Artists & speakers

Artists:

Adiba (Almaty, 1989) is an occasional artist based in Berlin. In her projects, she engages with topics of death, transgenerational trauma, post-Soviet and queer identities. 

Amaqhawekazi Emafini Malamlela is a Ghanaian-South African multidisciplinary artist. She creates artwork that challenges the norms of identity, sexuality, and spirituality. Centred on confronting what is "present". Engage Space -Time through their body and exploration as a form of research. She advocates for the underrepresented groups through art and Pyramidkofi - An Art house dedicated to collaborative artmaking.

Finn, aka Animal Bro, is a Serbian - Australian visual artist and writer working primarily with ink drawing, mixed media and digital art. Born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, they obtained an MFA in painting from the University of Fine Art in Belgrade. They participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions and festivals, and completed a few international residencies. Their interests include graphic novels, printing, zines and independent publishing, murals and art in public spaces. They see art as a medium of communication and empowerment. As artists, by sharing our stories we invite and give others agency to do the same.

Bendix, living on thresholds, bending the boundaries between passivity and activity, giving and receiving, and forever and ever the boundaries of the gender binary as a queer sex worker and artist. In art and sex work alike, Bendix is moved by a deep love and fascination for the desire(s) of marginalised communities and bodies and likes to play and draw (up)on lines and flesh alike. 40+, white, trans*queer and disabled. Hamburg, Germany. Underpaid and overstimulated. Proudly being one tiny stone in the mosaic of fucking up capitalism.

Clémentine Roy and Marta Orlando are an artist duo living and working in Berlin. Their research is situated between Queer Ecology Studies and Ethnographic landscapes. Coming from different countries and educational backgrounds, their practices explore and engage  with several forms of media, such as videos, installations, paintings, tattoos, writing and curatorial projects.

grouping sil' (dnipro, 2017) is a queeranarchofem is a community that tries to develop political imagination via temporary associations that create grassroots theory, experience of resistance, and survival. They do this through artivistic exploration of the topic they are working on (zine making, podcasts, training courses, financial support). Their motto: a little bit angry, a little bit punk grassroots activism. The zine available at the exhibition is created in collaboration with Bumi.

gyenjam/গ্যাঞ্জাম is a collective exploring the politics of art, music and food for/by queer* 'people from the global south/majority'. gyenjam aims to bring together marginalized people to explore and express themselves through community, fun and resistance. they are always open to new members! oxi (no pronouns) is a creative, organizer and community weaver in chronic pain. oxi's work focuses on healing, connection and anti-colonial liberation. pankuabul is a visual and textual artist, and a map and music enthusiast. his work focuses on exploring and exposing the everpresent visuals, sounds and words that go unnoticed in everyday life.

İlhak Alltıparmak (Erzurum, 1990) graduated from Erzurum Anatolian Fine Arts High School Painting Department in 2009. They graduated from Erzurum Atatürk University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Graphics Department in 2013. İlhak is still continuing their education in Düzce University Graduate Education Institute Painting Department (Master's Degree), which they started in 2021.

Jasemin Anika Khaleli (Munich, 1993) is a Vienna-based writer, listener and art-maker, working with text, sound and sculpture. She is researching at the Music and Minorities Research Center (mdw) and is completing the Critical Studies program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Exploring questions of systemic and institutionalized violence through personal trajectories and collective reflections, Khaleli practices decolonial and queered methodologies and sensual ethnography. Her work has been awarded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, GAIN Gender and Agency prize and was featured by WIENWOCHE Festival, Garage Grande and CTM Festival for Adventurous Music Berlin, among others.

Marina Leo Shamov (Sebezh, 1990) is an artist, queer-rap lyrics writer, performer, teacher and LGBTQ2 activist who explores various topics, such as bacteria and other creatures, body-knowledge, psychoanalytic thinking in artistic practice and identity politics. Marina received their diploma in choreography at the Institute of Applied Arts`13, master's degree in artistic practices of contemporary dance at the Vaganova Academy`15 and graduated from an independent political art program at the School of Involved Art`17. Marina`s last projects were devoted to art education for orphans, teaching the course of autofiction and reenactment performance and body practices for anti-war activists.

Masha Godovannaya is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator. Approaching art production as an artistic research and collective action, Masha's artistic and scholarly practices draw on a combination of approaches and spheres such as moving image theory, experimental cinema, DIY video tradition, social science, post-soviet/postsocialist studies, queer theory, and decolonial methodologies. Masha holds an MFA degree in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College (USA), and an MA degree in Sociology from European University in St. Petersburg (Russia). Currently, she is a candidate in PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Austria).

Naomi Frisson is a visual artist, illustrator & comic author based in Athens, Greece. Their work revolves around intimacy, spirituality, the creation of alternate fictional realms by combining fantasy, sci-fi and everyday life elements. Using a juxtaposition of existing histories, works of art, mythologies, they attempt to re-read realities and time through a neurodiverse lens.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo (1979) is a visual artist currently living and working between Mexico City and Oaxaca. From a decolonial-cuir perspective, her research-driven critical-mythical dreamlike worldmakings address the creation of counter-worlds in neo-colonial settings. In her work, she integrates her interests in theater games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of color critique.

Pêdra Costa (Nova Iguaçu, 1978) is a ground breaking, formative Brazilian, Visual & Urban Anthropologist, Performer and Tarot Reader based in Berlin that utilizes intimacy to connect with collectivity. They work with their body to create fragmented epistemologies of queer communities within ongoing colonial legacies. Their work aims to decode violence and transform failure whilst tapping into the powers of resilient knowledge from a plethora of subversive ancestralities and spiritualities that have been integral to anti-colonial and necropolitical survival. Pêdra Costa is the Erste Bank Art Awardee 2023.

ReSew sewing сooperative (Kyiv, since 2016) focuses on intersectional queer feminism, environmental activism, and economic justice. Before the full-scale invasion, they held workshops for LGBTQI+ and feminist communities, created clothes for trans* and non-binary people, held free markets, film screenings, presentations, informal gatherings, and functioned as a social center for the queer community in Kyiv. One month after the full-scale invasion, two members of the cooperative moved abroad and continued to support the community that had formed around ReSew. They also started to raise funds for humanitarian and military aid, and inform communities abroad about Ukrainian left, feminist, queer initiatives.

Ruthia Jenrbekova is 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.

Sophia Yuet See (London, 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture, photography, moving image, zines and writing. Recurring feelings of longing and absence mark their work as they explore non-linear narratives of return and recovery. Reimagining and grappling with what has been lost or created as a result of marginalisation and trauma; how it renders in the body, the vulnerability of being seen and the situated knowledges offered in turn.

Vishnia Vishnia, a.k.a. Double Cherry, is a visual artist, queer feminist, pervert creature, and researcher based in Kyiv. They mostly do drawing and illustration, but also different hand crafts such as tattooing and sculpture. At the moment, Vishnia Vishnia lives in their own private queer bubble, being engaged with maintaining a connection network among a small community.

 

Lecturers, workshops, discussions:

 

Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a Focus on Postcolonial Studies at the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Previously, she was Junior Professor of English Literature at the University of Flensburg. Following her PhD at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, research stays and positions took her to New York University (USA), the University of Potsdam, the University of Innsbruck (Austria) as well as to the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz. Her research interests include the Anglophone novel from its beginnings to now, Black Atlantic and Diasporic Writing, Postcolonial Studies, Visual Culture, Cultural Memory and the Archival Turn, Queer Theory and Intersectionality. In addition to numerous articles and two monographs, Familial Feeling: Entangled Tonalities in Early Black Atlantic Writing and the Rise of the British Novel (Palgrave Macmillan 2021, open access) and The Privilege of Crisis. Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film (Campus 2011, won the Britcult Award 2009), she has just completed a third book on Revisualising Intersectionality (Palgrave Macmillan 2022, open access) co-written with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne. This publication marks the conclusion of the research project of the same name funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and led by Prof. Haschemi Yekani and Prof. Nowicka (Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung DeZIM). In addition, together with Prof. Silvy Chakkalakal (HU, European Ethnology) she is the PI of the Princeton-HU Strategic Partnership Grant project "Re-Imagining the Archive: Sexual Politics and Postcolonial Entanglements". She has just been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for a new project on "Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives". More information: hu.berlin/haschemi-yekani

Ewa Maczynska has a PhD in International Relations from Central European University and is currently working as a visual artist. In her PhD dissertation, she studied subjectivity formation of contemporary progressive, equality, and justice oriented European activists who came in solidarity with migrants in Denmark, Hungary, and Sweden. She argued that activists subjectivity disclosed a series of tension and contradictions, particularly in regards to activists critique of neoliberal capitalism and their embeddedness in and reproduction of neoliberal discourses, which in turn marked the limitations of contemporary European justice oriented politics.

Henrie Dennis is a Nigerian lesbian activist, art curator, and cultural mediator and the founder of Afro Rainbow Austria. She is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her work centers on themes of queerness, migration, gender, anti-racism, and decolonization. A dedicated advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and representation, she leverages her platform to amplify marginalized voices and build bridges between diverse communities. Through the medium of art and dialogue, she challenges societal norms and promotes understanding and inclusivity.

Masha Beketova is working on a doctoral thesis "Queer EE&CA Diaspora in Germany beyond (in)visibility and (self)exoticization" in Slavonic cultural studies and Gender Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and is holding a Rosa-Luxemburg scholarship. Masha's research interests include queer, feminist and diasporic literatures and activisms, critical migration studies, Ukrainian and diasporic queer-feminist resistance.

Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk is a librarian and researcher from Ukraine currently based in the UK. They have broad research interests from gender and sexuality theories and social movements studies to art histories of Eastern Europe. Syaivo is a PhD graduand in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and holds MA degrees in Gender Studies and Cultural Studies. They volunteer supporting refugees and organise cultural events and protests in their free time.

Syrine Boukadida is a psychologist and project manager. She lives between Tunis and Berlin. She works for the Lesbenberatung/ LesMigraS Berlin and manages the LGBTIQ+ asylum project at Mawjoudin (We exist). She also facilitates workshops on topics related to migration, asylum, BIPoC empowerment and multiple discriminations.

Tegiye Birey is a text worker and community-enthusiast from the Mediterranean. She is a
PhD Candidate in Gender Studies at Central European University and Utrecht University, and
her research performs a postcolonial/decolonial feminist reading of migration solidarity.
Tegiye has often integrated art to her writing practice (see Devising conviviality:
intersubjective becoming through labor of community-building
, Being and Understanding
the Other: A Brief Look at the 21 st century Cypriot Art
). Tegiye has a BA in Women’s Studies and Political Science with a minor in French Studies from the University of New Hampshire, and a MSc in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has worked in the field of refugee rights, engaged in gender, history and youth research and training, and taken part in feminist, queer, anti-militarist, and anti-racist networks transnationally.

 

Curator

Anna T. (MA, PhD) is an artist, educator, and curator based in Vienna. She has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the University of Art and Design Linz, and the University of Vienna. Her artistic practice and scholarly work draw from poststructuralism, queer theory, decoloniality, peripherical knowledge, aesthetics, and affect. She has worked as a cultural producer, curator, educator, and festival artistic director, and has collaborated extensively with academics, activists, and fellow creatives in Greece, the UK, Germany, and Austria. She has given talks, seminars and workshops in academic and non-academic settings in Athens, Berlin, Linz, and Vienna. Since 2003, she has exhibited and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions and new media festivals in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Between 2014 and 2017 she was a board member and curator at Mz* Baltazar's Lab, a feminist hackerspace for creatives in Vienna. She is member of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research (GR), and the Queer Museum Vienna. Her monograph Opacity - Minority - Improvisation: An Exploration of the Closet Through Queer Slangs and Postcolonial Theory was published by transcript in 2020.