southasastateofmind

The Alphabet Collection is an artist collective made up of Mohammad Salemy and Patrick Schabus. It functions as a platform for their ongoing historical research and practice in text and art production concerning mythopoesis in the time of rising complexity and artificial intelligence. Salemy is an independent Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MA in critical curatorial studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works internationally and his writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, Brooklyn Rail, Ocula, Arts of the Working Class and Spike. Schabus is an independent artist, filmmaker and curator who holds an MA in visual arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has shown his works internationally and his writings have been published in engagée, Malmoe, and artmagazine.cc. From 2015 until 2018 he was the director and curator of the Mandelkern Project. In 2017 he won the honorary prize of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Andrea Ancira and Sofía Olascoaga are two womenwho were born in and now live in Mexico City. They have read, discussed, shared and participated in initiatives organised by EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) women. They are often in dialogue with other women, both online and face-to-face. Ancira and Olascoaga stand at a crossroads between art and experimental education, both of which become the site of learning and reconfiguration, politico-personal exploration and the quest for being-doing-thinking in which the body and collective processes better align with the ideas that question us and shared life experience.

Pierre Bal-Blanc is based in Paris and Athens. He was curator at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. In 2005, he presented La Monnaie Vivante in Paris, at Tate Modern and as part of the 7th Berlin Biennale, among other venues. He was director of CAC Brétigny from 2003 to 2014. His last exhibition was The Canaletto View in 2017 for the Erste Group Bank in Vienna. His exhibition catalogues are Project Phalanstère (Sternberg Press 2017), Soleil Politique (Museion/Paraguay Press, 2016), Draft Score for an Exhibition (NERO Publisher, 2014), Reversibility (Mousse Publishing, 2012), Ver Sacrum/The Death of the Audience (Secession/Niggli, Vienna, 2010). Collective Exhibition for a Single Body – The Private Score was commissioned by Kontakt Collection and will be performed for Playground Festival in Leuven, Belgium, in November 2019.

Bamako Encounters 12th edition team
Artistic Director:
Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a Yaounde-born, Bamenda-bred and Berlin-based curator and biotechnologist. He is founder and Artistic Director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. He is currently Guest Professor in Curatorial Studies and Sound Art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and has been appointed as the artistic director of Sonsbeek 2020, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands.
Co-curators:
Aziza Harmel is an independent curator based in Tunis, Tunisia. She is co-curator of the research program on curatorial knowledge, Qayyem, which roams between Amman, Tangier and Alexandria, MMAG Foundation (Amman) and l’Appartement 22 (Rabat).
Astrid Sokona Lepoultier is an independent curator based in Paris, France, and Bamako, Mali. She was assistant-curator of the 2017 Rencontres de Bamako and curator of the first and second editions of BICIM Amie des Arts in Mali, in 2018 and 2019.
Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is an artist, curator and writer based in Kumasi, Ghana. She was a co-curator of Silence Between the Lines: Anagrams of Emancipated Futures (2015) and Orderly Disorderly (2017), both organised by blaxTARLINES KUMASI, and curator of Spectacles. Speculations… (2018).

Karen Barad is a professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy and History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. Barad is also affiliated with the programme in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and the director of the graduate training programme for the Science & Justice Research Center. Barad holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, feminist and queer theory.

Sara Lee Burd is a Nashville, Tennessee-based writer, curator, and educator. Academically grounded with a masters in art history from Vanderbilt University, she engages her art expertise by writing about artists, art fairs, biennials, museums and galleries around the world. Shehas taught university courses and moderated and participated in panel discussions. She has written catalogue essays and published articles in Number, The Nashville Scene, Burnaway, Nashville Arts Magazine, Huffington Post and Vanderbilt University’s Afro-Hispanic Review. Previously she worked as executive editor of Nashville Arts Magazine, where she developed deep connections with her local art community.

Zinaida Chekantseva is a Dr Sc in history, and Professor and Chief Research at the Institute of World History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is a graduate of Moscow State University, M.V. Lomonosov. For thirty years, she has taught history and historiography at the universities of Novosibirsk and Moscow. The author of more than 140 scientific papers, her research interests include modern and recent history of the West, the history and culture of France, social history, anthropological history, intellectual history, history of history, historiography, theory of history and historical epistemology.

Binna Choi is a curator. She heads the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht. In 2018, with her team, after a ten year commitment, she re-established the institution. At Casco, she conceived of the transdisciplinary project Grand Domestic Revolution (2010–2012) and the artistic research program Composing the Commons (2013–2016), each of which involved collaborations with artists, other practitioners and organisations. She was a faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute and has worked with Arts Collaboratory. In 2016, she served as the curator forthe 11th Gwangju Biennale The Eighth Climate (WhatDoes Art Do).

Pip Day is currently Artistic Director at SBC Galleryof Contemporary Art in Tiotià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, where she has developed long-term exhibition andresearch projects including Sovereignty; Água Viva (Clarice Lispector); Wood Land School; and Colors: for 14 Women’s Voices (Julius Eastman). She has worked with numerous artists, writers and curators including Anna Boghiguian, Dana Michel, Ursula Johnson, nènè myriam konaté, Sepake Angiama, Maria Hupfield, Sarah Pierce, Pablo Sigg, Ashon Crawley, Cheyanne Turions, Jackie Wang, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Sabeth Buchmann, Pablo Lafuente, Suzanne Kite, Harun Farocki, Atelier Céladon and many others.

Christian Dunker is a psychoanalyst and professor at the Institute of Psychology at University of São Paulo (USP) in the Department of Clinical Psychology. With philosophers Vladimir Safatle and Nelson da Silva Jr., Dunker coordinates the Laboratory of Social Theory, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at USP. He has published essays including “The Neurotic Calculus of Enjoyment” (2002), “Malaise, Suffering and Symptom” (2015) and “Why Lacan?” (2016).

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is a writer, playwright and curator, as well as a professor of Political Philosophy and Human Rights at Birkbeck College Law School and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in the University of London. His writing includes history and current affairs, philosophy and poetry. He is the author of the award-winning What If Latin America Ruled the World?, founder and curator of the annual art/activist gathering Focus on the Funk and curator of the 2017 Global Art Forum where he produced and performed the play Funk!. He speaks and writes for The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC, Novara Media and M24 (Monocle’s radio station), among others. 

Daniel Blanga Gubbay is a Brussels-based researcher and curator. With Dries Douibi and Sophie Alexandre, he currently acts as an artistic director at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. He completed his masters degree with Giorgio Agamben in IUAV, Venice, and his PhD in Cultural Studies in Palermo. In 2014 he initiated Aleppo, a curatorial platform for public programmes in performance and discursive practices. Recent curated programmes include Can Nature Revolt?, at Manifesta, Palermo (2018); Black Market in Brussels (2016) and The School of Exceptions in Santarcangelo (2016). He worked as co-curator for LiveWorks, a residency programme in Centrale Fiesand. Since 2015 he has been head of the Department of Arts and Choreography (ISAC) at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts, in Brussels.

Maria Hassabi is an artist and choreographer based in New York City and Athens. Over the years, she has developed a distinct practice involved with the relation of the live body to the still image, utilizing stillness and the velocity of deceleration as both technique and subject. Her performances and installations are presented worldwide in theatres, museums, galleries, and a public spaces. She won a Bessie Award in 2016, a Herb Alpert Award in 2015, the President’s Award from LMCC in 2012, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, and a FCA Award in 2009. She holds a BFA from Cal Arts and is an Onassis Decade Resident 2019–2029.

Jakob Jakobsen is a visual artist and writer. Self-organisation has driven his practice, and over the years he has built a number of autonomous institutions such as the Free University of Copenhagen, the Hospital Prison University Archive and most recently the Hospital for Self Medication. While living in London in the nineties, he ran both, a project room called Info Center and the journal Infopool. He has shown extensively around the world in venues and exhibitions including the 31st São Paulo Biennial and at dOCUMENTA (13). He lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

Kite a.k.a. Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media and performance practice. Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations.

Sarat Maharaj is Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems, Malmo Art Academy/Lund University and Research Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was a professor of art theory and history from 1980 to 2005. Alongside positions at Humboldt University, Berlin and the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, he was also co-curator on Okwui Enwezor’s team for Documenta XI, 2002, the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in 2008 and the 29th São Paolo Biennial in 2010. He was chief curator of Pandemonium: Art in a Time of Creativity Fever at the Göteborg Biennial in 2011 and curatorial advisor for the Sharjah Biennale in 2012. His publications cover the artists Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard Hamilton: ‘visual art as know-how and no-how’, as well as textiles, globalisation and cultural translation.

Natalia Majluf is an art historian with a focus on Latin America from the era of independence to the early twentieth century. As Head Curator and Director of the Museo de Arte de Lima MALI, between 1995 and 2018 she oversaw the renovation of the historic building, which houses the museum and was responsible for enriching and diversifying the collections’ scope. She is editor of Los incas, reyes del Perú (2005), Luis Montero’s The funerals of Atahualpa (2011), José Gil de Castro, pintor de libertadores (2014) and has co-authored Tipos del Perú (2008), Fernando Bryce. Drawing Modern History (2011), and Chambi (2015), among other publications.

Olu Oguibe is a multimedia artist whose work often straddles minimalist formalism and engagement with global social issues. He received the 2017 Arnold Bode Prize for his work in documenta 14. 

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books, and the Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the author of thirty books, including The Darker Nations:A People’s History of the Third World and Poorer Nations:A Possible History of the Global South.

Marcelo Rezende is a researcher, critic and exhibition maker. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2012–2015), artistic director of the 3rd Bahia Biennial (2014), and part of the curatorial group of the 28th São Paulo Biennial (2008), among other projects and positions. Author of the novel Arno Schmidt (2005), he is associate curator of the Museu do Mato (Scrubland Museum) in Bahia and co-director of the Archiv der Avantgarden (AdA) in Dresden, Germany. He curated the exhibition Kaffee aus Helvecia at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich in 2017, and participated in the Museal Episode program through the Goethe-Institut Kulturstiftung des Bundes from 2015 to 2017.

You Mi is a lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and Aalto University, Helsinki. Her long-term research and curatorial works span the ancient and futuristic, with one focal point being the Silk Road. She has curated programs at Asian Culture Center in South Korea, and the Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival in Mongolia (2016). With Binna Choi she co-steers a research/curatorial project Unmapping Eurasia. Her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on ‘actionable speculations’, articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fi-a-thon Sci-(no)-fiction at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her function as committee chair on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum.

Hema’ny Nancy Molina Vargas was born in Valdivia, Chile, in 1967. She is a member of the Selk’nam Covadonga Ona Indigenous Community and president of The Corporation of Selk’nam People in Chile for the Resurgence and Revival of Cultural Identity, an organisation aiming to strengthen Selk’nam culture and the dissemination of its language, songs and worldview. Her love of nature, the Earth and Indigenous peoples comes from her Selk’nam maternal ancestry and having lived with her Selk’nam grandfather. She leads political actions that aim to claim the Selk’nam people as a living nation, which seeks to be integrated into Indigenous Law by the state of Chile. She has been awarded several national and international literature awards and her work has been published in various publications and blogs.

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean visual artist and poet whose work addresses ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. She has lived in exile since the overthrow of the Allende government in the early 1970s. Vicuña’s ephemeral site-specific performance/installations, set in nature, streets, and museums, combine ritual and assemblage. Her work has been exhibited at documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and in major museums around the world, like Hammer Museum, LA; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; ICA, Boston; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; ICA and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. 

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state; a blackstudies scholar, a prison abolitionist, a poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD student at Harvard University. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), and a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb.