Team

  • Anneli Schütz

    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

    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

    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.

    www.modem.ws
  • Suza Husse

    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

    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. After holding positions at District*School Without Center, the FHNW Academy for Art and Design in Basel and at Potsdam University, she now works as a research associate and project coordinator for the Succow Foundation in Greifswald, Germany. Here, she is responsible for Sensing Peat, an international project interconnecting ecological art, climate activism, and peatland conservation, supported by the Andrea von Braun Foundation. It continues the work of The Venice Agreement (2022–), an assembly and commitment to protect and restore our planet’s peatlands at a local level.

    succow-stiftung.academia.edu/UlrikeGerhardt

Guests

  • Alla Mitrofanova

    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

    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

    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.

    deaddogdance.tilda.ws
  • Dilda Ramazan

    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

    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

    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.’

    www.ilmirabolotyan.com
  • Irina Gheorghe

    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.

    irinagheorghe.ro
  • Karol Radziszewski

    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/

    www.district-berlin.com/en/a-body-is-an-archive
  • Kim Bode

    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

    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

    www.district-berlin.com/en/producing-roma-feminist-art-2
  • Mihaela Drăgan

    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/

    www.district-berlin.com/en/producing-roma-feminist-art-2
  • Zofia nierodzińska

    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/

    www.district-berlin.com/en/a-body-is-an-archive

Curators

  • Anna Bitkina

    In her curatorial practice, Anna Bitkina focuses on socio-political processes that occurred in Russia and the post-Soviet territories after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her research looks at the local and global implications caused by the acceleration of capitalism in the region. Anna also explores the changing role of cultural workers, the possibilities of creative practices, and the agency of artists in different social spheres. In different years, she has contributed to 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2009), 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2010), 10th Manifesta Biennale (2014). She curated Nordic Art Today: Conceptual Debts, Broken Dreams, New Horizons (2011), United States of Europe (2011-2013) as well as the on-going public art project Critical Mass (2009-2017). Together with Maria Veits among others, she co-curated Propaganda News Machine: Creating Multiple Realities in the Media, and States of Control (2016-2017).



    Performing Words, Uttering Performance
  • Bettina Knaup

    Bettina Knaup works internationally as a curator with a focus on performance and gender. She was program coordinator of the International Women’s University, Hannover, co-curator of the City of Women Festival, Ljubljana, and contributed to the In Transit Festival at the House of World Cultures Berlin. Recent projects include the festivals performing proximities (Brussels) and performance platform. body affects (with S. Bake, Berlin) as well as the long term exhibition and archive project re.act.feminism #2 – a performing archive (with B. E. Stammer, Berlin, Tallinn, Gdansk, Barcelona a.o.). She is an international lecturer; since 2015, she has been a PhD research fellow at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance, Roehampton University, London.



    ReTopia
  • Eva Birkenstock

    After studying in Cologne, Berlin, and Havana, Eva Birkenstock has worked in various positions at the Kunstverein in Hamburg; the Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg; and Ludlow38, New York. From 2010–2016, she was curator of the KUB Arena, the KUB Billboards, and the KUB Projects at Kunsthaus Bregenz, where she edited the publications On Performance (with Joerg Franzbecker), Beginning Good. All Good (with Kerstin Stakemeier, Nina Köller), Art and Ideology After 1989 (with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Jens Kastner, Ruth Sonderegger), and KAYA. Currently she is the director of the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, curator of the Performance Project of LISTE Art Fair Basel and one of the five initiators of the ongoing magazine, exhibition, and debate project Class Languages.



    The Body as an Indexical Reader
  • Fehras Publishing Practices

    Fehras Publishing Practices investigate the histories and present of Arabic-language publishing and its entanglement in the socio-political and cultural sphere across the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and the Arab diaspora. It understands publishing as a possibility for creating and accumulating knowledge and works with different formats such as installations, films, publications, lectures and performances aiming to extend the notion of publishing. Fehras’ practices are concerned with translation as a tool for creating solidarity and deconstructing colonial power, and its relationship to cultural domination in its traditional and modern forms. They examine publishers and university catalogs as well as newspaper, radio, and television archives. Personal stories of publishers, memoirs, letters, and photographs are also part of this research. Fehras was co-founded by Kenan Darwich, Sami Rustom and Omar Nicolas in 2015 in Berlin. Since 2022 Fehras is run by Kenan and Sami in collaboration with artists and cultural workers of their community.

    www.fehraspublishingpractices.org

  • Inga Lāce

    Inga Lāce lives in Riga and is a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. She has been a curatorial fellow at de Appel arts center, Amsterdam (2015–2016), working on the research and events program Instituting Ecologies (2016). In Amsterdam she also co-curated the exhibition It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades! at Framer Framed (2017). Lāce has been curator of the 7th, 8th and 9th edition of the contemporary art festival SURVIVAL KIT (2015–2017) and is currently working on a research project Portable Landscapes tracing and contextualizing Latvian artists’ emigration and exile stories throughout 20th century (at Villa Vassilieff, Paris, and the Latvian National Museum of Art, 2018).



    Performing Words, Uttering Performance
  • Jana Seehusen

    Jana Seehusen’s practice as an artist and writer focuses on modes of language and action in relation to concepts of in-betweenness, otherness, and transitionings. Her work in the field of art theory, aesthetic theory in film, and cultural studies relates to questions on in/visibility, subject and gender theory, and identity politics. Her most recent publications are: “Performing Documentary. Birgit Kohler im Gespräch mit Jana Seehusen” (2014), “Echo: Lauter widerständige Entwürfe. Künstlerische Praktiken von Korrespondenz und Transfer” (2015), “How to perform entangled memories: Vom Sehen im Nichtsehen” (2016). Visualität und Abstraktion. Eine Aktualisierung des Figur-Grund-Verhältnisses, with Hanne Loreck (ed.) (2017). Since several years, she is part of a production e.V..

    www.aproduction.org

    The Suspension and Excess of Time
  • Jelena Vesić

    Jelena Vesić is an independent curator, writer, editor, and lecturer. She has published numerous essays exploring the relations between art and ideology. Her most recent exhibition is Story on Copy at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. She also curated Lecture Performance (MoCA, Belgrade, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein) as well as the collective exhibition project Political Practices of (post-) Yugoslav Art, which critically examined art historical concepts and narratives on Yugoslav art after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her recent book, On Neutrality (with Vladimir Jeric Vlidi and Rachel O’Reilly) is part of the Non-Aligned Modernity edition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.



    We Are Family
  • Kathrin Becker

    Kathrin Becker studied art history and slavic literatures at Bochum University and Leningrad State University. She is a curator and writer and head of the Video-Forum at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). Her curatorial practice focuses on the social role of art in society and on the complex of exclusion / inclusion in contemporary cultures. Her latest projects include: Claire Fontaine (n.b.k., 2017); Bani Abidi (n.b.k., 2017); Halil Altındere. Space Refugee (n.b.k., 2016); Elizabeth Price (n.b.k., 2016); Rosa Barba (n.b.k., 2016); A Sense of History (with Marius Babias, Nordstern Video Art Center, Gelsenkirchen, 2016).



    The Suspension and Excess of Time
  • Katja Kobolt

    Katja Kobolt (PhD) works on junctures of art, writing, and teaching. Katja worked for almost a decade with the City of Women Festival Ljubljana (2000-8). Katja co-founded the feminist curatorial platform Red Mined (Living Archive, 2011-15; 54. October Salon Belgrade, Endless Red Mined Symposium 2017–present). She has curated, initiated, or produced art and discursive events all over Europe. Currently she is working with a Munich collaborative art space Lothringer13 Florida and no stop non stop, a forum on post-migratory society. Katja teaches and writes on art, life, and feminism and holds a PhD on the topic of feminist canonization.

    kkobolt.wordpress.com

    ReTopia
  • Kenan Darwich

    Kenan Darwich studied Typography and Book Design at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts Kiel and Masters degree in Cultures of the Curatorial at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. In 2011, they founded the publishing house and research project Raum der Publikation and they worked as a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel. They live and work in Berlin.

    www.fehraspublishingpractices.org

  • krёlex zentre (Maria Vilkovisky & Ruth Jenrbekova)

    Krёlex zentre is a paranormal institution (parastitution) first made appearance in 2012 between Almaty and Bishkek. A nomadic art project in the genre of fake institutions, it builds on cultural traditions of inter-mixed earthly diasporas, their inclusive aesthetics and queer cosmo-politics. Working under the guise of contemporary art, krёlex zentre is engaged in xenographic study of the nascent life forms emerging in translocations, where cultural production fields are weak and subject to significant interference. It acts on behalf of imaginary communities that are not there yet, being overlooked by official records and existing only partially, in the borderlands between the real and the imaginary.



    Postsocialist Time Slips
  • Maria Veits

    Maria Veits is based in St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv, and her current interests include migration experiences and strategies of different generations and their reflection in different artistic practices (“Dreamland Never Found”, 3rd Jerusalem Biennial, 2017, TOK’s new project “Russian Bar”). She is also interested in activist practices of young artists that belong to the last soviet generation and the ways they use public space for engaging socio-political discussion (Civic Media Lab, 2016 and 2017, Dnipro, Ukraine). In 2014, Maria curated “Mobile Archive,” a collection of video works traveling across Russia from the Israeli Center for Digital Art – one of the projects that inspired D’EST.



    Performing Words, Uttering Performance
  • Maria Vilkovisky

    Maria Vilkovisky is a poetess, musician, artist and curator born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She graduated from the Kazakh State Conservatory as a violist, worked in the opera house orchestra, studied in “Musagethes” literary school for writers and in Moscow curatorial summer school. In 2011—2014 has been running an artistic space in Almaty. Co-founder of a long-term para-institutional project krёlex zentre. Lives and works in Almaty and Vienna.



    Postsocialist Time Slips
  • Markéta Jonášová

    Markéta Jonášová (1991) is a curator and researcher based in Prague, Czech Republic. She graduated from the University of the Arts, London (MRes: Exhibition Studies) and Maastricht University (MA: Arts and Heritage). She holds a curatorial position at the National Film Archive and etc. gallery in Prague, where she engages with both historical and contemporary forms of audiovisual art. As an independent curator, she has participated in a number of contemporary art projects in the Czech Republic and abroad. Her research is anchored in the field of exhibition histories and post-critical museology, investigating relations between national politics, moving image, and exhibition-making.



    Imagined Community VIII: My Significant Others
  • Miona Bogović

    Miona Bogović is a film director who works between Berlin and Belgrade. She holds a diploma in filmmaking from the German Film and TV Academy (dffb) and moves professionally between film industry productions and collaborations with visual artists. She is currently preparing her next film Der Andere Zenit / Drugačiji Zenit as part of an artist-in-residence program Pixel, Bites and Films in Vienna – supported by ORF III, arte creative, and the goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden.



    Cosmos Cosmetics: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions
  • Nadja Quante

    Nadja Quante has been the artistic director and curator of the Künstlerhaus Bremen since 2018. She has been responsible for solo exhibitions by Dafna Maimon (2019), Nona Inescu (2019) and Jef Geys (curated by Gloria Hasnay and Moritz Nebenführ in cooperation with Nadja Quante), among others. From 2008 to 2015, she was project manager and curatorial assistant, as well as interim managing director (2013–14) at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, where she curated exhibitions with Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2013, co-curated with Anja Casser) and Michaela Melián (2014), as well as others. From 2016 to 2017, Quante was an editor for the project Untie to Tie – Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Societies at ifa-Gallery, Berlin and worked on the archive of the Kunstraum at Leuphana University Lüneburg, where she taught. She also worked as a freelance curator and author in Berlin.

    www.kuenstlerhausbremen.de

  • Naomi Hennig

    Naomi Hennig lives in Berlin, where she works as researcher, artist, curator, editor, and project coordinator. She graduated from ECA Edinburgh and UdK Berlin and has since been involved in a number of artist-run initiatives. She collaborated in curatorial projects including an exhibition on the Artist Placement Group (APG) with Ulrike Jordan, presented at Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin, and Summerhall, Edinburgh (2015/16). She co-curated the research and exhibition project Spaceship Yugoslavia at nGbK Berlin in 2012. Between 2013 and 2015, she organized the exhibition program at Galerie im Turm.
    Her artistic and curatorial research revolves around the memorialization of political micro-histories, as well as the relationships of place, history, ecology, and economy.

    www.naomihennig.com

    The Body as an Indexical Reader
  • Nataša Ilić

    Nataša Ilić is a curator, critic, and member of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom / WHW, formed in Zagreb in 1999. Since 2003 WHW has been directing the program of the city-owned Gallery Nova in Zagreb. Nataša Ilić has worked internationally in various contemporary art contexts. With WHW, she curated the 11th Istanbul Biennial in 2009 and the Croatian Pavilion for the Venice Biennial in 2010. Among others, the curatorial collective’s international shows include Collective Creativity (2005), Really Useful Knowledge (2014), Meeting Points 7: Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks (2013–2014), My Sweet Little Lamb (Everything we see could also be otherwise (2016–2017)).



    We Are Family
  • Nhà Sàn Collective

    Nhà Sàn Collective (NSC) began operating as an independent artist collective in 2013. The name Nhà Sàn signifies the collective’s foundation which is rooted in the spirit of Nhà Sàn Studio, an artist-run space founded in 1998 in Hanoi. With or without a physical base, NSC has worked with friends, colleagues, and collaborators to organize exhibitions, workshops, film screenings, talks, and other activities as a support platform for artists in the community. Some of the collective’s long-running serial projects include Skylines With Flying People, IN:ACT Performance Art Festival, and the Emerging Artists Programme. In 2022, NSC and friends participated in Documenta15 curated by Ruangrupa.

    Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song] was conceived by Nguyễn Quốc Thành and Trương Quế Chi. Together with Nguyễn Phương Linh, Tuấn Mami and Vũ Đức Toàn, they form the NSC curatorial board. Nguyễn Quốc Thành is founder and curator of Queer Forever! Festival that opens dialogue for queer cinema from 2013. Trương Quế Chi is curator of Like The Moon In The Night Sky (Như Trăng Trong Đêm), multi-edition events on Vietnamese cinema heritage.



    The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song
  • Ruthia Jenrbekova

    Ruthia Jenrbekova is an artist/ researcher from Almaty, Kazakhstan. She works as an interdisciplinary post-studio artist and cultural organizer. Co-founder of krёlex zentre (together with Maria Vilkovisky). Fields of interest: queer ecology, material semiotics, arts-based methodologies, trans*feminism. Currently is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Lives and works in Almaty and Vienna.



    Postsocialist Time Slips
  • Sami Rustom

    Sami Rustom completed a bachelor studies in Media at Damascus University in 2012. Their interests in the art career of the trio Fayrouz and Rahbani Brothers played an essential role in their learning about history, politics and culture in the Arabic-speaking region. They obtained a Masters degree in Library and Information Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2020. They live and work in Berlin.

    www.fehraspublishingpractices.org

  • Suza Husse

    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.



    Cosmos Cosmetics: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions
  • Suzana Milevska

    Suzana Milevska is a curator and visual culture theorist from Macedonia, currently Principal Investigator at the Politecnico di Milano (Horizon 2020). She was the Endowed Professor for Central and South European Art Histories, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmith’s College and was Fulbright Research Scholar. Her interests include postcolonial critique of the hegemonic regimes of representation, gender theory and feminism, and participatory art. In The Renaming Machine (2008–2011) she addressed the politics of overwriting histories and memories through renaming in arts and culture. In 2012 she won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory (2012).



    Cosmos Cosmetics: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions
  • Tatiana Bogacheva

    Tatiana Bogacheva is a researcher with an interdisciplinary background and cultural worker living in Berlin. She studied law, worked in human rights and humanitarian organisations until she developed an interest in postcolonial criticism and entered a graduate program at Potsdam University (Germany) in 2014. She collaborated on a Post-Postsoviet project of School of Engaged Art including exhibitions and publications reflecting similarities between post-soviet and post-colonial positions in the context of global art. From 2019–2021, she was engaged in a research project by the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories. Being a first-generation immigrant, she is interested in historical socialist internationalism. Accordingly, she is developing a doctorate project which will focus on the archives of Film University Babelsberg as an example of the related archival politics in Germany.



    Obscene West and Flickering Love Bites
  • TOK (The Creative Association of Curators)

    TOK (The Creative Association of Curators) is a female curatorial duo from St. Petersburg founded by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits in 2010 as a platform for conducting interdisciplinary projects in the fields of contemporary art and social sciences. TOK’s research-based art and educational projects have a strong social component and deal with current issues that are widely discussed both in Russia and internationally, such as public space and citizens, the development of education, the deprivation of social resources, collective memory, the growing role of the media in global society, changing political climates, migration policies among many others.

    tok-spb.org

    Performing Words, Uttering Performance
  • Ulrike Gerhardt

    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. After holding positions at District*School Without Center, the FHNW Academy for Art and Design in Basel and at Potsdam University, she now works as a research associate and project coordinator for the Succow Foundation in Greifswald, Germany. Here, she is responsible for Sensing Peat, an international project interconnecting ecological art, climate activism, and peatland conservation, supported by the Andrea von Braun Foundation. It continues the work of The Venice Agreement (2022–), an assembly and commitment to protect and restore our planet’s peatlands at a local level.

    succow-stiftung.academia.edu/UlrikeGerhardt

    Imagined Community VIII: My Significant Others
  • Xandra Popescu

    Xandra Popescu is the curator and producer of the screening chapter and initial website D’EST Prologue: O’ Mystical East and West (2016). She works as a writer, filmmaker, and curator in Berlin and Bucharest. From 2012 to 2016, together with Larisa Crunțeanu she led Atelier 35, one of the most active project spaces in Bucharest. She has a background in political science and philosophy and studied dramatic writing at the National Film and Theater University in Bucharest. Popescu has written for cinema and works as a filmmaker at the intersection of the narrative and the visual. Currently she is in the process of setting up Eroika, a production framework for female artists and directors from the former East.

    www.xandrapopescu.com

    D’EST Prolog: O’ Mystical East and West