T.J. Clark has until last year held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair, and Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley in California. His writings on art history throughout the 1970s and 80s single-handedly redefined the history of modernism internationally. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–51 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (both 1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985); Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999); Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (co-written with Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts under the name Retort, 2005) and The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006).
Visitors 2010
Goshka Macuga attended Wojciech Gerson School of Art in Warsaw, Central Saint Martins School of Art, London and Goldsmiths College, London. She merges the roles of collector, curator and artist, creating carefully staged, mixed-media installations that draw on the conventions of the historical archive and exhibition making. Her installations play with historic objects and documents. Creating complex networks of reference they are poignant reminders of the profound relation between aesthetics and politics. She uses techniques and styles common in archiving and museum display. Macuga's solo exhibitions include, 'The Nature of The Beast' (2009-10), Whitechapel Gallery, London; 'I Am Become Death' (2009), Kunsthalle Basel; 'Objects in Relation, Art Now' (2007), Tate Britain London; 'Sleep of Ulro' (2006), Liverpool. Group exhibitions include the 53rd Venice Biennale: 'Fare Mondi/Making Words…', Venice; 'The Great Transformation: Art and Tactical Magic', Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 'Martian Museum of Terrestial Art', Barbican Art Gallery, London; 'The British Art Show', Baltic and touring the UK. She has also participated in the the 27th São Paulo Biennial (2006) and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008.
Peter Friedl is an artist. His artistic practice - consistently heterogeneous in terms of medium, style, and meaning - emphasizes the friction between aesthetic and political awareness in the framework of their respective narratives. His works explore the conditions and genres of representation, employing strategies such as permanent displacement, editing, or over-exposing. Friedl's recent solo exhibitions include Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2010), Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen (2008), 'Working', Kunsthalle Basel (2008), 'OUT OF THE SHADOWS', Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art (2004). In 2006, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) organized a comprehensive retrospective exhibition 'Peter Friedl: Work 1964-2006,' which was subsequently shown at Miami Art Central/Miami Art Museum (2007) and the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Marseille (2007). Friedl's work has been exhibited worldwide, including at documenta X (1997) and documenta 12, Kassel (2007), the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the 3rd Berlin Biennale (2004), the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville (2006), Manifesta 7, Trento (2008), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), the 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008), and Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, Tirana (2009). Since the 1980s, Friedl has published numerous essays and book projects such as Four or Five Roses (2004) and Working at Copan (2007). A selection of his Writings and Interviews 1981-2009 has been released in 2010.
AA Bronson lived and worked as a member of the artists' group General Idea from 1969 through 1994, with Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz. Together, they presented over 100 solo exhibitions world-wide, and exhibited in biennales in Paris (1977), Venice (1982), Sydney (1983) and São Paulo (1998), as well as documenta (1983). They published the influential FILEmagazine (1972-89), and founded Art Metropole (1974), an early artist-run archive and distribution centre for artists' editions and publications in Toronto. In the last seven years of their time together they worked solely on the subject of AIDS. Since the deaths of his collaborators in 1994, AA Bronson has worked and exhibited as a solo artist, curator, educator and animator. Solo exhibitions include those presented at Secession, Vienna (2000); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001); the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge (2002) and the Power Plant, Toronto (2003). He is the author and editor of numerous texts and books, including his autobiography Negative Thoughts (2001) and Queer Zines (2008). He is also the director of Printed Matter, Inc., and the Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary. He was appointed Senior Critic at the School of Art, Yale University, in 2006, and given honorary doctorates by NSCAD University in 2007 and Concordia University in 2009.