SEMINAR NO.8: FOREIGN EXPERIENCE IN POST-89 ART

BIOGRAPHIES

programme
abstracts
biographies

Amy Bryzgel In May, 2008, I was awarded my PhD in art history from Rutgers University, where I specialised in contemporary art from Eastern Europe and Russia. I am currently a lecturer in the History of Art Department at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, where I teach courses on modern art from both Western and Eastern Europe. At present I am working on a book manuscript that will be an expansion of my PhD dissertation, entitled New Avant-Gardes: Contemporary Performance Art in East Europe and Russia.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are curators and art historians who deal with issues of memory, ecology and translocal exchange. They are the curators of a trilogy of exhibitions dealing with the revolutionary moments of the twentieth century: Revolution is not a Garden Party (2006-7) dealt with the legacy of the 1956 Revolution for contemporary art, Revolution I Love You (2008) dealt with the resonances of 1968 for art, politics and philosophy, while Revolutionary Decadence (2009) considers the opening up of the Budapest art scene since 1989. They publish their joint activities on www.translocal.org

Diana McCarthy lives in Berlin. She works in art, politics and radio. Her current projects include Prologue: New Feminism, New Europe, the faces-l digital community and the radio initiatives hausradio, backyardradio  and the radia.fm network. She was a co-founder of the Berlin media initiatives Mikro e.V. and bootlab e.V. In the 90's, she co-founded the Nettime and Syndicate mailing lists and as part of the Media Research Foundation, she co-organized the MetaForum Conference Series. Her main interests are exploiting social and technological systems for cultural use; i.e. piracy and open source software development for real life.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an independent curator and critic based in Paris and Ljubljana, Slovenia. She finished her Master studies at EHESS, where she has been a PhD candidate since 2006. At EHESS she is co-directing a seminar on artistic and curatorial practices, together with P. Falguieres, E. Lebovici and H.U. Obrist. She has published articles on contemporary and new media art in numerous international exhibition catalogues and art magazines, and is a contributing editor for the online review ARTMargins: Contemporary Central and Eastern European Visual Culture (UC Santa Barbara). She has curated exhibitions and projects in Slovenia, Austria, Slovak Republic, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, The Netherlands and France, most recently she guest-curated the exhibition at the festival transmediale.08 in Berlin.

Lena Prents
Lena Prents (Born 1972 in Minsk, Belarus) studied German philology in Minsk and art history at the Free University in Berlin. She worked at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin,  the Bauhaus Museum Weimar and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig. Since 2005 she has been working as a freelance curator and art historian. Her attention she focusses on the contemporary art projects - from East and West - which challenge and reflect the social circumstances. She lives in Berlin.

Nada Prlja (1971, Sarajevo) moved to Skopje in 1981 and to London in 1999. She has graduated from the National School of Fine Art (A Levels) and from the Academy of Fine Arts, Skopje, Macedonia and consequently received an MPhi (Master of Philosophy) research degree from the Royal College of Arts, London, UK. Nada Prlja is an artist whose work deals with the complex situations of inequality and injustice in societies, ranging from political and economic to religious issues. Using different media, her projects are multi layered and 'site, space or condition-specific'. As a respond to this Prlja recently initiated Serious Interest Agency (SIA), a series of curated art projects and events, that explore and question notions of the New European identity (focusing specifically on the interpretation of South Eastern Europe within a global context of Europe). Within the feamework of SIA she has curated 3 exhibitions in different locations in London and Vienna and numerous presentations and discussions. Her work as an artist has been represented at Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan, INIVA – Institute of International Visual Art, London; TATE Britain, London; David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia, London; OPTICA 2007, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art and National Gallery of Macedonia, Skopje, etc. In 2008 she participated in more than 18 group shows. Her work has been reviewed in Flash Art, Artreview, Time Out, Art News, Third Text, etc. Prlja has been lecturing in various London colleges since 2003.

Oleksiy Radynski – Kyiv-based art historian, critic and curator with a special interest to Soviet avant-garde and its influence on contemporary visual culture. Among recent works – extended essays on the interconnections between Walter Benjamin’s and Dziga Vertov’s approaches to media theory and practice and on research-based art strategies in Boris Mikhailov’s Unfinished Dissertation. In 2006-2007 edited the screen arts magazine KINO-KOLO. In 2006 carried out the research of conceptual practices in contemporary photography at CCA Zamek Ujazdovski, Warsaw. In 2008-2009 – curator at Kyiv city gallery Lavra. Currently – curator at Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv). Post-graduate student at Cultural Studies Department of National University ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’, preparing the dissertation on appropriation of Soviet montage theories in contemporary media.

Szabolcs KissPál (1967) is an artist based in Budapest. He studied as a postgraduate at Budapest Fine Arts University, and was a lecturer at the Academy of Visual Arts Cluj. KissPál has developed installation and performance works towards video and computer-based practice, and although using technical and electronic images and sounds, his art maintains an "intermedial" attitude towards the elements of the work, following rather an "inductive" than a "generative" tradition.