Tarek Atoui is a French-Lebanese artist and electroacoustic composer working within the realm of sound performance and composition. He engineers complex and inventive instruments as well as arranges and curates interventions, concerts, performances, and workshops. His work often revolves around large-scale, collaborative performances that develop from extensive research into music history and instrumentation, while exploring new methods of production. Using custom-built electronic instruments and computers, Atoui references current social and political realities, revealing music and new technologies as powerful aspects of expression and identity. Education and social connection are integral aspects of Atoui’s practice.
Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests, and water. In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry, and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props, and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects.
Mekhala Dave is a lawyer and art academic based in Vienna. She is the ocean law and policy analyst/legal researcher at TBA21–Academy and a doctoral researcher in contemporary art history and theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In her past and current work in legal practice, as well as in her PhD research, she advocates for a social turn in artistic practices and explores encounters located across knowledge spheres and communities in the Global South at the intersection of activism and newly shaping ocean policy. From her lived experiences across borders, she draws inspiration and spiritual guidance from water to the questions of historicity and the search for emerging “new” relations of identity and belonging.
Rosela del Bosque is a curator and researcher from Mexicali, Mexico, currently based in Zurich. Her practice has focused mainly on the specific context of Baja California, Mexico, and works with art education, curatorial practice and research-led methodologies. On a larger scope, her ongoing project and curatorial research with Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado focuses on overcoming the flat and instrumental notions of the Colorado River as a provider of ecosystem services and of water as a resource to delve into the experiences of the tangible, embodied research tactics and non-extractivist relations with water and land.
Sonia Fernández Pan is a writer, (in)dependent curator, and podcast host. Conversation and entropy are part of her research methodology, thanks to the ongoing exchange of gestures and ideas with other people. She understands dancing as an experience of radical listening not only to music but also to the environments in which it happens. Co-curator of
You Got To Get In To Get Out, a long-running project from and into techno with La Casa Encendida (Madrid), she is also the host of several podcast series for
Promise no Promises! at/with the Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW. She recently published Edit with Caniche Editorial, a book that draws on her personal experience on the dancefloor to produce a remix of texts mirroring each other. Her perception of art and dance culture keeps shifting, looking for experiences of contact between the two scenes.
Teresa Vicente Giménez is professor of the philosophy of law and deputy director of the Center for Cooperation and Development Studies (CECODE) at the University of Murcia. She is also director of the Chair of Human Rights and Rights of Nature of the same university. Her teaching and research profile focuses on theory of justice and human rights. In this area, she has researched the new paradigm of ecological justice and the rights of nature and has participated as a speaker in international and national congresses, conferences, and seminars as well as international meetings. She is the author of numerous publications addressing ecological justice, the rights of children, social rights, and the rights of nature, among many other subjects. Giménez has been the leader of the Iniciativa Legislativa Popular (ILP) or popular legislative initiative in Murcia that seeks to give legal personality to the Mar Menor lagoon and basin.
Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. She is the founder of
Susie Ibarra Studio and Sound, Health & Habitat, a cultural studio and journal that focuses on sharing and supporting listening health practices, global soundwalks, acoustic ecology focused on climate and eco-friendly and sustainable global music practices. She created
Drum Labs: Rhythm in Nature, a course and e-book through her studio that demonstrates her six part analysis of rhythms in nature. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation: she has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.
Ronald Kolb is a researcher, lecturer, curator, designer, and filmmaker based between Stuttgart and Zurich. Co-head of the postgraduate program in curating at ZHdK and co-editor-in-chief of the journal
On-Curating.org, he is also a PhD candidate in the practice-based doctoral program in curating at Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading. His PhD research deals with curatorial practices in global/situated contexts in light of governmentality, its entanglements in representational power, and self-organized modes of participatory practices in the arts.
Nancy Mounir is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer. Mounir is a key member of Egypt’s alternative music scene. She contributes original music to theatre productions, films, and international art installations. Mounir plays a range of instruments—including violin, piano, bass, Theremin, and the traditional Egyptian bamboo flute called the
kawala—and in the process she has explored both the harmonic principles of the Western canon and the microtonal
foundations of Arabic maqam (musical modes). Lately she has stepped further into the limelight with her solo debut album (3 June 2022, Simsara Records),
Nozhet El Nofous — a transcendent exploration of musical freedom through the lens of century-old archival recordings. She was born in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and now lives in Egypt’s capital, Cairo.
Dorothee Richter is professor in contemporary curating at the University of Reading, and head of the postgraduate program in curating, CAS/MAS Curating, at the Zurich University of the Arts,
On-Curating.org. She is director of the practice-based doctoral program in curating, PhD in Practice in Curating, University of Reading. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she was initiator of Curating Degree Zero Archive, curator of Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated different symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, and an archive on feminist practices, Materialien/Materials; recently she directed, together with Ronald Kolb, a film on
Fluxus: Flux Us Now! Fluxus Explored with a Camera. She is executive editor of On-Curating.org and she is also the initiator and head of the OnCurating Project Space in Zürich. Together with Ronald Kolb she also launched the platform
Small Projects for Coming Communities.
Azahara Ubera Biedma is an artist, dancer, and researcher based in Brussels. Their practice is situated at the intersection of dance, choreography, experimental pedagogy, artistic creation, and how to translate philosophical ideas around feminism and queer culture into somatic practices. They teach these pedagogies at the postmaster program in art in social political context at Sint Lucas in Antwerp. Through performances, installations, workshops, and social situations they create spaces for humans and nonhumans, for being together, intimate encounters to connect with otherness through movement, language games, and sound.
Azahara also develops their work and practices along with several collectives and organizations and thanks to all the learnings with Somatecx, research group initiated by philosopher Paul B. Preciado, after his advance program on queer and gender studies at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Ziúr is an experimental producer/musician and a fixture in Berlin’s rich musical topography. It seems as though she produces her releases in the way someone scoring a television series does, gathering and arranging their selections for each episode…isolating and apprehending definitive scenes and memorializing their ethos in song. Soundtracks, like her release
Antifate, guide the listener through radically different emotional states, yet somehow still offer an idea of what underpins a show’s (or in this case an album’s) particular hues. Ziúr produces music within a scope that is expansive, rich, and diverse in texture. The sounds are simultaneously machinic and deeply anthropomorphic, toying with mechanical isolation and the chaotic spectrum of human emotion. Unlike a soundtrack or score, there is no film to which one can turn to narrativize the music, there is only evocative sounds reaching from each song toward the cybernetic sublime.
Daniela Zyman is artistic director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. She joined TBA21 in 2003 and has been instrumental in co-shaping its exhibitions and commissions program. Between 1995 and 2001 Zyman was chief curator of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna, which included the founding and programming of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003 she worked as the artistic director of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna, and as director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. Zyman is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, and regularly writes essays for art publications. Her many years of research into forms of artistic “counter-research” led to a doctoral thesis in 2020. Since 2022 she has been curating on behalf of TBA21 a series of exhibitions at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, including the exhibitions
Abundant Futures and
Remedios: Where new land might grow, and co-curating of the performance assembly
The Journeying Stream together with Sofia Lemos.