Suspension of Disbelief

Lea Guldditte Hestelund is a visual artist educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 2015, DK, and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, 2012-13, DE. Hestelund often creates physical fictions unfolded in large-scale installations, and interdisciplinary collaborations, where the sculptural body also present itself as literature, scent or music. She is currently working on a large scale public piece for Køge University Hospital, commissioned by The New Carlsberg Foundation, the piece is due to be installed 2025-26. Hestelund has been awarded by Aage and Yelva Nimbs Fond Honorary Grant, and Estate Ferlov Mancoba Honorary Grant, 2020. In 2018 Hestelund received the 3 Years working Grant given by The Danish Arts Foundation. Amongst others Hestelund has had solo shows at Aldea-Center of Contemporary Art, Design, and Technology, NO, Eduardo Secci Gallery, Italy, and Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, DK, and participated in group shows at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen Contemporary, Arken Museum of Modern Art, DK, the National Museum of Stettin, Poland, Fused Space, San Francisco, US, and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, DK.

Ursula Mayer is an artist and researcher based in Vienna. Her artistic practice spans a range of media, including film, video and sculpture. Mayer interweaves myth, biopolitics and the semiotics of cinema to visualize and ruminate upon future post human ontology. She received the Derek Jarman Award in 2014 the Otto Mauer Prize in 2007.  She is the co-founder of  KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS, Vienna. Recent exhibitions include: Spiritual Technology, High Line, New York (2022); When Gesture Becomes Event, Künstlerhaus, Vienna (2021); What Will Survive of Us, Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2020).

Florencia Rodríguez Giles (Buenos Aires, 1978) has developed two complementary lines of work, which are produced both inside and outside artistic spaces. On the one hand, drawing in large formats as a precise technique to represent fictitious scenes and rituals that give rise to beings that escape the human; and on the other, she understands the possibilities of art in contexts of therapeutic care. Recent exhibitions include: Drawing in the Continous Present, (The Drawing Center, New York, 2022), Mutualisme (New York, 2021), Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlín, 2019), Biodélica (Galerie Ruth Benzacar, 2019), Premodern Activities (in collaboration with Pablo Katchadjian, UV Studios, 2017), Séance Liminoïde (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. 2016), Noctario (in collaboration with Barbara Hang, Club Silencio, Paris, France. 2016), Strabisme Interne (Galerie d’Art Contemporain Bendana-Pinel) and Mareaciones (Galerie Ruth Benzacar, 2015).

Agnes Meyer-Brandis is a Berlin based artist with a background in sculpture and new media, She creates works on the fringes of science, fiction and fabulation. Educated first in mineralogy, followed by studies at the art academies in Maastricht, Düsseldorf and Cologne, she has founded the Research Raft, a fictitious Institute for Art & Subjective Science that purposefully ‘is asking questions but gives no answers’ in fields such as climate research, environmental studies, meteorology, as well as synthetic and artistic biology. Meyer-Brandis’ work has been exhibited worldwide and awarded with many prizes, including two Prix Ars Electronica Awards of Distinction & the European Kairos prize.

Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London. She is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. In 2019 Tai was a Max Mara prize nominee. Her work has been shown at Turner Contemporary, UK (2019); Grazer Kunst Verein, Austria (2019); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy (2019); Glasgow International, UK (2018); Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016); Tate, London (2016); Yvonne Lambert Gallery, Berlin (2016) and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016).

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments.

Born in Inner Mongolia in 1977, Song Kun earned her BFA (in 2002) and MFA (in 2006) from the Oil Painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA). She currently lives and works in Beijing. Song’s practice focuses on painting, while incorporating music live, video, installation and other media. She is hailed as one of the most promising female artists in China. The honesty and emotional power in her work align her with “the few artists who have stablished their own unique vocabularies of figurative painting in the contemporary art scene”. In her works, she observes and captures the different figures and fleeting moments in reality and hyper-reality world, She gathers up the fragments of our time, at the same time makes the elements-restructuring. As a result, her works constitute a mythical, private spatiality that reflects the potential changes in Chia.

Language is the anchor of Nora Turato’s multi-faceted practice. Scavenging news head-lines, memes, social media, advertising slogans, Turato takes our daily linguistic banalities and presents them back to us, removed from context and origin. Turato works in a varied manner, across several mediums, spanning text-based installations, prints, books and performances. The spoken-word performances provide the foundation of Turato’s practice, often running at a 30 minute length, and committed to memory. The found and sourced words, phrases and texts serve as the script, with each intonation or change of tempo deliberate and considered. Furthermore, Turato takes isolated text segments from these monologues and applies across the breadth of her work.

Mirela Baciak (*1987) is a curator and researcher in the field of visual arts with roots in

contemporary dance. She approaches curating as a choreographic practice of putting

things in spatial, temporal, and conceptual relations, creating connections of bodies to

objects and space, but also to concepts, ideas, and other bodies; whereas distance is

relative. Baciak currently serves as curator of visual arts and performance at the steirischer

herbst festival in Graz (2019-). Prior, she was assistant curator at Public Art Munich (2018),

and has realized exhibitions and projects at Kunsthalle Wien (2017), Kunstraum

Niederösterreich (2019), Belvedere21 (2022), ARAC Bucharest (2023). Baciak

taught contemporary art and curating at the IZK (Institute for Contemporary Art) in

Graz, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and is currently involved in a research project Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Irene Campolmi is a curator and researcher based in Copenhagen. She has focused her work on performance for many years, through which she researches postcolonial, queer and feminist theories. Currently, she is a curator and researcher at CC Copenhagen Contemporary on the project “Yet, it Moves!” which won the Bikuben Vision Award 2021, Denmark’s most prestigious curatorial award. The project explores new forms of collaboration between scientists, curators and artists, and it is developed in collaboration with Niels Bohr Institute,Copenhagen; CERN, Geneva; Interactive Minds Centre, Aarhus and Mod Lab at UC Davis.  Since 2019, she has been the Head Art Program and Curator of Enter Art Program, a publicly funded satellite program of performances and talks in conjunction with Enter Art Fair.  In 2022, she was the Curator of the International Performance Festival “Walk&Talk” in San Miguel, Azores Islands and the Curator of the Performance Festival Art In A Day with the Creator Projects. She has worked as an independent curator and a researcher for twelve years in art museums and institutions across the world, including the Museum of Art in Joliette, Canada; The Power Plant, Toronto; MAAT, Lisbon; Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen; KØS in Køge; MAH, Terceira; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. She was the co-curator of the Estonian Pavilion Birth V. Hi&Bye by Kris Lemsalu at the 58th Venice Biennial. In the past, her curatorial research and practice have focused on curatorial ethics. Before joining the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen as a PhD Fellow (2013-2016), she worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute research group “Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things”.

Helena Lugo (México, 1989)  is an art historian, researcher and curator based in Mexico City. She received her MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College after obtaining the FONCA-CONACYT scholarship for studying abroad. She has collaborated and curated exhibitions at museums, galleries and independent spaces in London, Mallorca, Venice, Cuernavaca and Mexico City. Formerly, she was Research Coordinator at MMAC Juan Soriano, Cuernavaca, Mexico, Associate Curator at Chalton Gallery, London, and has made internships at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the British Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale. She is co-founder of the collective Palmera Ardiendo and editor of the publication A Return to the Island. She was selected to be part of the 2nd edition of the Shangai Curators Lab and the 6th edition of the Curatorial Program for Research Back to the North!. Currently she collaborates with Salón ACME and has recently been appointed as Executive Director at Terremoto.

Daniela Ruiz Moreno (Argentina, 1991) is a curator based in Madrid. She is interested in collaborating with artists who deal with day-to-day experiences and concerns, generating alternative narratives and ways of seeing the world. She is currently curator of the participatory art program Cuidadorxs Invisibles in Madrid; supported by Fundación “la Caixa” La Casa Encendida, and Museo Reina Sofía, Spain, the program develops projects with people suffering from degenerative diseases and their carers. In Argentina, Daniela was curator of residencies at Fundación ‘ace and in 2019 she received a Brooks International Fellowship to join the Tate Exchange team at Tate Modern. She has contributed to a variety of publications on topics such as the politics of food (CCEMx), community arts (hablarenarte) and net.art (Digital Arts Center, Taipei). She has been a curator in residence at Delfina Foundation (London), Mahler&LeWitt (Spoleto) demolición/construcción (Argentina), Guanlan Printmaking Base (Shenzhen), and has participated in the Shanghai Curators Lab (Shanghai).