Jennifer Allora (1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (1971, Cuba) are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Through a research-based approach, their works trace intersections of history, material culture, ecology, and politics, using a multiplicity of artistic media that include performance, sculpture, sound, video, and photography.
Since the beginning of their collaborative practice in 1995, Allora & Calzadilla have presented solo exhibitions at some of the world’s most important museums — including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Neue National galerie, Berlin; The Menil Collection, Houston; Serpentine Gallery, London; the Castello de Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MAXXI, Rome; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. In 2011 they represented the United States of America at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale with an ambitious project, Glória—a performative critique of the narratives and symbols that overlap in America's political, cultural, and economic nationalism. In 2015, they made the site-specific installation Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), a Dia Art Foundation commission on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. The first mid-career survey of the artistic duo is currently on view at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, in Porto Portugal until mid-October.
Baum & Leahy is an international studio exploring biophilic, collaboratively-driven artistic creation through interactive installation, art direction, scenography and experience design. Their work explores modes of remediating interspecies relations as an integral methodology for collective survival during planetary climate crisis. Through research-led worldmaking and material storytelling, they question and sensorialise scientific inquiry into tactile, participatory experiences. With this they aim to allow the beholder a proximity to alternative realities, melting between the feasible and fantastical. Multisensorial ceremonies recur as an ongoing thread throughout Baum & Leahy’s research, where edible encounters and metabolic moments encourage digestion of entwined cross-disciplinary concepts and matter. Delving into the porous boundaries between bodies, species, materials and space these experiences aim to nurture sensitivity and symbiosis between inner and outer sensory worlds.
Since meeting at the Royal College of Art in 2015, Baum & Leahy have exhibited and run events internationally, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, The National Gallery of Denmark, Medical Museion, Roskilde Festival (DK), Somerset House, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wellcome Collection, (UK), Museum Het Valkhof, MU Hybrid Art House (NL), Centre for Book Arts (USA), Dansens Hus, Vega Scene (NO), Art Laboratory Berlin (DE), and MMMAD – Madrid’s Urban Digital Art Festival (ES). Baum & Leahy recently won the ‘Post-digital Landscapes’ Prize with Sensory Cellumonials. They were shortlisted for the Hedda Prisen 2022, Lumen Art Prize in 2021 and 2019, The Rapoport Award for Women in Art and Tech in 2019, and received both the Bio Art & Design Award and the British Library Labs Artistic Award in 2018. During 2020-2021 they were commissioned artists for One Cell at a Time, a public engagement program for the Human Cell Atlas. They were recently selected to be part of The Danish Arts Council’s career development grant "The Young Artistic Elite" 22/23, and are residents at BOM (Birmingham Open Media). Baum & Leahy are currently continuing their art-science collaboration with researchers at Medical Museion with a key focus on exploring sensorial representations of the holobiont.
Mónica Arreola (b. 1976) is based in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico. She has a degree in architecture, a Master’s degree in modern and contemporary art, a course in curatorship, and is currently a member of the National System of Art Creators (FONCA). Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, the United States, and Spain.
In 2022 Arreola participated in the Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept and was selected for PHotoESPAÑA Discoveries. She has received many accolades and grants including first place in the “VI Biennial of Photography of the State of Baja California” (2008) and the “IX Biennial of Photography of the State of Baja California” (2014); “Program for the Promotion of Cultural Projects and Co-Investments”, FONCA, in the category: Visual Arts (2017); the “Stimulus to Creation and Artistic Development in Baja California” (PECDA), category: Dissemination of Cultural Heritage in the Visual Arts discipline (2015); second place of the "IV International Biennial of Banners" (2006); first place in the contest "Spectacular of the Mexico Border Bridge" for INSITE (2002). She is currently the co-director of the independent space 206 arte contemporáneo in Tijuana, Mexico.
Adrián Balseca (b. 1989 in Quito, Ecuador) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His practice aims to activate strategies of representation, narration, and/or interaction in order to highlight the ecosystem of a particular territory. Balseca’s research focuses on several social-environmental agendas within “extractivist” dynamics. Each proposal has been associated with historico-economic processes that are relevant to the consolidation of the Modern State project in Ecuador, while, at the same time, is located within globally relevant environmental issues.
In his work, these struggles are underlined by implementing mythological narratives that refer to the extraction of natural resources, and traditional notions of progress and development in capitalist culture. The research process behind each project ultimately reveals hidden histories in the folds of Latin American politics, dismantling colonial constructs. His analysis of specific social-environmental agendas within extractivist economies of modern history has led to a series of projects in a wide range of formats such as film, site-specific installation, sculptural objects, and photography, bringing to life ironic allegories on late capitalism. This production relies on a process of rigorous investigation and dynamic association, provoking unexpected references that include elements of popular culture, art history, and social history. Balseca’s projects synthesize complex contemporary landscapes while navigating the contradictions found within modernity’s promises.
A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), Rebecca Belmore is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist. Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, Belmore’s works make evocative connections between bodies, land, and language. Solo exhibitions include Facing the Monumental, Art Gallery of Ontario (2018); Rebecca Belmore: Kwe, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (2014); The Named and The Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2002). In 1991, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother was created at the Banff Centre for the Arts with a national tour in 1992 and subsequent gatherings took place across Canada in 1996, 2008, and 2014. In 2017, Belmore participated in documenta 14 with Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. In 2005, at the Venice Biennale, she exhibited Fountain in the Canadian Pavilion. Other group exhibitions include: Landmarks2017 / Reperes2017, Partners in Art (2017); Land Spirit Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and the IV Bienal de la Habana (1991).
Miguel Calderón is regarded as a seminal figure in Mexico’s contemporary art scene. His pieces often combine a dark sense of humour that is reconfigured into works that explore deep social and personal territories, taking advantage of what is at hand to create low budget films and videos. His multidisciplinary practice focuses on exploring power relations, in interpersonal (often family) relationships as well as between different groups in society. He draws satirical portraits—always with a respectful regard for marginalized figures—depicting Mexico’s class society, defined by rigid hierarchies. His work often is unified by an ever-present sense of theatricality, questioning the fine line between reality and fiction. Frequently cast from the perspective of an outsider, he highlights the macabre complexity of our position as humans in the universe deftly weaving together mockery, social critique, and straightforward emotions. He creates works from a mashup of vernacular references, employing a variety of media, including video, photography, sculpture, and painting.
Calderón received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. He has been the recipient of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grant & Commissions program (2013), The MacArthur Fellowship for Film and New Media (2000), and the Bancomer/Rockefeller Fellowship (1995). Calderón currently lives and works in Mexico City.
Jo Ann Callis (b.1940, Cincinnati, OH) moved to Los Angeles in 1961. She enrolled at UCLA in 1970 where she began taking classes with Robert Heinecken, among other prominent artists. She started teaching at CalArts in 1976 and remains a faculty member of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media. She has continued to photograph, draw, and paint, and her work has been widely exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many others. In 2009 a retrospective of her work, Woman Twirling, was presented by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Callis has received three NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards and prizes.
Tania Candiani lives and works in Mexico City. One of the central interests of her work is the expanded idea of translation, extended to the experimental field through the use of visual, sound, textual and symbolic languages. Many of her projects consider the universe of sound and the politics of listening as a tool capable of expanding and transforming perceptions, both human and non-human. A fundamental part of her work is related to feminist policies and practices, understanding them as a communal, affective, and ritual experience. Its production usually involves interdisciplinary work groups in various fields, consolidating intersections between art, literature, music, architecture, science, and labour, with an emphasis on ancestral knowledge and techniques, technologies, and their history in the production of knowledge.
She is a member of the National System of Art Creators of Mexico; a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution Research Grant for Artists; and an artist-in-residence at the Arts at CERN program, in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2015 she represented Mexico at the 56th Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, institutions, and independent spaces, and is part of important public and private collections.
Paloma Contreras Lomas (b. Mexico City, 1991) began her artistic training in the career of Visual Arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, La Esmeralda (2011–15). Shortly after she joined the multidisciplinary collective Biquini Wax EPS (2016) and enrolled in the educational program SOMA (2016–18). The work of Contreras Lomas extends to different media such as video, writing, drawing and performance, as well as collective production, parallel to her personal research. Her work has been shown in places like Palais de Tokyo; FRAC Center Orléans; Museo Tamayo; kurimanzutto, among others. Currently, she uses horror and Latin-American sci-fi as a genre of artistic production. Contreras is represented by Pequod Co in Mexico City. She lives and works in Mexico City.
Minerva Cuevas (b.1975, Mexico City) finds the raw material for her work in the analysis of the notions of value, exchange, and property inherent to the capitalist system and its social consequence, and the latent possibility for rebellion that exists within everyday life.
Her work encompasses a wide range of media—installation, video, muralism, sculpture, and public intervention—which she uses to investigate the politics that permeate social and economic ties. By generating aesthetic exercises with objects and images of everyday consumption, Cuevas encourages us to rethink the role corporations play in the exploitation of natural resources and in the conditions of social inequality around the world.
Through her work, she explores familiar visual references and questions the ideas present in our political imaginary to locate channels of social communication. In her interdisciplinary projects, elements of anthropology, ecology, and marketing converge.
Cuevas studied at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1993-1996). She founded Mejor Vida Corp. and joined Irational.org in 1998. She created the International Understanding Foundation [IUF] in 2016.
She has been an artist resident in the following programs: Berliner Künstlerprogramm at Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Germany, 2003; Media Art of the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus, Germany, 2003; Delfina Foundation, London, 2001; and The Banff Centre for Arts, Canada, 1998.
Patricia Domínguez (1984, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Puchuncaví, Chile. Her work focuses on tracing digital and spiritual relationships between living species in an increasingly corporate cosmos. Through a wide variety of media, Domínguez draws upon new myths, rituals and healing practices, combining artistic imagination with experimental research on ethnobotany and extractivism. Domínguez works with watercolours, ceramics, sculptural assemblages and video installations to create shrine-like imagery derived from a visual vocabulary that spans from plant intelligence, corporate wellness schemes and the digital world. Her multi-layered artistic approach is informed by the wide scope of her education and research; her MFA from Hunter College, New York is supplemented by a Botanical Illustration Certificate from the New York Botanical Garden, a residency at CERN to learn about quantum physics, non-locality and entanglement, and time spent in Peru learning from a healer and researching beliefs around interconnectivity and multi-species spirit in the plant world. Domínguez is also the founder of Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research based in Chile.
Ines Doujak is an artist, researcher, and writer who works in the field of visual culture and material aesthetics with a queer-feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial focus. In her research, Doujak investigates how global histories are characterized by cultural, class, and gender conflicts. Doujak has presented her projects in the following institutions, among others: Kunst Haus Wien (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2020); Bergen Assembly (2019); Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (2018); Centro de Iniciativas Culturales de la Universidad de Sevilla (2018); steirischer herbst (2018); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2018).
Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke aRE experimental moving image and object maker from Canada. THEIR work has shown at the Walker Center, International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal, Images Festival, The New York Film Festival, Berwick Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival among many others. In 2011, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious prize for artists under 40. They have received prizes from festivals around the world, and his work is in the libraries at Harvard and Princeton. A book about his work, The Beauty Is Relentless, came out in 2012. They currently teach at Syracuse University.
Gauri Gill (b. 1970, Chandigarh, India) is a Delhi-based photographer. Her practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include an almost two decade-long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (since 1999)—this ongoing archive contains sub-series such as The Mark on the Wall, Traces, Birth Series, Jannat, Balika Mela, and Ruined Rainbow. She has explored human displacement and the migrant experience in The Americans and What Remains. Projects such as the 1984 notebooks highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and “active listening,” and in using photography as a memory practice. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is an equal collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives.
Gill has exhibited within India and internationally. Most recently, her first major survey exhibition took place at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt in 2022, which continued on to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk in January 2023. Her work has also been shown at BAMPFA, Berkeley (2020), the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019), Chobi Mela, Dhaka (2019), Chennai Photo Biennale (2021 and 2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2018), MoMA PS1, New York (2018), Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), 7th Moscow Biennale (2017), Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), San Jose Museum of Art (2015), The Wiener Library, London (2014) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), among other places. She has also consistently exhibited at locations outside of the art world, including public libraries, rural schools, and non-profit institutions. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Museum, London; Smithsonian Institution, Washington and Fotomuseum, Winterthur.
Ane Graff (b. 1974, Bodø) lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Her artistic practice is grounded in feminist new materialism, which rethinks our material world and engages in a relational and process-oriented approach to matter, including that of living bodies. Within this framework, Graff focuses on human and non-human relationships, viewing human beings as part of an expansive, material network, stretching inside and outside of our bodies. She often collaborates with scientists to incorporate experimental materials such as bacterial pigments, hair dye, meat glue, phytoestrogens and SSRI antidepressant medications.
She is a 2004 graduate of the Bergen National Academy of the Arts and currently holds a position of PhD Research Fellow at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art. Recent exhibitions include the Liverpool Biennale 2020 (curated by Manuela Moscoso); “Weather Report – Forecasting Future”, at the Nordic Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial (curated by Piia Oksanen and Leevi Haapala, KIASMA) and the Art Encounters Biennial 2019 (curated by Maria Lind & Anca Rujoiu).
Regina José Galindo is a visual artist and poet whose main medium is performance. Galindo lives and works in Guatemala, using its own context as a starting point to explore and accuse the ethical implication of social violence and injustices related to gender and racial discrimination, as well as human rights abuses arising from systemic inequalities in power relations of contemporary societies. Galindo is, in Loris Romano’s words, “an artist who pushes herself beyond her own limits, through performances which are radical, unsettling, and ethically discomfiting.”
Galindo received the Golden Lion for a Promising Young Artist in the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) for her works ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? and Himenoplastia, which critique Guatemalan violence arising from misconceptions of morality and gender discrimination while demanding the restitution of the memory and humanity of the victims. In 2011 she was awarded the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands for her ability to transform injustice and outrage into powerful acts that demand a response. She has also participated in the 49th, 53rd, and 54th Venice Biennials; Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel; the 9th International Biennial of Cuenca; the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; the Shanghai Biennial (2016); the Biennial of Pontevedra in 2010; the 17th Biennial of Sydney; the 2nd Biennial of Moscow; the First Triennial of Auckland; the 1st Biennial of Art and Architecture of the Canarian islands; the 4th Biennial of Valencia; the 3rd Biennial of Albania; the 2nd Biennial of Prague; and the 3rd Biennial of Lima.
Tsēmā Igharas is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, mentor, mentee and descendant of Tāłtān Matriarchy, living and working on Ohlone Lands in Oakland California. Using strategies of care and resistance Tsēmā creates work that connects materials to mine sites and bodies to the land. This practice cites her Indigenous mentorships, Potlatch, studies in visual culture, and time in the mountains. She has studied at K'saan, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and earned an Interdisciplinary Masters of Art Media and Design from OCADu. Tsēmā has exhibited and performed on Turtle Island, and beyond.
Lake Verea is a queer duo working in conceptual photography formed in 2005 by Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea. They work in series that develop over years where the technical and the conceptual go hand in hand to create a personal narrative. Their work explores concepts of expanded photography through portrait, installation, textile, performance, sculpture, and video. By experimenting with photographic techniques and formats that blur questions of authorship, they build narratives that highlight their combined identity to create intimate portraits of architecture, artists’ archives, and people. Their work has been exhibited internationally for almost two decades and is part of the MoMA Collection in NYC, the Jumex Collection and Museo Tamayo Collection in Mexico City, and Museo Amparo Collection in Puebla, Mexico, amongst others. Their series Bodyguards in Lands of Shadows was awarded the British Journal of Photography award in 2007 and has been exhibited at the Photographers Gallery, London (2007), SCAN Festival, Tarragona (2008), Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City (2009), Museo de Arte Zapopan, Jalisco (2014), FotoMuseo 4Caminos, Mexico City (2015), Museo Cuatro Caminos , Mexico City and Museo Alvarez Bravo, Oaxaca (2019).
Jeneen Frei Njootli has been working and living on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Skwxwu7mesh territories (Vancouver) for the last ten years. Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who has performed and exhibited their work internationally, from galleries to rooftops, casinos, runways, and the bush. They work across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and are a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli has completed multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has collaborated with James Luna, Dana Claxton, Olivia Whetung, Tsēmā Igharas, Krista Belle Stewart, Lindsay Lachance, Angela Code, Tania Willard, Gabrielle l’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, and her brother Stanley Grafton Njootli. Frei Njootli has been awarded the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize and the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize, and was a Sobey Art Prize finalist in 2018.
Tania Willard, of Secwépemc and settler heritage, works within the shifting ideas around contemporary and traditional, often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Her curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-2014), co-curated with Kathleen Ritter. In 2016 Willard received the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art from the Hnatyshyn Foundation and a City of Vancouver Book Award for the catalogue Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Willard’s ongoing collaborative project, BUSH Gallery, is a conceptual land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges and relational art practices. Willard is an MFA candidate at UBCO Kelowna, and her current research constructs a land rights aesthetic through intuitive archival acts.
Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus, her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms.
Tala Madani has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of museums worldwide, including Tala Madani: Biscuits, the artist’s first North American survey at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023). Other solo exhibitions include Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2014); and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). She recently participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial: The Seventh Continent, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among many other international group exhibitions. Madani’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.
Dafna Maimon’s work mutates between performance, video, drawing and installation. Through fictional and semi-autobiographical narratives, she surveys the ways in which humans handle recollections, stereotypes, abjection and traumatic experiences. In particular, her work deconstructs patriarchal structures and plays with them through exaggeration, subversion and re-contextualization. The study of diverse forms of community and belongingness is another characteristic of her practice; as is the realization of long-term collaborative processes. Her humorous and often absurd work taps deep into the human narrative and its vessel; the human body. Ultimately, her practice is a search for new perspectives of embodied knowledge and tools, that allow for self-reflection, digestion and catharsis. Maimon has shown her work in institutions and art spaces such as Helsinki Biennial, Kunst-Werke (Berlin), MoMA PS1 (New York), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Mahj Jewish Museum (Paris), Kim Center Contemporary Art (Riga), 1646 (Den Haag), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, Maine), Gallery Wedding (Berlin). Maimon holds a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and an MFA from the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.
Combining sculpture, painting, performative collective acts, and installation, Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976) grounds his transdisciplinary practice in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the United States when he was eight years old due to the Salvadoran Civil War. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of people in the Global South who become immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with gut cancer, which he links to his own migration to the US.
Maravilla received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso, Norway; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2019; Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space, 2019; MAP Fund Grant, 2019; Franklin Furnace Fund, 2018; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, 2018; Art Matters Fellowship, 2017; Creative Capital Grant, 2016; Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, 2016; and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award 2003.
He has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, among others. Maravilla’s work was featured in Drums Listen to the Heart: Part III, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA in January 2023 and soft and weak like water, the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea in April 2023. Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago, a solo exhibition featuring a newly commissioned immersive installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston’s Watershed, was on view from May 25 - September 4, 2023. His work is currently on view in the 12th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art: forms of the surrounding futures, Gothenburg, Sweden and the 35th Bienal De São Paulo: choreographies of the impossible, São Paulo, Brazil. La Alegría del Fuego, Maravilla’s first solo exhibition with mor charpentier, is on display in Paris through November 18, 2023.
An artist and transmedia producer of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn founded Studio REV-, a non-profit organization whose key projects include El Bibliobandido, Video Slink Uganda, Contratados, the Nannyvan, an app for domestic workers that CNN named as “one of five apps to change the world,” and the CareForce. She is a graduate of MIT and teaches at MIT, Columbia University, and The New School.
Like a series of experiments executed for the camera, Yoshua Okón's work blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation, and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood, and morality. In 2002 he received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship. His solo exhibitions include: Oráculo, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City; Yoshua Okón: Collateral, MUAC, Mexico City and Amparo Museum, Puebla; Yoshua Okón, Ghebaly Gallery, LA; Yoshua Okón: In the Land of Ownership, ASAKUSA Tokyo; Salò Island, UC Irvine, Irvine; Piovra, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Poulpe, Mor Charpentier, Paris; Octopus, Cornerhouse, Manchester and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and SUBTITLE, Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich. His group exhibitions include: Manifesta 11, Zurich; Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul; Havana Biennale, Cuba; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Antes de la resaca, MUAC, Mexico City; Incongruous, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; The Mole's Horizon, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre; Amateurs, CCA Wattis; San Francisco; Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London; Adaptive Behavior, New Museum, NY and Mexico City: an exhibition about the exchange rates between bodies and values, PS1, MoMA, NY, and Kunstwerke, Berlin. His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, London; Hammer Museum and LACMA, Los Angeles; Colección Jumex and MUAC, Mexico City and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, among others.
Daniela Ortiz seeks to generate visual narratives in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and gender are explored in order to critically understand structures of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist power. Her recent projects and research revolve around the European control system, its links to colonialism and the legal structure created by institutions in order to inflict violence against racialized communities. Recently, her artistic practice has turned to visual and manual work, developing artworks in ceramic, collage, and children’s books as an attempt to take a distance from Eurocentric conceptual art aesthetics. She is also mother of a one-year-old and a six-year-old, and an activist and workshop leader around the European migratory control system and institutional racism.
Irma Pineda is a Binnizá (Zapoteca) writer, professor at the National Pedagogical University, unit 203. She writes the column “La Flor de la Palabra'' in “La Jornada Semanal” (La Jornada’s weekly supplement). She is the author of various bilingual poetry books (Zapoteco-Spanish). Her work has been translated to English by Wendy Call, and has been published in journals like Poetry and Chicago Review. Her most recent book is In the Belly of Night and other poems – en el vientre de la noche y otros poemas – Ndaani gueela’ ne xhupa diidxaguie’ (translated by Wendy Call, Pluralia Ediciones, 2022). In addition to English and Spanish, Pineda’s poems have been translated to Estonian, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, German and Chinese and published in magazines and anthologies in America, Europe and Asia. She has done residencies at the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center at Washington University, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, and the Casa de Arte y Cultura Calles y Sueños in Chicago. She was a member of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations for 2020–22.
Dana Prieto is an Argentine-Canadian artist and educator based in Tkaronto. Her site-responsive work examines our deep relations with colonial structures and infrastructures through a careful attention to the ground, and the different forms of living and dying within it. Dana’s practice is material, process, and place-focused, and often unfolds over extended periods of artistic research and interdisciplinary collaborations. For over ten years, Dana has worked with ceramic processes and soil-derived materials to reflect on the technologies of containment found in the places where she lives and works: looking at mines, bodies, nests, vessels, institutions, and land. Dana holds a Master of Visual Studies from University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University. Her work has been presented in national and international galleries, public spaces and informal cultural venues.
Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, 2023); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2022); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, 2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2020); Sprengel Museum Hannover (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2019); New Museum (New York, 2019); and Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna (2019). She was included in the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and the Taipei Biennial (2014). Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.
Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor in visual art at the University of British Columbia. Her artwork investigates the grotesque, at the intersection of language, image, and materiality, and her research interests include ecology, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. Humour is explored through a corporeal register: humans’ underlying animality and mortality, as well as the absurdity of humanist moral positions vis-à-vis life on this planet. She has shown nationally and internationally. Roy was recipient of the VIVA award in 2010. In 2001 she published sign after the x (Arsenal/Artspeak), a book that revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings. Her newest book Queuejumping (Information Office/Art Metropole, 2022), uses the letter Q as device to investigate such interwoven issues as the “invention” of language and art, the shifting nature of sovereignty, feminist utopias, ecological devastation, and animal extinction.
Teresa Serrano (b. Mexico City, 1936) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works between Mexico City and New York. A selection of her exhibitions include: The Whitney Museum at Champion, New York (1998); Laboratorio/Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2002); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid ( 2005 ); 61st Festivale Internacionale del Film, Locarno, Italy (2008); Beijing 798 Biennial, China (2009); Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (2009); Daros Latinamerica, Zurich, Switzerland (2009); Kunstahale KadE Amersdorf, The Netherlands (2010); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2010); SAPS Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2010); MOLAA Museo de Arte Latinoaméricano (2011); CAAM Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Canarias (2012); Oi Futuro Flamengo, Brasil ( 2013); ARTIUM, Vitoria Gasteiz (2014); Daros-Latinamerica Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2014); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ( 2015); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA (2015); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2015); MUAC, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, CDMX (2021); Museo Universitario del Chopo, CDMX (2022). Her work is included, among others, in the following collections: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Daros Latinamerica Collection; Cemex México; CAAM Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Canarias; Museo ARTIUM, Vitoria-Gasteiz; MEIAC Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz; Museo Amparo, Puebla; MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; MUAC Museo de Are Contemporaneo de la UNAM, Ciudad de Mexico.
Tejal Shah was born in 1979 in Bhilai, India. Shah is a visual artist who works with video, photography, sound, installation, and performance. Their interests lie in the areas of sexuality, gender, ecology, and the interrelation between humans and nature. Shah holds a BA in Commercial and Illustrative Photography from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and was a visiting scholar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1999 to 2000. They have exhibited widely in museums, galleries, and film festivals including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay; and Documenta 13, Kassel.
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice engages science, somatics and interspecies relations. Simun creates art works in various formats, for example video, sculpture, installation, writing, painting and performance. Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau, New Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Momenta Biennale, New Museum, Himalayas Museum, MIT List Center for Visual Art, Ars Electronica, Museum of Arts and Design, The Contemporary, Rauschenberg Project Space and Bogota Museum of Modern Art. Recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, and Flash Art International, the work has been supported by Creative Capital and the Foundations of Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Gulbenkian and Onassis.
Dannielle Tegeder is a New York-based artist whose practice is grounded in painting but also extends to drawing, wall works, sculpture, installation, animation, music, artist books, conceptual strategies, tarot reading and writing. Throughout her career, her work has engaged with the history of modern painting and architecture, drawing from the multi-disciplinary spirit of 20th-century art practices while seeking to find new experimental approaches. She has often developed collaborations to create dialogues between abstraction and music. Her work engages with current debates around abstraction, design, and utopian thinking, often exploring the role that social and urban systems play in shaping contemporary life. More recently, in both individual and collaborative work, her practice has centered on topics around feminism, alternative pedagogies, and the spiritual. In 2020 she co-founded the two-person collective Hilma’s Ghost.
Joseph Tisiga maintains a multidisciplinary practice that is rooted in painting and drawing, but also draws from performance, photography, sculpture, and installation. His work reflects upon notions of identity and what contributes to this construct—community, nationality, family, history, location, real and imagined memories. Tisiga’s works look at cultural and social inheritance, the mundane, the metaphysical and the mythological, often all at once and on the same surface. This conflation of interests and perspectives plays itself out in the artist’s narratives, which are distinctly non-linear, cross cultural and supernatural.
Tisiga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal and a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation. Tisiga recently held solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art de Joliette (Joliette), the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (Lansing), Michigan State University (East Lansing), the Audain Art Museum (Whistler), and Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal). Other notable exhibitions include those held at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg), MASS MoCA (North Adams), the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, (Santa Fe), and the West Vancouver Museum (Vancouver). Tisiga is the recipient of The Yukon Art Prize (2021), the Sobey Art Award (2020), and the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (2017).
Laureana Toledo is a self-taught artist whose work explores relationships between different media and languages, as well as the assimilation of popular culture and the ways in which we read it. She has exhibited individually and collectively in spaces like Eastside Projects, Birmingham, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Mexico City’s Modern Art Museum, RedCat in Los Angeles among many others. As a curator, she has collaborated with Francis Alÿs, David Byrne, Lourdes Grobet, the band The Limit, amongst others. Her book, The Limit, published by Trolley Books in London, was published in 2009. She is co-founder of SOMA, a space for artists. She did a residency at Gasworks in London and prepared an art piece in collaboration with the bass guitarist John Taylor. Her collaboration with Mick Jones’ collection was exhibited at the Jumex Museum in 2019, and her documentary about the punk movement in Mexico City is forthcoming.
Couzyn van Heuvelen is a Canadian Inuk sculptor and installation artist. Born in Iqaluit, Nunavut and now based in Southern Ontario, van Heuvelen's artistic practice explores Inuit culture and identity, new and old technologies, and personal narratives. While rooted in the history and traditions of Inuit art, the work strays from established Inuit art-making methods and explores a range of fabrication processes. His work fuses Inuit art history and traditions with contemporary materials and technologies, as seen in his recent series Nitsiit, which includes materials like silver and brass as well as muskox horn and baleen. Van Heuvelen received his BFA from York University (Toronto) and his MFA from NSCADU (Halifax). His work has been included in several group exhibitions across Canada and he has received many major scholarships and awards. Notable achievements include being selected as the 2017–18 Sheridan College Temporary Contemporary Artist in Residence program, longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018, and longlisted for the Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award through the Inuit Art Foundation in 2023.
Miguel Ventura (b. 1954, San Antonio, TX) has been living and working in Mexico City since 1977. He has developed a body of work creating a new world with its own races and languages: NILC (New Inter-Territorial Language Committee). His atypical social model is presented through a series of video installations, objects, music, paintings, and drawings––employing parody and ridicule in order to label everyday patterns of societal behavior. His earlier work referred to notions of innocence, sexuality, and masculinity. In recent years, Ventura has reinterpreted symbols of the past––such as the swastika––in order to discuss current practices in the neoliberal world of finance, government, and art. His solo exhibitions include Oratorio de Arte Contemporáneo Neoliberal at the museum of the city of Queretaro (2011); Cantos Cívicos, un proyecto de NILC en colaboración con Miguel Ventura at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), Mexico City (2008) and at the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, Castellon, Spain (2007); Como he amarte mi pequeñín? at El Ojo Atómico, Madrid (2005); The P.M.S. Dilemma at Carrillo Gil Art Museum, Mexico City (2002); and The New Fuck Me Little Daddy House at Museum of Mexico City, Flatland Gallery, and Impakt Festival in Utrecht (1999). He has also participated in various group exhibitions in America and Europe. Ventura is currently writing a novel away from the noise of the art world.
Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle’s multifaceted practice is preoccupied with developing a personal response to the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, unpicking its connections to institutional racism, white supremacy and climate emergency in the present. Against an oppressive political background Whittle aims to foreground hope and engage with different forms of resistance. Whittle represented Scotland in the 59th Venice Biennale and is a 2022 recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Artists. In 2020, she was awarded a Turner Bursary and the Frieze Artist Award, she was the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/19. Whittle recently presented a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and currently has a major solo presentation on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh.
For thirty years, the work produced by artist and cultural activist Lorena Wolffer (Mexico City, 1971) has been an ongoing site for enunciation and resistance at the intersection between art, activism, and feminism. Her work revolves mainly around gender and advocates the rights, agency, and voices of women and persons with non-normative identities. From the creation of radical cultural interventions with various communities to pioneering pedagogical models for the collective development of situated knowledge, these projects are produced within an inventive arena that underlines the pertinence of experimental languages and displaces the border between so-called high and low culture. Her work—a stage for the voices, representations, and narratives of others—articulates cultural practices based on respect and equality.
Wolffer currently coordinates DISIDENTA: Comunidad de práctica social + saberes feministas with Cerrucha and María Laura Rosa. Wolffer was a member of the Parlamento de Mujeres de la Ciudad de México (2019); Coordinator for Social Practice and Interventions at the Laboratorio Nacional Diversidades (UNAM-CONACyT; 2017); Academic Coordinator of Arte, cultura y justicia: representaciones y performatividades alternas for the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género, UNAM (2011); advisor to the Coordinación de Difusión Cultural of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2004–07); and co-founder and director of Ex-Teresa Arte Alternativo of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (1994–96), all in Mexico City.
She has been the recipient of the Hermila Galindo Medal (Mexico City Congress, Mexico City, 2019), the Artraker Award for Social Impact (England, 2014), Commended Artist of Freedom to Create (Singapore, 2011) and the Omecíhuatl Medal granted by Inumjeres DF (Mexico City, 2011), among other grants and prizes.
Kira Sosa Wolffer (b. 2005, Mexico City) is interested in art, cinema and how sexuality is represented in both. She has performed darme-darse-darnos with her mother, Lorena Wolffer, and believes that it is imperative to make visible how people in her generation are experiencing sexuality.