Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator and editor living in Iași (Romania), but travelling mostly in the deep non-spherical space of the Internet. As Associate Professor, he teaches Theories and Practices of Artistic Research, Curatorial Studies and Practices, and Applicative Visual Studies at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași. He is the editor of Vector – critical research in context publication series (co-participating with an experimental format in the framework of the project documenta12magazine in Kassel), editing and co-editing the books: “After the educational turn” (2017), “Post-photography” (co-editor Matei Bejenaru) (2015), “Critical Theories and Creative Practices of Research” (2014), “Exhibiting the ‘Former East’: Identity Politics and Curatorial Practices after 1989” (co-editor Cristian Nae) (2013), “Trial” (artist’s book> Dan Acostioaei) (2012), “Exhibition as [micro]city” (2011). “Vector – critical research in context” (pilot edition co-edited with Livia Pancu) (2010). In 2021 he is co-editing with Mick Wilson the reader “Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination”, a partnership between Vector (Iași) and PARSE (Gothenburg). He is also the curator of Vector – studio for art practices and debates (since 2007), which is a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He held curatorial talks to a series of art schools and institutions in Northern, Southern, Western and Eastern Europe. His explorational interests are elaborated around critical artistic research, curatorial critical practices, art as experimental journalism, contemporary art (political) theories, xeno-spaces, xeno-practices, trans(ex)positions, post-capitalism […]
Raluca Voinea is curator and art critic, based in Bucharest. Since 2012 she is co-director of tranzit.ro Association. From 2012 to 2019 she managed tranzit.ro space in Bucharest, which included an art gallery, a communitarian permaculture garden and an Orangery (a space for hosting fragile plants and ideas), all developed organically and in response to both the local context and to more international frameworks. In 2021 the ideas and approach that configured this space are continued in a new project, The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, a collective project realised by tranzit.ro together with a group of artists, curators, theorists, economists and other cultural workers in the village of Silistea Snagovului, 30 km north of Bucharest. Recent curatorial projects: Upon Us All Equally (National Dance Centre Bucharest, an event curated by tranzit.org network), Artistic Enquiries into Plants (tranzit.ro/Bucharest, group exhibition co-curated with Iuliana Dumitru, 2019), After the Canal There Was Only „Our” World, Mestna Galerija Ljubljana (2019) – research exhibition on the Suez Canal from the perspective of Eastern Europe and of the present implications (co-curated with Ovidiu Țichindeleanu/ as the Resurrection Committee); Collection Collective – Tools for Self-Representation (Bucharest, 2018) and Collection Collective – Template for a Future Model of Representation (Bratislava, 2017), an ongoing collective project co-initiated by Raluca Voinea together with Judit Angel and Vlad Morariu; Alexandra Pirici: Aggregate (n.b.k., Berlin, 2017). Since 2008 she is co-editor of IDEA arts + society magazine and since 2012 the coordinator of the (Expozitii) collection published by IDEA Publishing House.
Corina Oprea is the managing editor of L’Internationale Online since January 2019. She is the former artistic director of Konsthall C, where she curated a programme on decolonisation in the north. She holds a PhD from Loughborough University, UK, with the thesis ‘The End of the Curator: On Curatorial Acts as Collective Production of Knowledge’.
Rena Raedle & Vladan Jeremic are Belgrade-based artists whose research-oriented work comprises installations and artistic interventions in public space. In their collaborative practice, Rena & Vladan explore the relation between art and politics, unveiling the contradictions of today’s societies. They use techniques that are easy to reproduce and distribute such as drawing and prints, and simple materials such as textile, cardboard and wood, and they insist on their artistic production’s use value and social and ecological awareness. They develop the transformative potentials of art in the context of social struggles and in collaboration with social movements. They have recently exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, New York; Creative Time Summit, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje; Galleria del Progetto, Milano; Intercultural museum, Oslo; 56th October Salon, Belgrade; EKKM, Tallinn; Autostrada Biennale, Prizren; Politics of Dissonance in the framework of Manifesta 12, Palermo; < rotor >, Graz; Borey Art Center, St. Petersburg and the Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade. The official website of the artists: http://raedle-jeremic.net/
Vladimir Us (1980), artist and curator based in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, founding member of Oberliht Young Artists Association. He studied art, curating, cultural management and cultural policy in Chisinau, Grenoble and Belgrade. Beginning in 2000, under the umbrella of Oberliht Association, he initiated and is coordinating several cultural platforms in collaboration with artists, architects, curators, activists, researchers and cultural workers from across the region, among which [oberlist] mailing list (information gateway for arts and culture from Moldova), Postbox Magazine – literature, art & attitude, KIOSK AIR – international artist-in-residence program, Zpace – independent arts & culture scene from Moldova, Bunker – an educational platform hosted by the Art Academy in Chisinau. Through his art and curatorial work he aims to increase the access to culture for different communities, stressing the need for spatial justice and inclusive urban environment in post-soviet cities. By inviting artists to repurpose various areas in the city, a network of alternative culture public spaces in Chisinau is being conceptualized. His cultural activism work is focused on development of the public spaces as part of democratic infrastructure of the city, but also on development of the higher art education curricula through introduction of the new artistic practices and theoretical modules, as well as on building a resilient independent culture scene in Moldova and in the region. For a few years he has been passionate about bicycling culture and long-distance travel, and he is actively supporting the growth of the bicycle movement as an environmentally friendly alternative to the motorized means of transportation in urban areas.
Vasyl Cherepanyn (born 1980) is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, Kyiv). He holds a PhD in philosophy (aesthetics) and has been lecturing at University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), University of Helsinki, Free University of Berlin, Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, University of Vienna, Institute for Advanced Studies of the Political Critique in Warsaw, Greifswald University. He was also a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He recently co-edited Guidebook of The Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018) and ’68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019) and curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam) and Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague) projects. VCRC is an organizer of the Kyiv Biennial (The School of Kyiv, 2015, The Kyiv International, 2017, Black Cloud, 2019) and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. VCRC received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture in 2015, and the Igor Zabel Award Grant for Culture and Theory 2018.
Mick Wilson is an artist, educator and researcher based in Gothenburg and Dublin, and is currently Professor of Art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He was previously a Fellow at BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands (2018/2019); Head of Valand Academy (2012-2018); Editor-in-chief PARSE Journal for Artistic Research (2015-2017); and founder Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Ireland–GradCAM– (2008–2012). Co-edited volumes include: Curating After the Global (MIT Press, 2019) with P. O’Neill, L. Steeds and S. Sheikh; Public Enquiries: PARK LEK and the Scandinavian Social Turn (BDP, 2018) with G. Zachia et al; How Institutions Think (MIT Press, 2017) and The Curatorial Conundrum (MIT Press, 2016) both with P. O’Neill and L. Steeds; Curating Research, Open Editions/De Appel (2014); Curating and the Educational Turn, Open Editions/De Appel (2010) both with P. O’Neill; and SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education, ELIA (2013) with S. van Ruiten. Current research interests include questions of: political community with the dead; the political imaginaries of foodways; political imaginaries within curatorial practice and exhibitionary forms; and rhetorical form / method discourse in processes of knowledge conflict. Recent essays include: “White Mythologies and Epistemic Refusals: Teaching Artistic Research Through Institutional Conflict”, in R. Mateus-Berr & R. Jochum (eds.) Teaching Artistic Research, De Gruyter, 2020; “Living the Coming Death”, in M. Hlavajova and W. Maas (eds.) BASICS #1: Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tentative and Urgent, MIT Press, 2019; and “What Is to Be Done? Negations in the Political Imaginary of the Interregnum”, S. H. Madoff (ed.) What about Activism? Sternberg Press, 2019.
Šárka Zahálková is a Czech artist, curator, cultural manager and activist based in Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her work focuses on public space as a social matter of a specific public discourse. She is interested in a role for artists as active mediators of positive change. She works collectively, and her long term approach is a non–hierarchical work based on cooperation across disciplines. She is a co-founder and a member of the Offcity Collective, an independent platform comprising a team of visual artists, architects and theorists who explore different views of the city. Offcity Collective organize lectures, workshops, art events in public space, and initiate public dialogue. Since 2019, she also has curated a municipal contemporary art gallery in her home town where tabling issues of relevance in today’s society, both locally and globally. In her solo artistoc practice she mostly deals with such topics as memory, public space, architecture and perception. He practice includes a wide range of processes such as drawing, time–based media, installations, sound art and community oriented participative projects. The ropactice is mostly based on work in–situ. Zahalkova is also a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Czech Republic (visual arts): www.160cm.me
Krisztián Gábor Török looking at socially engaged art, with a strong focus on educational practices in the Central Eastern European region. His curatorial practice questions the hegemony of exhibition-making using alternative formats to present artistic process such as peer-learning groups, discursive platforms and workshops. His practice is positioned at the intersection of alternative pedagogies, institutional critique and socially engaged art. He is currently studying at “Commissioning and Curating Public Art” at HDK-Valand (2021) and he will be a member of Curatorlab at Konstfack (2021-2022).
Viviana Checchia is a curator, critic and lecturer active internationally. She has worked on curatorial and artistic programmes around contemporary art for the last eighteen years. Her work has always foregrounded the public practice of art, the use of public and private space, the legacies of institutional critique, and of socially-engaged art practice. With Anna Santomauro, Checchia received the 2013 ICI/DEDALUS Research Award for research carried out in the United States into the legacy of Mary Jane Jacob project Culture in Action, and in 2016 she was awarded the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory Laureate’s Choice for her contributions to the comprehension of and international interest in Eastern European art. She completed a PhD from Loughborough University (2016) on curatorial practice contextualised by European Regional Development Funding in the Euro-Med region between 2005-2015
exhibition.school 