SEMINAR NO.7: ART AND ESPIONAGE

BIOGRAPHIES

programme
abstracts
biographies

Doina Anghel is critic and art historian, she studied Art History and Theory at the Arts University in Bucharest. Since 2001 she works as an education curator at the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, with a break in 2004-5 when she worked as a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (mnac) in Bucharest. Since 2006 she is a member of E-cart.ro Association in Romania, for which she coordinated the projects: “Marcel Iancu arhitect” (2008), she co-edited the publications “Marcel Iancu. Bureau of Modern Studies” (2008), “Dada East? The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Stockholm 2007” and issue no.8 of e-cart magazine.

Laszlo Beke is an art historian and curator who has played a leading role in Hungarian art since the late 1960s. He was an active figure in the development of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde of the warly 1970s, and continued to play a key role in the Hungarian art scene into the 1980s and beyond. He was director of the Budapest Kunsthalle from 1995-2000, and currently heads the Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mark Boswell studied cinema production & film theory at various institutions in Switzerland, France, Germany, and the U.S. from 1986-1992. His experimental film works have been screened internationally in over 25 countries in museums, biennials, and film festivals, includingThe Transmediale Berlin, The 10th Biennial of The Moving Image, Geneva, National Center of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia, Arnolfini/Picture This, Bristol, Artists and Arms Show, Moscow, The Avanto Media Arts Festival, Helsinki, The Los Angeles Freewaves Biennial, The Image Forum Festival Tokyo, the Chechnya Emergency Bienniale, and Arte Television Europe. His 2001 film- “USSA: Secret Manual of the Soviet Politburger” chronicles the history of the hamburger as a Soviet conspiracy. His 2003 feature film “The Subversion Agency” revolves around the exploits of an American arms dealer, who after being lured to Cuba to play a golf match, finds himself in entangled in a murky web of DDR spies, CIA Double Agents, Russian bureaucrats, and Black Panthers on the run. The film, a post-modern noir intrigue with profound cold war implications, has screened in such “détente” locations as  Helsinki, Riga, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Siberia, Berlin, Paris, and Geneva. In 2004, He was awarded the “International Media Art Award” from the ZKM Museum of Karlsruhe, Germany. His recent lectures on Dadaism, Avant-garde film, and Agit-Prop cinema have been presented at various institutions including the Baltic Art Academy in Helsinki, The Museum of Propaganda in Mami Beach, The University of Arizona, and The Armand Hammer Museum of Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book on collage filmmaking, tracing it’s origins from Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and early Russian Cinema up to the present entitled “Nova-Kino: The History of Cinematic Agit-Prop.” He is currently visiting faculty at the Pratt Institute, New York, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Paolo Cirio is researching into media, communication, politics and cultural anthropology. Radically and ironically, he controversially plays with semiotic vectors in order to involve the audience in thinking about the meaning of representations of reality. He has worked as media artist in various fields: net-art, street-art, video-art, public-art, marketing-art, software-art and interaction-design. He recently exhibited in 'Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System' at HMKV, Dortmund and ' Revolutions – Forms That Turn' at the Sydney Biennale. http://www.paolocirio.net/

Anthony Downey is the Programme Director of the M.A. course in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. An editorial board member of Third Text, he has published essays, criticism and interviews in numerous international journals. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life and the Ethics of Aesthetics,” Third Text (Summer 2008); Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights, Aperture (spring 2009) and “At the Limits of the Image: Representations of Torture in Popular Culture”, Brumaria, 10 (Spring 2009). He has recently given talks at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, CENDEAC (Murcia), Cornell University, New York University, Manchester University, ICA (London), Leuven University, and the NFT (London). Downey is currently researching a book on Ethics, Politics and Aesthetics (forthcoming, 2010).

Catherine Fraixe teaches art history at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges (France). Her thesis is focused on the question of the impact of American modernism in Europe in the 50s, and how it interfered rather violently with a 'post modern' model constructed in France, Italy, etc. in the 30s. The new model, described by French critics as 'American', was in fact based on the concept of a supranational 'European art' conceived as a European equivalent of American 'modernist art'.

Kata Krasznahorkai, M.A. is a Berlin-based art historian and art critic completing a PhD-research on the University of Hamburg on "The energy of images - land art and science in the `70s". 1996-1999 she worked in the Ludwig Museum Budapest as a curatorial assistant and 2000-2003 as a curator, organizing major shows for e.g. L.A. Raeven, Mona Vatamanu / Florin Tudor and Balazs Kicsiny. Recently she curated the "Pseudo in BErlin - Gyula PAuer"-show at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. She is the editor for "Fair-Zeitung für Kunst und Ästhetik" and works as a Berlin-correspondent for the magazines "Balkon", "Müertö" and "tranzit" and publishes widely on East-European and international contemporary art.

Nina Levitt lives in Toronto and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at York University in Toronto. For the past twenty years, her art practice has addressed the ways women have been imaged and imagined in popular culture. From resurrecting lesbian pulp novel covers in her work in the late 1980s, to video installations about women and space in the mid-1990s, to her current obsession with spies, she often relies on the recovery and manipulation of existing images. Her work has been shown extensively in Canada, and in numerous group shows in the UK and the US, and has been widely published and reviewed, including a feature article in Parachute #100. Notable exhibitions include Sight Specific: Lesbians & Representation (A Space, Toronto, 1987), The Zone of Conventional Practice & Other Real Stories (Canadian touring show 1989-1990), Dress Codes (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1994), The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture (Vancouver Art Gallery. 2002), The Found & the Familiar: Snapshots in Contemporary Canadian Art (Canadian touring show, 2002-2004), Little Breeze (Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto at Scarborough and Oboro, Montreal, 2004), Otherworldly (Federation Square, Melbourne Australia, and Urban Screens Conference, Manchester UK, 2007), Thin Air (the Koffler Gallery, Toronto, 2008) and Relay (The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, 2008).  Levitt is currently working with the SOVFOTO press photography collection at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie for an exhibition in 2010.

Lukasz Ronduda, PhD, is an art historian, art critic and curator of the Archive of Polish Experimental Film at Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (www.csw.art.pl/archfilm). He works at Warsaw School of Social Psychology. He curated the exhibitions: Marysia Lewandowska/Neil Cummings:Enthusiasts from the amateur film clubs (CCA Warsaw 2004, Whitechapell Art Gallery, London 2005), The Workshop of the Film Form (Electronic Arts Intermix, NY, 2004), Paulina Olowska, Rainbow Brite; Wilhelm Sasnal, USA (CCA Warsaw 2006), Down with the pimps of art, relations between art and punk (Warsaw Stock Exchange 2006), Polish socialist Conceptualism from the 70s (Orchard, NY, 2006), 1,2,3...Avant-gardes. Film/Art between Experiment and the Archive (CCA Warsaw 2006; Kunstlerhaus, Stuttgart 2007; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao 2007/2008) and several screenings: Polish Women artists films from the 70s and 80s (Tate Modern, London, 2004), Robakowski / Sharits (Anthology Film Archives, NY, 2005), Analogue: Polish video art from the 70s and 80s (Tate Modern, London, 2006), Polish New Wave Cinema, the history of the phenomenon that never existed (Anthology Film Archives, NY, 2008). He is the author of the book Subversive strategies in media art (Krakow, Rabid 2006) and editor of several books and catalogues. He is a co-editor of Piktogram Magazine


Kädi Talvoja is a curator and program manager of the Soviet period art in the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. She has been working in the museum since 2002. She finished the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2001, and attended master studies from 2001-2006. Since 2002 she has also gave lectures of Soviet Estonian in the Academy.

Raluca Voinea is a curator and art critic, she studied Art History and Theory at the Arts University in Bucharest and the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London. She is founding editor of e-cart contemporary art magazine (published online between 2003-2007) and since 2006 she is a founding member and president of E-cart.ro Association in Romania. She has published in different journals, such as IDEA. Arts + Society (Cluj, Romania), Praesens (Budapest), Observator Cultural (Bucharest), Third Text (UK), and in catalogues such as: Anetta Mona Chisa/ Lucia Tkáčová, nbk, Berlin, Space Invaders, Galerija Skuc, Ljubljana, Rijksakademie Open Ateliers 2006, Dan Perjovschi: Walls, Floors and Museums. Since 2008 she works as an editor for IDEA. Arts + Society. Recent presentations and round table discussions for the public programmes of: U-Turn Quadriennale for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2008), 5th berlin biennale (2008), Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris (2007).

Franciska Zólyom, art historian, curator, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Dunaújváros / Hungary. 1997-1999 curator at the Museum Ludwig Budapest: Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1998); Rondo. Works by Middle- and East-European Artists (1999); Orshi Drozdik Retrospective (together with Dóra Hegyi 2001/2002). Projects in the public space include: Right: Here: Now. Temporary Monuments in the City Space (since 2004); Cinemascope. Sitespecific Works in the Atrium Cinema (2004). 2001 and 2003/ 2004 project manager at the Hamburger  Bahnhhof, Museum of the Present - Berlin: Stan Douglas: Le Détroit (2001); Berlin North. Contemporary Artists in the Nordic Countries in Berlin. (2003 /2004). Recent curatorial work: 1/4 Hungarian. Critical Art Practices (together with Beáta Hock 2007), City Without a Center (2007), Stalking Utopia, Congress of the Futurologues (together with Thomas Neumann 2008). Since 1999 lecturer at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. Board member of tranzit.hu (since 2005) and of the Hungarian section of AICA (since 2006).