M.M. Serra is a filmmaker, educator, curator and Director of The Filmmakers' Co-operative. Her film Art Parade premiered in 2007 at the Womanizer Film program at Deitch Projects in Soho, New York, USA. She was featured in Profiles from the Edge in Swoon Magazine in 2007 and her own work, as well as her curated programs, have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of the Moving Image in New York; The Centre Georges Pompidou and the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, France; The London Film Festival, UK; The Sundance Forum, USA and The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany. In December 2007 she curated New York Experimental Cinema for the Kulczyk Foundation and the Warszawa Kinolab in Poland. In August 2008 she programmed 'ART(CORE): The Avant Garde and the Cinematic Body' at The Pleasure Dome in Toronto, Canada. Serra teaches Media Studies at The New School for Social Research, where she lectures on genre and sexuality in the moving image.
Visitors 2008
Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist who has transformed the very definition of art, with work encompassing painting, film, performance and installation. Her works have been shown internationally, at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hirshhorn Museum D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, among others. In 2007, a dual exhibit at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo NY & MOCCA Toronto featured recent video installations. Electronic Arts Intermix NYC and Anthology Film Archives NYC collaborated on presentations of newly restored and current film & videos November 2007.
Sanja Iveković graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. Her art production has spanned a range of media such as photography, performance, video and installations. She belongs to the artistic generation that emerged after 1968 and whose post-object art was usually referred to with the umbrella term 'New Art Practice'. In the Yugoslav/Croatian art scene she was the first woman artist to adopt a clearly feminist attitude. In 1973 she started to work with video, and her videos were selected for numerous international video festivals (among others in The Hague, San Sebastián, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris and Montreal). She has had solo exhibitions and video presentations in art institutions such as the ICA, London; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; MoMA, New York; and Taxispalais Gallery, Innsbruck. Her work has also been shown at international exhibitions such as documenta 9, Documenta11 and documenta 12 in Kassel, Manifesta 2 (Luxembourg), Body and the East (Ljubljana and New York), After the Wall (Stockholm and Berlin), Double Life (Vienna) or How do We Want to be Governed? (Barcelona, Miami and Rotterdam). Iveković founded in the late 1980s the non-governmental organization Elektra - Centre for Women's Studies, the Women's Art Centre, based in Zagreb. She is also a member of a number of non-governmental organizations in Croatia, including B.a.B.e - The Women's Human Rights Group. From 1999 to 2001 she taught Contemporary Women's Art Practice at The Center for Women's Studies in Zagreb. Iveković has received awards such as the Canada Council Grant for Visiting artists (1979, 1982 and 1994) and the Artslink Grant (US). She is currently working in Berlin as part of a DAAD grant.
Saâdane Afif draws from the fields of both art and music in order to critically explore the notions of interpretation, collaboration and translation. His installations, which include light, sound, pictures, texts and sculptural elements (often in the form of manipulated musical instruments and appliances), are often accompanied by a complex reflection on authorship.
For example, in Black Cords (2007), his contribution to documenta 12, Afif arranged thirteen black guitars with automatons and amplifiers in a darkened room, programming the automatons to play each of the guitars at alternating intervals. The investigation of authorship is also present in Lyrics, a project that begun in 2004 when Afif commissioned writers to produce lyrics based on his artworks. The lyrics became wall texts, and afterwards musicians were commissioned to create music for them. Lyrics was first shown at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France in 2005. For the exhibition Technical Specifications at Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Afif reworked for the first time his own sculptures and installations.
Afif's solo exhibition includes Technical specifications at Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2008), One, at FRAC Pays de Loire, Carquefou, France, Two…, FRAC Basse-Normandie, Caen, France (2008). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Pop! goes the weasel at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany (2007), documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007), Learn to Read at Tate Modern, London, UK (2007) and Airs de Paris at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2007).
Saâdane Afif's residency was made possible with funds from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and by additional support from Culturesfrance.
London-based artist Enrico David's production and work, explores the creative intellect, sexual identity, cultural inheritence, and the meaning of art objects by integrating mechanisms of irony and dark humour. By employing a conscious strategy of disjuncture, incoherence, and an overall stream of consciousness, David endows thoughts, such as "meaning is welded to understanding, yet understanding has been blown loose from creativity," with sculptural composition. David's recent critically-acclaimed solo exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London was described by OCA's Director Marta Kuzma inArtforum's "Best of 2007": "Reflecting on the tireless efforts of artists of late to merge art with the historical traditions of theater in all too often disharmonious and disingenuous combinations of Beckett, Brecht, and Cage, David's recent exhibition divided into three acts - 'Corrupt and Crooked,' 'Molten Brown Nylon,' and 'Ultra Paste.' Motivated by a kind of unmediated pleasure principle, the artist transposed his obsession with treating 'people as objects' and his abject perversions like 'rubbing himself against the effigy of trustworthiness' into meticulously rendered illustrations, assemblages, and room-size installations."
From 2008 until 2013 Pablo Lafuente has been the Associate Curator at OCA, for which he developed a number of projects, among others the anthology Whatever Happened to Sex inScandinavia? In 2011 he was a co-curator with Marta Kuzma and Peter Osborne of Norway’s official representation for the 54th Venice Biennale, which included the lecture series 'The State of Things'. Lafuente has written for numerous magazines and books, and since 2005 he is an editor for the publishing and research organization Afterall. Lafuente is also a lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where he runs the MRes Art: Exhbition Studies.
Raqs Media Collective consists of Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events, locates them squarely along the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory - often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They co-founded Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Dehli, India, in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series.
Polly Staple is an independent curator and writer as well as Editor-a-Large of the contemporary arts journal frieze. Staple was formerly Director of Frieze Projects, the curatorial programme realized annually at Frieze Art Fair, London where she produced commissions with artists including Pawel Althamer, Manon de Boer, Jeremy Deller, Liam Gillick, Aleksandra Mir, Paola Pivi, Roman Ondak, Martha Rosler, Lawrence Weiner, Cathy Wilkes and Andrea Zittel alongside "The Artists Cinema" in association with LUX, and a talks programme including presentations from cultural figures such as Marina Abramovic, Thomas Crow, Zaha Hadid, Jacques Rancière and Saskia Sassen.
Staple was previously Curator at Cubitt Gallery, London and co-Editor of Untitled magazine. She is a tutor on the MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design and has been a regular visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College, and contributor to a range of publications including frieze, Art Monthly and Afterall writing criticism and essays on artists, including - Micol Assaël, Johanna Billing, Gillian Carnegie, Hilary Lloyd and Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan, She is the commissioning editor and producer of the bi-annual publication Living & Loving by Aleksandra Mir. A former member of the Arts Council Collection Acquisitions & Advisory Committee, Staple is currently chair of the board of trustees of Studio Voltaire, London and The Elephant Trust.
More recently, Staple co-curated You Have Not Been Honest, a major British Council produced, touring survey show of contemporary film and video from the UK. Including works by Phil Collins, Ryan Gander, Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, The Otolith Group and Margaret Salmon, and which opened at MADRE, Naples (2007). Staple is currently developing a "Switzerland: Art, Commerce and the Desiring Subject", as a research project to be realized as a group essay-show and publication in 2008/09.