SHAKING THE ARCHIVE

Angelika Stepken is a curator, writer and researcher, living between Florence and Berlin. Between 2006 and 2022 she was director of the artist house Villa Romana in Florence and from 1998 to 2006 director of the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe. Since 1988 Stepken has curated more than 150 exhibitions and international collaborations and authored numerous catalog texts for international artists. She is co-curator of the international IfA traveling exhibition "Future Perfect". Recent book publications include Lara Vinca-Masini, Scritti scelti 1961-2019, Arte Architettura Design Arti applicate, ed. by Angelika Stepken and Alessandra Acocella; Florence 2020; Ketty La Rocca, You - works and writings 1964-1976. ed. by Angelika Stepken, Berlin 2017; Unmapping the Renaissance, ed. by Angelika Stepken, Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Mariechen Danz, Vienna 2016; On One Side of The Same Water, Artistic Practices between Tirana and Tanger, Jahresring 59, Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V., Stuttgart 2012.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Private Ear, listening to, with and on behalf of people affected by corporate, state, and environmental violence. Abu Hamdan's work has been presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures and live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions all over the world. He received his PhD in 2017 and has held fellowships and professorships at the University of Chicago, the New School, New York and most recently at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz where he developed his research AirPressure.info.

Abu Hamdan's audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and been a key part of advocacy campaigns for organisations such as Amnesty International, Defence for Children International and Forensic Architecture. His projects that reflect on the political and cultural context of sound and listening have been presented at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, the 58th Venice Biennale, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the 13th and 14th Sharjah Biennial, Witte De With, Rotterdam, Tate Modern Tanks, Chisenhale Gallery, Hammer Museum L.A and the Portikus Frankfurt. His works are part of collections at Reina Sofia, MoMA, Guggenheim, Hamburger Bahnhof, Van AbbeMuseum, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern. Abu Hamdan has been awarded the 2020 Toronto Biennial Audience Award, the 2019 Edvard Munch Art Award, the 2016 Nam June Paik Award for new media and in 2017 his film Rubber Coated Steel won the Tiger short film award at the Rotterdam International Film festival. For the 2019 Turner Prize Abu Hamdan, together with nominated artists Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, formed a temporary collective in order to be jointly granted the award.

Martina Muzi is a designer, curator, and educator based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her work engages critically with design through its complex material logistics, its geopolitical cultures, and its effects on social formations from the family to the market, from the atelier to the school. She is the curator of the GEO—DESIGN exhibition platform at Design Academy Eindhoven where she is also the leader of Technogeographies Studio in the bachelor program. Martina is currently working as curator at Faber in Timisoara, on a long term project that aims at understanding the unique reality of the digital sphere in Romania and eastern europe more broadly. She has also made documentary and speculative films for the Venice Architecture Biennale and Vitra Design Museum and for M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong as a member of Space Caviar from 2014 to 2018. One of her latest exhibitions in 2021 is co-curated with Aric Chen at MAAT museum Lisbon and titled X is Not a Small Country — Unraveling the Post-Global Era.

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys historical precursors of the metaverse and reveals the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome and presented at the New Museum in its online form, and its print form is a recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), among many others, and has been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.

Mohanad Yaqubi is co-founder of Subversive Film, a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light on historic works related to Palestine and the surrounding region, to engender support for film preservation and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Ramallah and Brussels.

Moritz Nebenführ works as an art historian, curator and dramaturge. In addition to studying art theory and philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and The New School, New York, he realized exhibition projects e.g. at the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Badischer Kunstverein and Artists Space, New York. Together with Gloria Hasnay he founded the project space Linden in Düsseldorf and worked closely with the artist Anne Imhof from 2016-2021. At the Munich Kammerspiele he developed the plays "COLD LOVE (seelenstahlbaden)" and "KLITTERN (aesopica)" with the director and author Lennart Boyd Schürmann.

Özge Çelikaslan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media Studies program at Braunschweig University of Arts. Her research focuses on collaborative, activist archival networks, and digital commoning practices. She was the former artistic director of KozaVisual (Istanbul, Ankara 2007-2014) a platform for collective video research methodologies, visual ethnography of local and urban transformation, political conflicts in border zones, and autonomous trans-media. In the past, she was the co-founder and a member of art/activist/archive collectives: Artıkişler, Videoccupy, and vidyokolektif. She participated in Video Vortex #10, 2014; Istanbul Biennial, 2015; Transmediale 2016, The Whole Life Academy (HKW Berlin, 2019-2022) among a wide range of art and academic projects, exhibitions, panels, and festivals as a scholar, artist, and curator. Co-edited the books; 'Surplus of Istanbul’ (2014, free pub.) and ‘Autonomous Archiving’ (2016 epub, 2020 book, dpr-barcelona) and has contributed to publications on film, video, activism, and archiving. She is co-founder of the digital media archive of social movements https://bak.ma

Sara Callahan is an art historian, based at Stockholm University. Her book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published in January 2022 by Manchester University Press in their series “Rethinking art’s histories”. Callahan currently works on a project that investigates how photographic motion studies from the late-19th and early 20th century have been used in different contexts over time, and to what effect.

Sidar Bayram is a scholar and researcher based in Istanbul. Sidar Bayram completed his doctorate in Koç University Sociology Department in 2022, focusing on video recordings and practices in the 1990s. He conducts research in areas such as media archeology, visual culture, archival practices, forensic sciences, human rights aesthetics and sound studies. After having received a double major in Political Sciences and Sociology, he completed his MA in Sociology working on the media infrastructure and political effect in the distribution of Özgür Gündem newspaper. He collaborated as a researcher with institutions such as Hafıza Merkezi, Dissensus, Demos etc. He translated The Least of Possible Evils by Eyal Weizman and Mengele’s Skull by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman into Turkish and edited a book with Duygu Doğan entitled Recording the Conflict: Archives, Human Rights and Social Struggles.

Tanja Marković (1970) is a psychologist, artist and political activist from Belgrade, Serbia. She is a member of the feminist anti-fascist collective Women in Black. She places her work in the intersection of art, activism and research with an emphasis on politics. In the field of visual arts, she was engaged in performance and installation. She exhibited in Belgrade, Timișoara, San Diego and Vienna. She moderated a series of panels mostly on engaged art. She is a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia. She is one of the founders of the Center for Queer Studies. She was the vice-president of the Union of Anti-Fascists of Serbia. She is a member of Rainbow of Desire collective, based in Croatia, which experiments with Augusto Boal’s techniques that help us`see' for the first time the oppressions we have internalised.