Visitors 2009

For three decades, Barbara T. Smith has been at the forefront of feminist, body and performance art in California, USA. Trained as a painter, Smith began her body-oriented work in 1965. As one of the originators of California performance art scene, Smith worked together with artists such as Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Suzanne Lacy and Paul McCarthy. Her work is aligned with 1970s art practice that explores, among other things, the body and the patriarchal structures within the art world. Her work externalises psychic materials, in the form of mythic rituals that deal with issues of gender, spirituality and sexuality. Smith approaches the intimate, personal and participatory, and often the works evolves into extending over several days.

Barbara T. Smith is a founding member of several artist-run galleries and is Chair of the Performance and Video Programming Committee at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. She has worked as a curator and organized many panel discussions, performance events and workshops. Smith has also written about other artists' work in various West Coast publications, gave numerous guest lectures and taught in California universities since 1974.

Barbara T. Smith recently had a solo show 'Barbara T. Smith 1965-1972', at Maccarone, New York City (2008). For the exhibition 'Allan Kaprow - Art As Life', Smith reinventedPush and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann (1963), MOCA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008). Her work was also part of the exhibitions: 'Art Since the1960s: California Experiments', Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2008), 'WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution', The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, curated by Connie Butler (2007), among others.

During the symposium 'Art, the Social and Gender Politics in the 1960s and 1970s', Smith gave the presentation Art, Performance and the Body: Barbara T. Smith and the West Coast scene in the 1960s and 70s, which she discussed her engagement with the West Coast art scene in California, USA during this period, focusing on the new forms of performance art, participation, gender, spirituality and the body.

Jonas Mekas is one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the 'New American Cinema'. He was editor and chief of Film Culture and wrote Movie Journal, a film column for the Village Voice. He is the co-founder of The Filmmakers' Co-operative (FMC) and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. Among films made by Jonas Mekas are Guns of the Trees (1961), The Brig (1963),Walden (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost (1975), Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (1972), Zefiro torna, (1992) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001). Jonas Mekas' films have been screened extensively and he has received numerous grants and awards, among them, New York State Council on the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Luluc Huang's writings on international art, film and fashion are widely syndicated across the Chinese cultural media, and her blog is well known throughout the Chinese art and literary world for its characteristic mix of cultural commentary, criticism and gossip. She has worked as Asia representative for Artforum International (2006-08), curator at the non-profit art space UniversalStudios-Beijing (now Boersli Gallery, 2005-06) and editor of Rear Window(2003-05), at that time China's leading online film discussion forum. She holds a masters in Comparative Literature from Nanjing University, Nanjing, People's Republic of China.

This project is supported with 03-funds, a support program underwritten by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for enhancing collaboration in the contemporary art field in countries in the south.

The experimental filmmaker Babette Mangolte was one of the first women accepted into the cinematography programme at L'École Nationale de la Photographie et de la Cinématographie in Paris, founded by Louis Lumiére, in 1964. She discovered cinema with the New Wave and moved to New York City in 1970, where she worked as the cinematographer for Chantal Ackerman and Yvonne Rainer among others. In her work as director from the 1970s, Mangolte focused on performance documentation, working with artists such as Richard Foreman, Robert Whitman, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs. Her early film work was a self-examination as to what it means to be a spectator, but also an experiment in narrative filmmaking. Among the films directed by Mangolte are What Maisie Knew (1976), The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977), Four Pieces by Morris (1993) and Seven Easy Pieces (2007). Her films are in the collections of the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Deutsche Kinematek, Berlin and the Cinéathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels. The first retrospective dedicated to her work took place in 2000 in three German cities - Berlin, Hamburg and Munich - and was organised by Madeleine Bernstorff and Kleus Volkmer from the Munich Film Archives. Her second retrospective was in New York in September 2004 at the Anthology Film Archives.

The work of Trisha Donnelly explores the limits of perception through the use of language, experience and order. Her practice suggests a profound belief in the notion of art as a situational phenomenon, existing in relation to other things in the world and, just as importantly, to its experience. Donnelly uses multiple media, including photography, drawing and performance, and moves regularly between the performative and text. Her performances and demonstrations tend to happen just once and leave no trace behind.

Donnelly's recent solo exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA (2008), Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (2007), Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2006) and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2005). She has also participated in group shows such as 'Meet Me Around the Corner: Works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection', at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2008); 'The Third Mind' at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2007-08); 'Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan', at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (2007); the 54th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2004); and 'Utopia Station' at the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California in Los Angeles and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art.

Roger Buergel was recently appointed the artistic director of the Busan Biennale 2012. He received his education from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and studied under the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch for 3 years. He served as a guest curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and the artistic director of Documenta Ⅻ Kassel. He also curated exhibitions that won critical acclaim, such as ‘Barely Something. On Ai Weiwei’ (2010, Museum DKM, Duisburg, Germany), ‘The Government’ (2003–2005, University Art Gallery Luneburg, Germany; Museum d'Art Contemporary de Barcelona, Spain; Miami Art Central, Miami, FL, USA; Witte de with Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam Secession, Rotterdam, the Netherlands) and ‘The Subject and Power’ (2001, Central House of the Art). He taught in Luneburg University (2002–2005, Luneburg) and the Academy of Fine Arts (2007–2009, Karlsruhe, Germany), contributing significantly to the education of young artists.

Sheela Gowda trained as a painter during the mid-1980s, at the Royal College of Arts in London and the Cité International des Arts in Paris. These European references, together with an awareness of the Indian socio-cultural situation, resulted in a series of oil paintings dealing with the bodily and emotional immersion of people in their surroundings. At the beginning of the 1990s Gowda started using unconventional and often unusual materials, through which she expressed the angst and melancholy caused by local socio-political tensions. Her labour-intensive installations show an attempt to preserve the integrity of her materials and at the same time the will to contend with their peculiar resistances. In her own words, Gowda seeks a 'specificity within abstraction' that avoids strident statements and instead reveals meaning through suggestion.

Sheela Gowda's work has been included in documenta 12 , Kassel, 2007; 'Fare Mondi//Making Worlds…', the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009; 'Indian Highway' at The Serpentine Gallery, London and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway, 2009; the 2009 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; 'Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture', MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, 2008; and 'HORN PLEASE: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art', Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Switzerland, 2007-08 among others.

Sheela Gowda's Rresidency has been supported by O3-funds as underwritten by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for enhancing collaboration in the contemporary art field with professional artists in countries designated by the MFA. The purpose of the O3-funds as allocated to OCA is to further develop cooperation and professional networking between OCA and the constituency of artists, independent cultural producers, and organisations that are located in designated countries.

Stuart Bailey is a graphic designer and co-editor of Dot Dot Dot, a publication concerned with art, design, music, language, literature and architecture, with David Reinfurt (earlier with Peter Bilak). His work circumscribes various aspects of graphic design, writing and editing, most consistently in the form of publications made in close collaboration with artists. Since 2002 he has worked with Will Holder under the compound name Will Stuart on a broader range of projects, including theatre and performance. Since 2006 he has worked together with David Reinfurt as Dexter Sinister, also the name of their basement space on New York City's Lower East Side that operates as a workshop and occasional bookstore.