Alla Mitrofanova is a critic and philosopher working with media art, new ontologies, and feminist philosophy. She was active in the 90s cyberfeminist movement: a co-founder of the Cyberfemin Club in St. Petersburg (1994) and a member of Cyberfeminist International. He writes and lectures on contemporary philosophy, the theory of feminism, science, art, and performance. They live and work in St. Petersburg.

Aziza Kadyri is a London-based Uzbek multidisciplinary artist specialising in extended reality (XR), performance design, textiles, and experimental costume. Her practice explores the themes of hybrid identities, decoloniality, liminality, feminism, and migration (“9 Moons”; “Self-exoticisation archives”; “De-canon”). Since 2016, Aziza has also been designing for theatre, performance and film across the Eurasian continent. Currently, one of Aziza’s primary interests lies in exploring the role of XR/AR/VR and AI within artistic research, edutainment, activism and social engagement. Recognising the transformative potential of these technologies, she actively conducts workshops internationally to foster the democratisation of XR tools.

Daria Iuriichuk is a dance artist and a researcher of body politics, media, and visual culture based in Moscow. As an artist, she practices dance to investigate intersections of affect, perception, gender, and labor. Since 2017 she worked as part of zhvyu, a collaboration of movement researchers. Since 2019 she works for politically and socially engaged documentary theater projects with a focus on collaborative work. She has a BA in art history (Moscow State University) and an MA degree in cultural studies (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), where she works as visiting tutor. Besides researching, creating and performing, her practice also includes writing and lecturing.

Born 1993 in Kazakhstan, Dilda Ramazan is a curator and art worker specializing in the contemporary art scene of her native Central Asian region. She is part of DAVRA, a Central Asian research group initiated by the Uzbek video artist Saodat Ismailova, as well as MATA and Beyond The Post-Soviet collectives.

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S.(GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists. Her works have been featured in international exhibitions, among others at Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg (2023), Bundeskunsthalle (2022), 12th Berlin Biennial (2022); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2020-21); Goethe Institute Moscow (2020), “Palast der Republik, Haus der Berliner Festspiele (2019), f/stop Leipzig (2018), Gorki Herbstsalon III (2017).

Ilmira Bolotyan, born in Chuvashia, is an artist and curator with a PhD in philology. She was a co-founder of the artist-run space Centre Red. Her paintings and graphic works explore figurative anthropomorphic imagery, as well as studies of the representation of gender and ‘femininity’ in contemporary visual culture. In her participatory projects, she creates different social situations. In 2018 she was nominated for the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award in the category ‘The Best Visual Art Project.’

Irina Gheorghe is an artist. She works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, drawing, photography or video, to address the tensions inherent in the attempts to speak about things beyond our possibilities of observation, from extraterrestrial life to hypothetical planets. Since 2009, Irina has also worked with Alina Popa as part of the artist duo The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) to investigate how passions shape contemporary society. Since January 2019 she is also part of the Psychedelic Choir. She studied Painting and Photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest and has recently completed a PhD in Artistic Practice at GradCAM, TU Dublin.

Karol Radziszewski is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Warsaw. His archive-based methodology intersects multiple cultural, historical, religious, social, and gender references. Since 2005 he is publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine. Founder of the Queer Archives Institute. His work has been presented in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; New Museum, New York; Videobrasil, Sao Paulo; Cobra Museum, Amsterdam; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum; Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. He has participated in several international biennales including PERFORMA 13, New York; 7th Göteborg Biennial; 4th Prague Biennial.

http://www.karolradziszewski.com/

As a visual artist working at the intersection of sculpture, sound and photography, Kim Bode is interested in creating spatial and often uncanny installations. Using artistic research as a gateway to a refined practice, they often work thematically with landscape as a material and physical space, a collective idea and a political terrain. Based on these foundations, their research explores transformative aspects as well as the interstices between artificial habitats and ‘natural’ environments and how they collapse upon each other. Bode is part of the collaborative research projects N*A*I*L*S – hacks*facts*fictions and bureau of transitioning landscape.

Margaret Tali is a cultural theorist, art historian and occasional curator. Originally from Estonia, she now calls Rotterdam her home. She has taught art history and theory in arts academies and universities in both countries, and is currently affiliated with Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), where she has also completed her doctoral studies. She is the author of Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (Routledge, 2018) and editor of Archives and Disobedience. Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe (2016, with Tanel Rander).

www.margarettali.net

Mihaela Drăgan, born in 1986, is an actress and playwright who lives and works in Bucharest and Berlin. In 2014, together with other Roma actresses, she founded Giuvlipen Theater Company, for which she is an actress and playwright, a “revolutionary theater” according to Reuters. Giuvlipen’s performances have a feminist agenda and bring to life the issues of early marriage, anti-gypsyism hate speech, hyper-sexualization, eviction, and heteronormativity in order to promote discussion and critical thinking. She is currently working in Berlin at Maxim Gorki Theater. She also works as a trainer for Theater of the Oppressed where she works with Roma women on their specific issues. She is one of the six finalists for the 2017 Gilder/Coigney International Theater Award, New York.

http://giuvlipen.com/

Zofia nierodzińska is an artist, activist, and curator. Since May 2017 she has worked as Deputy Director at the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznan. She graduated from the University of Arts in Berlin (M.A. in 2016) and the University of Arts in Poznan (2017 Ph.D) with a thesis about women at academies entitled “Where is the Academy? Critical Institution and Science Fiction, towards The Virtual Feminist University”. She is a member of Ciocia Basia collective.

www.znierodzinska.com

http://www.arsenal.art.pl/en/

Anneli is interested in projects that empower people and pursue sustainable and inclusive goals. Her special interest lies in the areas of equality, education and culture. Professional background: Since October 2018 project and financial administrator at Frau und Beruf e. V., counseling center for Women in professional transition/ on the job/ inbetween jobs. Since July 2018, freelance financial administrator e.g. at District Kunst- und Kultur gGmbH, District*Schule ohne Zentrum e.V., Mikub e.V., Haus Neudorf e.V. 2018; IHK-Graduation retail saleswoman, focus on organic foods; 2010 Diploma in Fine Arts HfbK Hamburg; Volunteer: 2020/21 Head of the finance circle at the Freie Waldorfschule Kreuzberg e. V.; 2019 Involvement in the Alpha-Siegel-Certification of Frau und Beruf e.V.. Since 2018 logistics, implementation and baking at the monthly pizza-get-together in Päwesin, Brandenburg.

Joe Ekenhorst is a student of Art History and English Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig, currently writing her BA thesis on the reception of Afghan War Rugs carrying 9/11 imagery. In 2015 she was involved in Henrike Naumann’s project The Museum of Trance. During her studies she co-curated the supporting program of the 91st Kunsthistorischer Studierendenkongress 2016 in Leipzig under the title Vermeintlich anders – Das Fremde in der Kunst and assisted in the inaugural edition of Shanghai Project, a multidisciplinary ideas platform organized by Shanghai Himalayas Museum. Since 2017, she has worked at District Berlin as its public relations manager, as head of communication for D’EST and as an assistant for Discoteca Flaming Star.

Pieterjan Grandry is a Belgian graphic designer living and working in Berlin. His office, Modem Studio, works for a wide range of international clients and operates in the fields of print and web design. Next to his practice as graphic designer, Pieterjan founded Crap is Good, a blog dedicated to documenting and describing contemporary visual culture by focusing on non-client-based experimental work. The blog extends into publishing, issuing under the name Crap is Good Press. He also founded the t-shirt label ‘yoshimi’, is co-founder of architecture collective ‘Collective Disaster’ and created the D’EST website.

Suza Husse is interested in queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches to bodies, socialities, ecologies, and histories. Since 2012, she has been working as the artistic director of the interdisciplinary art space District Berlin with an emphasis on artistic research, collaborative practices, public space, critical education, and political imagination. In 2016 she co-founded the experimental publishing collective The Many Headed Hydra with artist Emma Haugh. She is currently a guest professor at the University of Arts Berlin where she initiated Sister Stones and Blocks of Anger. Queer Petrographies – a collective artistic inquiry into diasporic rocks in Berlin.

Ulrike Gerhardt is the artistic (co-)director of D’EST since its founding in 2016, nowadays leading the platform together with Suza Husse. As a visual culture studies scholar and curator, she has been researching cultural memory concerning the reverberations of the post-socialist transformation. For her PhD at Leuphana University Lueneburg, she analyzed the ways in which video works by queer-feminist artists and collectives of the “generation transformation” visually deal with the experiences of Perestroika, migration, ecosystems of damage, and indexical landscapes after 1989 / 1991. In 2024, her study on Easternfuturist memory practices within post-socialist video art will be published (Berlin: De Gruyter). After holding positions at District*School Without Center, the FHNW Academy for Art and Design in Basel, Potsdam University, and the Michael Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Centre, she will start working as a research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in spring 2024.