PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Agape Harmani
Being a London-based queer bicultural woman, born to a Greek-Ethiopian family in Athens, Harmani perceives identity not as something absolute, static or concrete. Identity has an in-flux, dynamic nature and is the constantly updated outcome of influences and experiences; the result of one’s being and intra-acting with their one environment. Christos Anesti is a state of spiritual awakening, the conclusion of a period of challenges and isolation. The performance explores this awakening as a personal, internal process in which one’s self becomes the Messiah. This awakening unchains identity from its shackles, fears and anxieties, allowing it to expand outwards rather than inwards, to embrace endless possibilities of exploration rather than to exclude, to resurrect rather than to die.
Andrii Dostliev
Andrii Dostliev (b. 1984) is an artist, curator and photography researcher from Ukraine, currently based in Poland. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, identity – both personal and collective – and the various aspects of queerness. He works in a variety of media and has exhibited in Ukraine, Poland, Austria, France and Italy, among others. He has also published several books with his photographic series.
Andy James
Andy James is a British sculptor and installation artist based in Porto. His work seeks to indulge an audience through immersion and alluring flashiness. The effects of visual stimuli through daily media exposure are appropriated to forge aesthetics which serve a well known, yet impalpable pleasure. Subtle nuances evoke desired outcomes. The layout of a shrine in a place of worship, the way the light falls in a supermarket, how a sunset is translated into a glossy print, the quit smoking helpline number on a packet of cigarettes, word structures on protest signs, rituals of attending parties. Moving forward, his work begins to question how can fantasy and theatricality can begin negotiate our new realities. This begins by focusing on a collision of identity; we have seen the disparity between communities become sharper than ever, meanwhile, as individuals, we have been served an opportunity to reflect upon ourselves and the society within which we operate.
Benedito Ferreira
Ferreira was born in Itapuranga, Brazil, in 1989, and lives and works between Goiânia and Rio de Janeiro. A visual artist and researcher, Ferreira works with filmmaking, installation and photography, without no hierarchies between media. His artistic investigations are centered on image as writing, on the poetics of the archive, their montage and the erasure of limits between “document” and “fiction”. Ferreira studied filmmaking at the State University of Goiás, has an MA in Art and Visual Culture from the Federal University of Goiá, and is a PhD student in Arts at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. In recent years, he has collaborated with institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Goiás (MAC GO), the Circle of Plastic Arts of Coimbra (Portugal), BEAM Collective (Israel), The Room Projects (France) and Art Space BLECH for Contemporary Art (Germany). His work is part of the collection of the Contemporary Art Museum of Jataí (Brazil), the Pinacoteca Municipal Miguel Dutra São Paulo (Brazil) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Ferreira received the Rumos Itaú Cultural Award in 2020.
Bożna Wydrowska
Born in 1994, Bożna lives and works in Warsaw. She studied Intermedia at the Faculty of Media Art in Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is a visual artist, dancer, choreographer and performer, and her practice is based on experimental and alternative choreographic practices of movement and voice. In her process driven work, she investigates the idea of identity as the subject of a complex shaping process. Her aim is is to reconstruct the habits of feeling by practicing the ability to develop greater layers of empathy. Through her work she draws attention to the socially shaped body, which she believes has a huge impact on the social sphere. Her choreographic practice focuses on simple gestures, posing combined with dance movement and a game of eyesight and emotions. The artist is also responsible for spreading ballroom culture and Vogue dance in Poland. She is also the creator of The Ball at Bożna’s – an event combining local club culture and Polish ballroom, which is the first ball associating LGBTQ+ community from Poland and abroad.
Brenda I. Steinecke Soto & Kirstin Burckhardt
Brenda I. Steinecke Soto (Colombia/Germany) is a scenic artist, lecturer and film producer. She has a MA in Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, Germany and is a contemporary dancer and Argentinian Tango teacher. She is the founder and director of La FEA , a non-profit organization that generates artistic-social projects in Medellín. Brenda works around an expanded concept of choreography and has a special interest in the relationship between the body and the gaze, seeking to juxtapose different formats that question and reinterpret the relationship between the performer and the public. After living, learning and working for 18 years in Europe, Brenda returned in 2013 to her hometown, Medellín, where she has been promoting artistic and social processes that aim to give prominence to the body within the dynamics and discourses of the city. Since 2017 she has been collaborating with visual artist Kirstin Burckhardt and is the co-founder of the artistic collective Zonasuspendida in Medellín.
Kirstin Burckhardt (Germany/USA) is a visual artist combining video and performance with sound and spoken word. Critically drawing upon her training in psychology and neuroscience, her practice addresses power dynamics intertwined with the body. Continuously questioning what defines a body, her artistic research focuses on interpersonal space as a locus of sensitivity that surpasses the body-mind duality in favour of empathy, transgenerational trauma, and the power of imagination.
Christopher Matthews
Christopher Matthews’ works have been shown at Art Night, Enclave Gallery, Arbyte Gallery, ]performance space[, LimaZulu, 4BID Gallery, Loop Video Art Festival, Mount Florida Gallery, MCLA Gallery 51, Prism Contemporary, Villa Empain Foundation Boghossian, Victoria and Albert Museum, and he has choreographed multiple music videos. In the June of 2021, he will curate a dance exhibition for Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. The show will premiere new works by Christopher Matthews alongside 10 other international dance and performance makers.His video work ‘Untitled Video Portraits’ won 1st Prize + Cinema Prize at International Choreographic Captures Competition 2017, with presentations in cinema networks in Switzerland, Germany and France and continue to play in festivals/exhibitions/screenings in NYC, Scotland, Salzburg, Paris, Reykjavik and throughout U.K. in 2019, Christopher was South East Dance/ Brighton Digital Festival artist. He has danced in works by Trajal Harrell, Jeremy Shaw, Tino Sehgal, Janine Harrington, Laura Peterson, Bojana Cvjevic/ Christine de Smedt, Simone Forti, Peaches/ Keith Hennessy, Yvonne Rainer, Marten Spangberg, Xavier Le Roy, Paula Roselen, Connecticut Ballet, Ballet Moskva and toured with exhibitions at Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, Haus Der Kunst, K21, as well as performed in various reality television shows.
Christos Tsiampakaris
Christos Tsiampakaris (b. 1998) grew up in Serres, Greece. His artistic practice entails the multilayered personal experience of growing up as queer kid in rural Greece, experiencing gender disphoria, shame, dissapointment as the financial crisis of 2008 was rising, 00’s tv nostalgia and his relationship with mother figures. His main media are a number of personas that he brings in life through the use of drag, video, photography, photoshop drawings, music and poetry. He entered Athens School of Fine Arts in 2017 and has performed in ‘Noli mi tangere’ of Nikos Navridis, in collaboration with NEON foundation and the National Opera, and has worked in ‘Dakota’s Birthday Larp project’ at Ultra Plain Space in Athens as part of the creative team and as a performer. He is performing in ‘Kivotos (ARK) Channel’ for ARK-ATHENS as part of the European programme MOVING BORDERS, as one of his personas, named Gilletta, and is a scriptwriter, costume designer and character designer. The project will be broadcast on Onassis Stegi YouTube channel in Summer 2021.
Darina Alster
Darina Alster is a visual artist, performer, publisher and pedagog who lives and works in Prague. From Autumn 2016 she is organising the Prague section of Mothers Artlovers collective. From 2019, together with Kateřina Olivová, they ran the New Media 2 studio in Academy of Fine Arts Prague. Darina Alster is an artist who sees herself as an author who clearly works with statements about the borders and limits of today’s world. Her artistic practice revolves around the disruption of the conventionally perceived boundaries and taboos which are crucial to the society. She is focused on the immediate social facts but also the immutable givens of the human soul, archetypes and mystery.
Dorothy Cheung
Dorothy Cheung (b.1987) is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through a double perspective – personal and political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works are internationally exhibited in Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), EYE Filmmuseum and Korzo Theater, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa.
Duke Aslani
Duke Aslani (b.1997, in Zug, Switzerland) makes installations, photos, media art and films. By emphasising aesthetics, his installations reference queer theory, the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the pseudo-“inclusive” capitalist system. By using blue and pink in his art, he creates a situation in which the viewer is confronted with the oppressive heteronormative society and has to reconsider their social position there. His works also demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limit and often tells stories and experiences about growing up as a queer child of Kosovar migrants in Switzerland. Duke Aslani currently lives and works in Zurich.
Ehab Aziz
Aziz’s works are reflections of his moods and feelings over long periods of time. They can be described as gloomy, optimistic, depressive, cheerful, painful, hovering upon success and failure, life and death. No matter what the topic is discussed or reflected, they all contain the same strangely homogeneous mixture of humor, sarcasm and wisdom. As an artist he is particularly fascinated by the dichotomies of popular culture, which he has explored through video and painting for over 30 years. His life in Egypt and Germany during a period of continuous political and cultural change and the transformation of what it means to be from ‘the East’, are themes that run through much of his art.
Emie // Eva-Marie Elg
Emie // Eva-Marie Elg is an artist whose work is inspired by posthumanism, and who mainly works with video and performance art. Emie is currently developing A Sexual Series which deconstructs ideas of sexual attraction and performativity.
Eremus
Eremus is a queer multimedia artist, a DJ and an architect, based in Athens, Greece. He recently completed his post-graduate studies on Digital Arts at Athens School of Fine Arts. Using primarily the media of video, 3D animation and sound, his work explores the potential dangers and/or possibilities of informational technologies, surveillance strategies and digital networks, as well as the relation between queer identity and digitally augmented realities. His videos, installations and performances have been exhibited in various exhibitions, festivals and events, including Athens Digital Arts Festival, Peloponnesus International Documentary Festival, KFFK (Short Film Festival Cologne), Aphrodite* Festival (Tainiothiki Online), Athens Biennale and Performance Rooms2020 (Kappatos Gallery). His current practice revolves around an investigation of digital loneliness during the global pandemic.
Fenia Kotsopoulou
Kotsopolou is a Greek cross-disciplinary, award-winning artist, currently based in Lincoln (UK), who navigates and explores the fields of dance, performance (art), video, photography, documentation, and their intersection. She holds an MFA in Choreographing Live Art from the University of Lincoln (UK), a BA Honours in Dance from the National Dance Academy of Rome (Italy), and a BA in Italian Language and Literature from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Based on a rhizomatic approach of making art, pivotal topics of her hybrid, cross-disciplinary practice include: the Body as gathering place of e-motions and site of transformation, personal and collective memory, (de)construction of fe/male identity, performativity of documentation, hair, hairiness and furriness as political expressive tools of deviance. In the past few years, as (dance) performer, producer and visual practitioner, her solo works, and the work with her close-collaborator digital artist, Daz Disley, have been shown at a wide array of festivals and art platforms, encompassing the fields of dance, experimental performance, live-art and video-art, receiving several prizes and awards. Alongside her practice, she teaches at the Master of Performance Practices in the University of ArtEZ (Netherlands), and since 2016 she is artist-in-residence at x-church in Gainsborough (UK).
Hannes Egger
Hannes Egger (b.1981 in Bolzano, Italy), studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the La Sapienza in Rome. His works have been shown in solo exhibitions at House of Arts, Usti nad Labem (CZ); Periscope (with David Meran), Salzburg (A); Centro d’Arte, Cavalese (I); Mewo Kunsthalle, Memmingen (D); Galerie M, Berlin (D); Empthy Cube, Lisbon (PT); Cubo Garutti / Museion, Bozen (I); Festung Franzensfeste, Franzensfeste (I); Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck (A); Export Kubus, Wien (A); Stellwerk, Kassel (D). He participated in group exhibitions at Museion. Bolzano (I); ZKM, Karlsruhe (D); 14th Curitiba International Biennial, Curitiba (BR); The MAC, Dallas (US); MART – Galleria Civica di Trento, Trento, (I); Galleria Premio Suzzara, Suzzara (I); Magazin4, Bregenz (A); Mewo Kunsthalle, Memmingen (D); Museion, Bolzano (I); Fondazione Barriera, Torino (I); Museo D’Emporda, Figueres, (ES); Kunsthalle Krems, Krems (A); Dox, Praga (CZ); Quartair, Den Haag (NL); Forte di Fortezza, Fortezza (I); Art Center, Krasnojarsk (RU); 54. Biennale di Venezia, Venezia (I); EXPORT Kubus, Wien (A).
Henrique Zahir Montagne
Henrique Montagne is a multimedia visual artist and independent curator from Belem, Pará, Brazil (Amazonic Region of Brazil). He studied Visual Arts at the UFPA (Federal University of Pará). His multicultural background combines the Indigineous South American origins with the Italian, Arab ancestry. His artistic and research practice revolves around the affective body and the sexual relationships in the contemporary world. His investigation focuses on the relationship with oneself and with the others, the games of power and the reflection on masculinity from a queer perspective. He has worked with various artistic media such as video, drawing, new media, site specific, installation and performance art. He has participated in several interventions, collective exhibitions and art shows in Pará and the Amazon such as the “IX Biennial Forum for Research in Art” (2019) in the Church of Santo Alexandre (Belém, PA), “Sem Título” (2018) at the Casa.
Jan Matýsek
Jan Matýsek (b.1994) is a visual artist and scenographer. His artistic practice is based in the ideas of transhumanism and hydrofeminism combining those with techniques from psychotherapeutic hypnosis. He works mostly in moving images with an emphasis on imaginary qualities of unconsciousness – almost like an experience of initiation. The everyday is translated into associations, tales and stories dictated by its own inner logic. He graduated from scenography, completed as intership at UdK in Berlin and currently studies at the feminist Studio of New Media II at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He is also a curator in Umakart gallery in Brno.
Jinxiao Zhou
Jinxiao Zhou (b. 1990, Sichuan, China) studied painting at the Fine Arts of the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy, Sichuan, China (2007-10) and obtained a BA in Movie and Animation from the same university (2010—2014). In 2014-18, he worked in children’s art education in China. Since 2018, Zhou’s practice focuses on lecture-performance, which he sees as a continuation of his work in the field of art education. Zhou has participated in numerous exhibitions, art education conferences and art programs, most recently in the National Art Education Convention, Boston, USA (2019); the National Art Education Convention (NAEA), Seattle, USA (2018); 35th World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art, Daegu, South Korea (2017); and the National Art Education Convention, New York, USA (2017). In 2018-19, Zhou initiated and led an exchange programme with Chinese and American art educators, affiliated with NAEC, which took place in Seattle and Boston. In 2019, he led a visual art education workshop for children and teenagers between 3-16 years old, entitled Unlearning Institutional Issue at Yiqizhangda, an institution offering visual art education to children and teenagers in Nanjing, China.
Κesha Lagniappe
Kesha Lagniappe (they/them) was born in Helena, Arkansas in the Mississippi River Delta. Due to being raised in this region also known as the ‘Bible Belt,’ their work focuses on queer, gendered and classed subjectivity, memory and relationships through and with unseen sensibilities such as soundscapes and alternative materialities such as fiber and found objects. To conceptualize their ideas, they explore alternative methods to convey a narrative or a point that extends beyond the modern- mediated categories of logic, reason, sight, visuality or tangibility – all held superior in binary renderings. Recently, their work has utilised performance and their own body to convey and conceptualise the ephemeral, ideas of time, distance, rejection, expulsion, community, connectedness and longing. They have a BFA from the University of Arkansas, with an emphasis on Graphic Design and Painting and an MA from the American University in Cairo in Gender and Women’s Studies. Lagniappe currently lives in Cairo.
Marcin Kosakowski
Marcin Kosakowski was born in 1992 in Wysokie Mazowieckie in Poland. He graduated from the Faculty of Textile and Fashion at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, and has experience in working with theater performances as a video maker and costume designer. In his works he unpacks themes of identity, and typically uses the medium of digital art, through which he includes special interactive and VR and 3D animation elements.
Martin Kámen
Martin Kámen (*1982) lives and works in Spain. He graduated from The Academy of Fine Art, Prague in 2008, with a degree in New Media Art. His involvement with photography began in 1999. Between 2007-11 he was a Director and Scriptwriter for QUEER, a tv programme in the Czech Republic. In 2008, he co-founded The Chemistry Gallery in Prague. He is one of the Founders and a former President of the HIV/AIDS charity Art for Life (2007-15).
Mitchell Moreno
Mitchell Moreno is a genderqueer, working-class artist from Leicester, UK. After studying at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music they worked for a decade in theatre, opera, and circus – as a performer and director – before shifting their creative practice to photography. Their work explores the construction of gender, the queer gaze, and art as therapy. It has been exhibited at FORMAT21, Singapore International Photography Festival, Copenhagen Photo Festival, Encontros da Imagem, and the National Portrait Gallery.
Natasha Nedelkova
Natasha Nedelkova (b.1993) is a visual artist and researcher based between Skopje and Paris. She is currently a PhD candidate in a practice-led research programme in Film Studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, under the mentorship of Professor Christa Blumlinger. Her work is often collaborative, audiovisual, available online and easy to follow. It is also repetitive and melodic, where sound and voice question the repositioning of figure and discourse in diverse audiovisual contexts.
Nerea Gil (“La Sedienta”)
Gil is a graphic designer, dancer and recent graduate of Animation and 3D media. She was born in Tossa de Mar (Girona, Spain) and when she turned 18 she moved to Barcelona, where she started studying graphic design and training in different dance styles. After years of training in design and dance, she decided to go into 3D animation to use it as a link between these two worlds, with what she studied a postgraduate course in motion design and 3D at IDEP Barcelona. In January 2020, La Sedienta was born: a strident, curious and constantly evolving personal brand under which my different audiovisual works will be grouped. Through each work she seeks to reflect a unique story with a social or emotional message, seeking to connect with viewers, transporting them to a magical place in their own inner world and experiences. Identity, psychology, dreams, surreal dream worlds and humor are some of the great pillars of her inspiration.
NO_PIC_NO_CHAΤ
No Pic No Chat is a visual artist who creates movies, photography and objects. He has graduated from the cinematography department at Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Film School, the University of Silesia in Katowice (2009). Since 2018, he has been exploring the representation of masculinity and intimacy in photography. His work is strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and the work of Carl Gustaw Jung (The Red Book). In his objects and video artworks, he refers to the collective archetypes and subconscious symbols. Winner of the Krakow Art Salon (collaborative work with Keymo) in 2019. His works were presented i.a. in Improper Walls (Vienna), bushes (Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin), F.A.I.T. (Krakow), PF Gallery (Poznań), Galeria Labirynt (Lublin), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow), New Orleans Photo Alliance (USA), London Photographic Association (UK), Porn Film Festival Vienna (Austria). Author of „Women Fragile as Bombs” book (Imperium Ducha, 2020) Scholar of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2013). He lives and works in Krakow, Poland.
rick h m
rick h m (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary artist/writer and performance theorist from the occupied lands of Kanaka `Ōiwi (Honolulu, HI). Currently based in Cheyenne/Ute/Arapaho Territories (Boulder, CO), they are an MFA (Choreography) candidate at University of Colorado Boulder, and a Graduate Instructor/Administrative Assistant in the Theatre & Dance Department. Their work spans through dance, media arts, writing, music, and pedagogy – often bricolaging them into performance. rick is invested in the potentials for decolonization, queering, and world reimagining made possible through the container of performing/visual arts. rick has worked with and studied beneath noted dance makers/scholars including Michelle Ellsworth, Rennie Harris, Darrell Jones, Katja Kolcio, Bebe Miller, Eiko Otake, Nicole Stanton, and Helanius Wilkins. Through written and embodied forms of creative research, rick calls for a dismantling of the systems that enforce control over our abilities to liberate our social bodies.
Soraya Sabrina Abdellaoui
Soraya Sabrina is a researcher, bodyworker+ and poet. In an articulation of being, of making and conjugating her pluralities at the same time, she Loves. Her works are the generous fruits of exchange, inheritance and sharings. In continual pursuit of this ode to the multiple, she develops paths, time, and body to relax minds, everybodies and hearts – always in a perspective of social justice.
TZUSOO
TZUSOO (b.1992 in Seoul, lives and works in Berlin) is well know for her extraordinary virtual images and videos. She has two BAs, one in Fine Art and Art Theory at the Art College of Hong-ik University in Seoul and one with Christian Jankowski at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design since 2017. In her work the artist experiments with shifting borders by virtually merging the reality and non-reality of objects. The main themes of her work are a deeper scrutiny of social minorities, the conditions of work in the digital age, sexuality and gender. According to TZUSOO, her works always combine a core sociopolitical interest with her own (lived) experience. TZUSOO has had solo exhibitions in The City Museum Sindelfingen (2020), Oberwelt e.V. (2020), Germany, and in group shows at Suprainfinit Gallery, and Electro Putere Gallery Romania (2021), at the Gallery Damdam in the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Berlin (2019), at the 4th Youth Biennale in Bolzano, Italy (2018), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2018), and at Museum Folkwang in Essen (2017). The artist has been holding a scholarship from Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung since 2020 and held a scholarship from the Korea Student AID Foundation from 2011 to 2017, was artist in residence at V2_Lab X Art Centre Nabi in Rotterdam, and received the DAAD Prize in 2019.
Vangelis Trichias
Vangelis Trichias (b.1996 in Athens, Greece) works with film and digital elements. His work heavily uses symbols from club and queer culture, Greek culture, politics and the contemporary internet to explore themes of power and manipulation. He is a member of Design Yourself Collective, a collective commissioned by Barbican Centre in London which is working with digital art on human identity when technology is changing everything.
Virginie Follope
Virginie Foloppe is a video artist and a teacher. She teaches representations of rape in cinema at the New Sorbonne.