heiner Conradi since 2008.
Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer based in Durban, South Africa. His work obsesses over the tensions in Heritage/Modernity and Culture/Tradition as it applies to black life. His said practice includes cultural research, writing, creative producing, design, film and curatorship.
He is part of a number of working groups spread across the Southern African Region, the African continent and internationally.
He has shown work in Munich, Marrakech, Maputo, Karlsruhe, Harare, Bristol, Tokyo and throughout South Africa.
Natasha A. Kelly holds a PhD in communication sociology, and is an author, curator and artist. Her art installations have been shown in Berlin, Dresden and Düsseldorf, among other places. Her award-winning documentary Millis Erwachen made its film debut at the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018, and the same-titled publication was released the same year by Orlanda Frauenverlag in Berlin. Based on her book Sisters & Souls (2015), the sequential empowerment theater M(a)y Sisters commemorating the Afro-German poet May Ayim has been staged under her artistic direction at HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater in Berlin since 2016. She made her directorial debut in 2019/20 with the international performance of her dissertation thesis Afrokultur. The Space Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (2016) in three countries (Brazil/USA/Germany) and three languages (Portuguese/English/German). With the publication The Comet - Afrofuturism 2.0 (2020) and the same-titled symposium curated by her at HAU Theater in 2018, she first moved away from historical representations towards visions of the future. In April 2021, she will release her latest book, Racism. Structural Problems Need Structural Solutions in response to Black Lives Matter Summer 2020.
Dr. Doris Krystof is a curator, author and lecturer.
Studied art history, literature and history. 1993 doctorate in art history at the University of Cologne. After traineeship at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, worked as curator for modern and contemporary art (Kunsthalle Wien, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen). Numerous monographic and thematic exhibitions (including "Ich ist etwas Anderes" Steve McQueen, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Martin Kippenberger, "Talking Pictures. Theatricality in Contemporary Film and Video Works", Gillian Wearing, Wael Shawky, Akram Zaatari, Carsten Nicolai, Hito Steyerl). Work as author and lecturer. Numerous publications on modern and contemporary art with a focus on video/film, questions of staging and literary-theatrical processes in the visual arts.
Michelle-Marie Letelier is an artist and obtained her BA from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 2000 and has participated in postgraduate programmes such as Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT and as guest student in the Experimental Media Design studies at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
Her work has been shown internationally in biennials, galleries, museums and institutions. Her videos and VR have been exhibited in international screenings and festivals, including: VRHAM! Festival 2020; 5th Mercosur Biennial and X Chilean Media Arts Biennial.
Paloma Nana studied Media Cultural Studies as well as Languages and Cultures of Africa at the University of Cologne. She is currently a freelancer at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, where she is co-managing the awareness program for the upcoming special exhibition RESIST! The Art of Resistance. For the Temporary Gallery (Centre for Contemporary Art in Cologne), she is organizing online reading sessions on Black Quantum Futurism in collaboration with Aneta Rostkowska, Jana Dormann, Siddhartha Lokanandi, and Denzel Russel as part of the exhibition A Sequence of Events in the Lives of the Dormant. Her interests include postcolonial research, (Black) Peformance Theory, and also resistant narratives in popular culture.
Dr. Astrida Neimanis is a lecturer and author.
She writes and collaborates at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation amidst climate catastrophe. Her most recent book is Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Astrida is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies at the UBC Okanagan on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory, in Kelowna, BC.
Viktor Neumann is a curator and art historian. He has curated exhibitions and projects for, among others, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Bildmuseet Umeå, National Centre for Contemporary Arts Yekaterinburg The Kitchen, New York, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and the Municipal Gallery Gdańsk. He was curatorial assistant of the Public Programs of documenta 14, assistant curator of the 3rd Moscow Biennale For Young Art, and Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He was part of the core curatorial team of Bergen Assembly 2019 and, with Paul B. Preciado, co-curator of the transnational project Parliament of Bodies. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Curatorial Studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. Together with Nikola Dietrich and Eva Birkenstock, he co-curates the performative platform REBOOT at Kölnischer Kunstverein and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 2021. He lives in Berlin and Zurich.
Dr. Joanna Page is a Reader in Latin American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and culture, and she is the author of several books on cinema, graphic fiction, literature and visual art in Latin America. Her latest book is Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art (forthcoming with UCL Press, April 2021), which explores a new wave of transdisciplinary art-science projects by Latin American artists.
Úna Quigley is an artist. She graduated in 2001 from Crawford College of Art in Cork, Ireland and Winchester School of Art in Spain and the UK with an MA in European Fine Art. She has since exhibited widely such as in Kassel, Paris, Berlin and Cork. In 2020 she screened work in SSA/Cutlog at the Royal Scottish Academy Edinburgh, an International Women's Day screening at Blackrock Library Dublin, Photophobia, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario and 1,2,3,4: Dance in contemporary artists' films at Glucksman Gallery Cork, Ireland. She has received several awards from local authorities, including an Artistsʼ Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2017 and a Tyrone Guthrie Residency Award from Galway County Council in 2020. Quigleyʼs practice incorporates writing, drawing and filmmaking. She lives with her composer partner Loz Fitzgibbon and their two children in the west of Ireland.
Lex Rütten & Jana Kerima Stolzer have been working together as an artistic duo for 4 years. The starting point of their multimedia installations and performances is often shaped by the intertwining of the human being with its technological environment and the narratives and emotional challenges that arise from this. In the past, the duo realised projects both in the independent theatre scene and in exhibition contexts.
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Vanina Saracino is an independent curator and writer. Her work focuses on theories and art practices that explicitly question anthropocentric and binary worldviews from an ecological perspective, with an emphasis on lens-based and time-based art practices. She co-curated the group exhibition Tiger in Space at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM, Tallinn, 2020) and the Screen City Biennial on the topic Ecologies – lost, found and continued (Stavanger, Norway, 2019), also editing the SCB Journal, Vol. 2. In 2015, she co-founded OLHO, an international project about contemporary art and cinema, initiated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, also shown at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (2017) and Palais de Tokyo (2018). She has collaborated with Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (Venice), TBA21–Academy, Cinemateca Brasileira (São Paulo), Cinemateca do MAM (Rio de Janeiro), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), The EYE Film Institute (Amsterdam), among others.
Dr. Linnea Semmerling is the director of the Düsseldorf Inter Media Art Institute (IMAI), a foundation dedicated to the collection, distribution, presentation and conservation of media art. She holds degrees in Cultural Studies, Art Studies and Technology Studies from the Universities of Maastricht and Amsterdam. Semmerling organized exhibitions at ZKM Karlsruhe (DE), IKOB Eupen (BE), TENT Rotterdam (NL) and Marta Herford (DE), and contributed to catalogues (ZKM Karlsruhe, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl), art magazines (Kunstforum International, Metropolis M), and academic journals (Organised Sound, Leonardo Electronic Almanac). Her curatorial and research interests concern socially engaged artistic practices and the relationships between technologies, institutions, and the senses.
P. Staff lives and works in Los Angeles, USA and London, UK. Their work combines video installation, performance and publishing, citing the ways in which history, technology, capitalism and the law have fundamentally transformed the social constitution of our bodies today, with a particular focus on gender, debility and biopolitics. They have exhibited extensively, gaining significant recognition and awards for their work which is held in private and public collections internationally. Their work has been exhibited at Serpentine Galleries, London (2020); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Tate Liverpool, England (2014); Tate Modern, London (2012), among others.
Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby are artists. Their work in video and sculpture has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Walker Center, The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, The Power Plant, The Musee d’Art Contemporain Montréal, The New York Film Festival, The Toronto International Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Their 2019 work You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born has shown at Rotterdam, the Berwick Film and Media Festival, the Camden International Film Festival, and Antimatter Film Festival, among others.
Their recent work Dear Lorde won the Grand Prize at the European Media Arts Festival and showed at Videonale in Bonn Germany in 2017. In 2011, they were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. They have received prizes from festivals across the globe and their work is in the libraries at Harvard and Princeton. A book about their work called The Beauty Is Relentless, was published on Coach House Press/MOCCA in 2012. In 2015, a book of Duke’s writing in collaboration with Shary Boyle was published called The Illuminations Project. They are MacDowell fellows.
Radio Maria, a music format by Maria Wildeis for electronic, new, experimental music, electroacoustic, techno and IDM presents live concerts and DJ sets in combination with virtual environments, real-time coding and visual effects. For the opening party of Videonale.18 Maria Wildeis, Ulrich Steinbach and Paloma Groove will play. Visuals are provided by director and installation artist Alisa Berger (DE/JP) and by French net and digital artist Michaël Borras aka. Systaime (FR/SP). (Photo: Anna Siggelkow)
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