Visitors 2016

Sadya Mizan is an independent curator and researcher. She is the founder and Director of URONTO Artists Community (2012) which does interactive storytelling, research-based documentation and cultural exchange through Art. She is also the Founder of Art Initiatives Bangladesh (AIB) since 2018- A networking platform for aesthetical Practice. Completing her Post-Graduation in Graphic Design from the Faculty of Fine art, University of Dhaka- BD, Mizan has been involved in various fields as a coordinator, creative director and project director in Bangladesh. Mizan has been a Dhaka based contributing researcher for the Asia Art Archive-Delhi. She is a member of the Artist-Led-Initiatives forum by Samdani Art Foundation also is awarded as one of the potential Arts-Managers from South Asian regions by the Art Think South Asia Fellowship (ATSA). Being nominated for a research Grant by Foundation for Art Initiatives (FfAI), her recent research is looking into strategical planning, inclusiveness and accessibility of Art Organization models based in South Africa, South America (Colombia) and New York. Further extended in Germany and Norway too.

Devika Singh's work focuses on modern and contemporary art and architecture in South Asia and the global history of modernism. She was recently appointed Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. She was previously Smuts Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies of the University of Cambridge and a fellow at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art in Paris. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting fellow at the French Academy at Rome, the Freie Universität and the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. Her research received the support of the British Academy, AHRC, DAAD, Trinity College and Paul Mellon Centre, among others. She writes frequently for journals and exhibition catalogues and is finishing a monograph on art in post independence India for Reaktion Books. Recent exhibitions she curated include ‘Gedney in India’ (CSMVS, Mumbai, 2017;Duke University, 2018) and ‘Planetary Planning’ (Dhaka Art Summit, 2018).

An internationally acclaimed curator, Rodríguez most recently served as the director of CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain of Bordeaux from 2014–18, where the core of her project was to consolidate the museum as a platform for knowledge through the exhibition, cultural, and educational programmes. To this end she oversaw important retrospective exhibitions for artist such as Judy Chicago, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Franz Erhard Walther, and Beatriz Gonzalez as well as site specific commissions for the nave of the museum with Danh Vo, Leonor Antunes, Rosa Barba, and Naufus Ramirez Figueroa. Prior to Bordeaux, Rodríguez served as chief curator at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC) in Mexico City and chief curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon (MUSAC) in Spain. Her curatorial and research practice has dealt with a wide array of topics and interests, including the appropriation of public space in art, design, education, architecture, and urbanism as well as the links between artistic production in its historical, political, and social contexts.

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a curator, writer and educator. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, an online and onsite platform for community driven dialogue and discourse about craft. Wiggers served as the Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art), Portland, OR, from 2004–14, where she explored craft as a noun and a verb, and curated more than 65 exhibitions focused on contemporary and historical craft. Selected exhibitions include: 'Touching Warms the Art'; 'Object Focus: The Bowl'; and 'The Academy is Full of Craft'. Recent projects include 'Everything Has Been Material for Scissors to Shape' (2016–17), and 'Across the Table, Across the Land' (2016, with Michael Strand). Selected publications include essays and chapters in: Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade, Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture; Shows and Tales: On Jewelry Exhibition-Making; On + Off: Jewelry in the Wider Cultural Field; Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective; and Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft. Wiggers is the author of Generations: Betty Feves; Ken Shores: Clay Has the Last Word, Unpacking the Collection: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and editor of Garth Clark's How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts. She is the editor of the forthcoming Companion on Contemporary Craft, (Wiley Blackwell), and What is Contemporary About Craft?, Critical Craft Forum’s first print publication. She is an adjunct professor and graduate student mentor in the MFA in Applied Craft + Design, Oregon College of Art + Craft/Pacific Northwest College of Art and at Portland State University. In 2017, Wiggers received an award for Regional Excellence from NCECA with Nicole Nathan for their work on ceramics field at MoCC. Wiggers serves on the Board of Directors of The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She is the Exhibition Review Editor for The Journal of Modern Craft.

During her residence at Ekely as part of OCA's International Syudio Programme, Wiggers worked with Norwegian Crafts as a curator in residence, acting as consultant to both Norwegian Crafts and Galleri Format Oslo on forthcoming programmes and strategies.
Wiggers spent acquainted herself with the Norwegian contemporary craft scene by conducting studio visits to Norwegian crafts artists in Oslo, Tromsø and Trondheim, hosting professional workshops with curators and critics, and by moderating and hosting the international seminar 'Crafting Utopia and Dystopia: Future of Crafts in Museums' in Trondheim.

From August to November 2017, Gitanjali Dang will join the OCA ISP residency of Ekely, Oslo, and extend it through the OCA ISP+ to the Lofoten archipelago, which will include, among others, an OCA collaboration with Røst AiR. Røst AiR is an artist-in-residence run by a working group consisting of Elin Már Øyen Vister, Jason Rosenberg and Marie Kaada Hovden working on alternative ways of navigating, creating and being in this world. OCA would like to thank the Nordland County Council, Bodø; and The Hamsun Centre, Hamarøy for their kind support and collaboration.

Gitanjali Dang is a curator, writer and shape-shifter. In 2012, she founded Khanabadosh, an itinerant arts lab. Khanabadosh lives off latitude, magic and agnosticism, and is interested in everything. It is particularly interested in constantly rethinking what it—and everything around it—is about. In 2015, Khanabadosh, in collaboration with Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts, co-founded Draft, which explores contemporary art that produces, contributes to or provokes public debate.

khanabadosh.info
draftprojects.info
aarandaar.net

Alice Creischer is an artist, curator, writer and theorist. Her artistic practice and theoretical work focuses on issues of economic and institutional critique, globalisation and the history of capitalism. Rather than concentrating on the production of individual works, Creischer centers on the process of inquiry to illuminate particular political histories of given contexts. Adopting prop-like devices and meticulously crafted and sewn objects, Creischer choreographs a space within a system of coordinates that deconstruct yet another set of given historical relations. Extending beyond artistic production, Creischer has also been prolific in her critical writings and curatorial projects.

Anders Sunna is an artist who grew up in a reindeer herding family in Kieksiäisvaara. His artistic work engages with the history of the Sami people and with his family's 47 year conflict with Sweden’s northernmost administrative herding delegation.

Magali Daniaux and Cédric Pigot have been working together since 2001. Their work bears the dual hallmark of experimentation and performance and brings together various media associating elements from opposite ranges with a taste for connections between sci-fi and documentary forms, high-tech engineering and fantasy tales, heavyweight materials and fleeting sensations. Starting with installations and objects, their work soon included experimental actions and more immaterial artistic gestures. Daniaux and Pigot are currently working in Alaska on land art projects dealing with time, archaeology, geology and climate change. Their work has been shown in institutions such as Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2014); Venice Biennial of Architecture (2014); Barents Spektakel, Kirkenes, Norway (2013); Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival (2011); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2011); Qui Vive International Biennial, Moscow (2010) and Dashanzi Art Festival, Beijing (2004). They were laureates of a Villa Medici hors-les-murs residency in 2003, fellows at the Cité Siam in Bangkok in 2005, at Dar Batha in Fez, Morocco in 2013 and at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, in 2015 and 2016. They were finalists of the COAL Prize Art and Environment in 2010.

Daniaux and Pigot are participating in the Winter Solstice 2016 NOVE SED NON NOVA, a night exhibition and cross-disciplinary event in Oslo gathering experimental music, visual arts, contemporary circus, performance, performative poetry and video-art; organised by Vandaler Forening the 17th of December 2016.

The artists’ participation within OCA’s ISP residency in Ekely is held in collaboration with Vandaler forening.

Eliza Naranjo Morse’s participation within OCA’s ISP residency in Ekely, Oslo, is being held in collaboration with PRAKSIS with whom Naranjo Morse will bring together a residency community and develop a series of initiatives under the title ‘In time, we too will become ancestors…’. An open call for participants will be released shortly from PRAKSIS seeking artists, philosophers, historians, writers, curators, and other professionals interested in cultural history, shared philosophies and synergic issues related to indigenous perspectives, such as the ones of the Sami population of the European continent or those of Native Americans. It will be an exploratory ground for a broader exchange on identity, perspective, sustainability, progress, and aesthetic history. For more information on the programme please click here.

Eliza Naranjo Morse studied drawing at Parsons School of Design and at the Institute for American Indian Arts, and ultimately graduated from Skidmore College with a B.S. in art in 2003. Through simple studies that are uncomplicated interactions with the nature of materials, she brings to the fore her history, with indigenous background knowledge, and a personal aesthetic. Naranjo Morse has shown her work in a number of international venues including, among others, at Cumbre de el Tajin, Veracruz, Mexico; Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinburg, Russia; Chelsea Art Museum, New York, New York; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM, USA; Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ, USA; Berlin Gallery Phoenix; School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe. A participating artist of the Site Santa Fe Biennial in 2008 she is also a 2007 awardee of the King Artist Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe.

Bhavna Kakar is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of TAKE on art magazine and the Founding Director of Latitude 28, a contemporary art gallery located in New Delhi. With several years of experience in arts management, writing, editing and curating Bhavna founded TAKE magazine in 2010 and has nurtured it to become one of the leading arts journals within the South Asian region which, through its diverse contributions and guest edited issues, now occupies a global platform. Her commitment to fostering art writing practices is one of the driving forces behind TAKE’s continued effort to establish a space for independent art writers by supporting both emerging and established critics through writers’ awards, workshops, panel discussions and seminars. Significant projects in this direction include TAKE on Residency, IFA and 1 Shanthi Road in 2013, TAKE on Writing, Critic-Community: Contemporary Art Writing in India in Goa in 2014 and more recently Take on Writing | Critical Writing Ensemble’s Baroda Chapter, MS University of Baroda in December 2015, as well as the Dhaka Chapter of CWE, conceptualised by Katya Garcia Anton that was held in collaboration with OCA, Norway at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2016. Under Kakar’s leadership, TAKE has participated extensively in various international curated forums and fairs including Art Basel, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Dubai, the Asia Triennial Manchester, Dhaka Art Summit and Videobrasil. A post-graduate in Art History from MS University Baroda, Kakar is a JRF-UGC grantee with a research fellowship on her ongoing thesis on pre-modern art focusing on sculpture from the Vidarbha region. Kakar is currently developing a volume of selected essays on the eminent Indian critic K B Goel and co-curating a travelling exhibition and book titled Planet Sharing; or How to Live Nonanthropocentrically with Plants and the next edition of TAKE on Writing: The Book scheduled for December 2016.

During her OCA residency, Saodat Ismailova is planning to work on archives of silent Uzbek films from early 1930s and film journals from the region to create a work dedicated to the female body in relation to its public representation. Furthermore, as part of the OCA ISP programme Ismailova will travel to Tromsø to develop her first solo exhibition in Northern Europe at the Tromsø Kunstforening (TKF), which is scheduled to open in January 2017.

Saodat Ismailova has studied filmmaking at the Tashkent State Institute of Art in Uzbekistan. Subsequently she joined the cinema department of Fabrica, Benetton's research centre, Treviso, Italy, where she directed the short film Zulfiya and co-directed Aral, Fishing In An Invisible Sea (with Carlos Casas), awarded Best Documentary film of the 2004 Torino Film Festival. Her first award-winning feature film 40 Days of Silence premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 and has since been presented in more than 30 countries around the world. She is presently working on directing her next feature-length film Barzagh, which has received support from the Hubert Bals Fund, The Netherlands, and the Asian Cinema Fund, South Korea.

Saodat's video- and sound-installations have been presented in numerous international exhibition and festivals including most recently the 2013 Venice Biennale (Central Asian Pavilion) and 'Lost to the Future', the 2014 Singapore Biennale. Titled 'Celestial Circles', her first solo exhibition was presented at the Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg, Germany in 2015.

Currently Ismailova is a guest artist at Le Fresnoy, National Center of Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing, France, where she is working on the three-screen film installation Stains of Oxus – featuring the Amu Dariya, a major river in Central Asia and collecting the dreams of its inhabitants alongside the river's shores – and the 'choreographic film' Two Horizons, which reflects on dance heritage in Central Asia and the disappearance of these dances.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and cultural critic. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. He is co-editor of the journals K&K: Kultur & Klasse and Mr Antipyrine. He has published a number of books, including Crisis to Insurrection: Notes on the Ongoing Breakdown (Minor Compositions, 2015) and Playmates and Playboys on a Higher Level (Sternberg Press, 2015), as well as articles in journals such as e-flux journal, Rethinking Marxism, Texte zur Kunst and Third Text.

Juan Puntes is the founder, curator and artistic director of WhiteBox, a New Yorkcentric, international non-profit alternative art space, founded with the support of a small group of artists, intellectual thinkers, and curators in 1998 in the Chelsea art district of Manhattan. WhiteBox has ever since been dedicated to presenting a continuous stream of original in-house and guest-curated cross-disciplinary contemporary projects focusing on a wide variety of art practices encompassing fine art, new media, installation art, electronic music, sound and performance laboratories, including opera, and politically activist exhibitions.
WhiteBox has relocated to the grittier Lower East Side of Manhattan, and works continuously in conjunction with neighboring non-profits, schools, public institutions and grassroots organisations to promote art projects rooted in and relevant to the real world. WhiteBox is currently in the process of dramatically transforming its gallery space with a radical design by architect Steven Holl and artist Lawrence Weiner aiming to remain architectonically as well, at the forefront of the Manhattan art scene; and continuing to partner with cutting-edge local, regional, national and international arts organisations.

James Bridle is an artist and a writer. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Observer and many others, in print and online. He lectures regularly at conferences, universities, and other events. His formulation of the New Aesthetic research project has spurred debate and creative work across multiple disciplines.
Bridle's residency as part of OCA's Studio Programme in March 2016 is organized in conjunction with his participation in the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016.

Adam Kleinman is a writer, editor, curator, lecturer, sometime performer, and former dOCUMENTA (13) Agent for Public Programming. He was Curator at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), where he created the interpretative humanities program ‘Access Restricted’. At LMCC, Kleinman developed LentSpace, a cultural venue and garden design by Interboro Partners, which repurposed an entire vacant Manhattan block. There, he curated the exhibitions ‘Avenue of the Americas’ (2010), and ‘Points & Lines’ (2009). Kleinman is also a frequent guest tutor at numerous educational institutions internationally as well as a contributor to multiple exhibition catalogues, monographs, anthologies, and magazines including Art-agenda, Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, Mousse, Texte zur Kunst, and TheWhite Review. Kleinman is currently Editor-in-Chief & Adjunct Curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) where he and the team launched WdW Review, a multi-disciplinary arts, culture & politics journal. In addition to these activities, Kleinman often curates thematic exhibitions at Witte de With and likewise programs symposia and other events at the center.

Eglė Budvytytė received her education from the Vilnius Art Academy in Lithuania, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Piet Zwart Institute, both in The Netherlands. In her work she creates performative and cinematographic situations in which she explores the body's ability to challenge conventions of conduct formed by public spaces. Authentic movement contrasts with the rational homogenised layout of the city. Her work manoeuvres between scripted and ordinary behaviour, and searches for unseen gaps and cracks where groups of unusual codified behaviour can be found. In resisting documentary (both the clichés of film language and the realities of the city or social groups born out of urban processes), she creates poetic commentaries through her films and events that defy the usual expectations of the audience, and reminds us that the potential for change lies in the imagination.

Selected projects and exhibitions include 'You must change your life', Artefact Festival, STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium; 'Le Mouvement, Performing the City', 12th Swiss sculpture exhibition, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland; 'Society Acts – The Moderna Exhbition 2014, Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden; 'The forgotten pioneer movement', District Kunst und Kulturförderung, Berlin, Germany; 'You imagine what you desire', 19th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; 'Buildering – Misbehaving the City', Contemporary Art Centre, Cincinnati, OH, USA; and 'Literacy/Illiteracy', the 16th Tallinn Print Triennial, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia.

Eglė Budvytytė's residency is part of 'Climbing Invisible Structures. Curated Residencies and Exhibitions in Norway, Iceland and Lithuania', a visual arts residency exchange and exhibition programme organised by the Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts (NAC) (Lithuania), in collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), the Nordic Artists' Centre Dale (Norway), the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland), and the Ars Communis Residency Centre YO-YO (Lithuania).
The programme is financed by the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism 2009-2014 and Nida Art Colony.

The work of Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui often explores neglected or overlooked sites, carefully cataloguing and highlighting each location's tendency towards entropy. Her projects have ranged from a guide to the wastelands of Amsterdam or London, to the display – in their raw form – of the materials used to construct the galleries in which she exhibits. Recently Lara filled the interior of the Spanish pavillion of the 55th Venice Bienniale with massive piles of building ruble similar to those used by workers during its construction. Working at a time of widespread urban renewal in Europe, she has remained a champion of overlooked, forgotten sites — creating guides for the cities’ wastelands and even instigating their legal protection. Her projects analyse the urban space thought showing the origine of the constructed and its building materials.

Recent group exhibitions include the Spanish pavilon, 55th Venice Biennial (2013); Manifesta IX, Genk, (2012), Radical Nature, Barbican Art Centre London, Shenzhen and Athens biennale (2009), Taipei and Gwuangyu Biennale in 2008, Sharjah Biennale (2007), The 27th São Paulo Biennial, San Paulo (2006), the 2nd Seville Biennial, Seville (2006), and Liverpool Biennale (2004). She has lectured in many art and architecture centers as well as Universities such as the London School of Economins, South California University, Madrid Architectural Faculty, Creative Time New York, Institut für Kunst und Architektur, Vienna, and Tate Britain in London.

Spanish artist Dora García uses a range of media including performance, video, text and installation. Her practice investigates the conditions that shape the encounter between the artist, the artwork and the viewer, focusing more particularly on the notions of duration, access and readability. García’s pieces often involve staging unscripted scenarios that elicit doubt as to the fictional or spontaneous nature of a given situation, setting rules of engagement or using recording devices to frame both conscious and unconscious forms of spectator participation. García’s work also explores the political potential rooted in marginal positions, paying homage through several works to eccentric and often anti-heroic personas. Dora García has participated in dOCUMENTA13 (2012), Biennale di Venezia (2011), São Paulo Biennial (2010), Lyon Biennale (2009), the Biennale of Sydney (2008), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and Istanbul Biennial (2003) among others.

Apolonija Šušteršič is an architect and visual artist. Her work is related to a critical analysis of space; usually focused at the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning and architecture. Her broad – ranging interest starts at phenomenological study of space and continues its investigation into social and political nature of our living environment. She usually makes extensive researches into specific situations found on location, which she uses as a starting point of her project. The result isn’t only presented as analytical criticism but it produces in itself already a suggestion for the future. She pursues new possibilities and makes proposals from a hybrid point of view that ranges beyond art and architecture, making socially committed works naturally taking the form of everyday life activity. Her practice is imbedded within interdisciplinary discourse and usually includes collaborations with other professionals such as architects, urban planners, curators, sociologists, and local population. Together with architect and professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm Meike Schalk, she formed an operative unit which occasionally produces research, projects, actions and discussions. Apolonija Šušteršič participated in a number of internationally published and exhibited projects and exhibitions within and beyond the international contemporary art institutions around the world, like Moderna Museet Stockholm, Berlin Bienale 2, Luxembourg City of Culture, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Marian Goodman, Paris, De Appel, Amsterdam, Generali Foundation, Vienna, Art Museum, University of Memphis, USA, Tirana Biennale 3, Tirana, Muhka, Antwerp, Edinburgh International Festival, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Galerie für Zeitgenossische Kunst, Leipzig, 12th Architecture Biennale, Venice and Artes Mundi 5, among others. She has a PhD from University of Lund, Malmö Art Academy, Sweden; and runs her own art / architecture studio practice in Lund, Sweden and in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Recently she was appointed as a professor in visual art at Oslo National Academy for the Arts, to build up the MA studies under title Art & Public Space.

Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, and an editor. She is the author of Rumored Animals (2012); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); and Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2014). A regular contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor to Frieze, her essays and poems appear in many artist monographs and critical anthologies. Her lectures and readings have also been held widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; and her work has been featured at the Serpentine Gallery, London; CRAC Alsace, France; the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy; and Qalandia International, Ramallah/Jerusalem. She is the co-editor, with Adam Szymczyk, of Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder (2014); Paul Sietsema: Interviews on Films and Works (2012); and Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created (2013); and the co-editor of No Core: Pamela Rosenkranz (2012). In 2012, she was a Pushcart Prize finalist and an Arts Writers Grant recipient through the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation programme. Latimer studied at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York, and teaches at Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD), Geneva.

Latimer's visit in August 2016 coincides with the presentation of documenta 14's journal South in Kárášjohka, Sápmi (Karasjok, Norway), allowing the documenta 14 team to encounter current artistic practices and conduct research regarding recent history and developments within communities in Sápmi and northern Norway.

John Giorno graduated from Columbia University in 1958. Four years later, he met Andy Warhol, who became an important influence for Giorno's developments on poetry, performance and recordings. Giorno was the main character in Warhol’s film Sleep. He has also collaborated with William Burroughs, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the decade of the 2000’s, with Rirkirt Tirvanija, Pierre Huyge, Elizabeth Peyton, and Ugo Rondinone. He is the author of ten books, including You Got to Burn to Shine, Cancer in my Left Ball, Grasping at Emptiness, Suicide Sutra, and has produced 59 LPs, CDs, tapes cassettes, videopaks and DVDs for Giorno Poetry Systems.

Viktor Misiano is a curator and an art critic. From 1980 to 1990 he was a curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin National Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. From 1992 to 1997 he was the director of the Center for Contemporary Art (CAC), Moscow. He curated the Russian contribution in the Istanbul Biennale, Turkey (1992), the Venice Biennale, Italy (1995, 2003), the São Paulo Biennale, Brazil (2002, 2004), and the Valencia Biennale, Spain (2001). He was on the curatorial team for the Manifesta I in Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1996). In 1993 he founded the Moscow Art Magazine and has been its editor-in-chief ever since. In 2003 he was one of the founders of the Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship and has served as editor there since 2011. In 2005 he curated the first Central Asian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Italy. In 2007 he realized the large scale exhibition project ‘Progressive Nostalgia: Art from the Former USSR’ in the Centro per l’arte contemporanea, Prato, Italy; the Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; KUMU, Tallinn, Estonia and KIASMA, Helsinki, Finland. His latest exhibition project ‘Impossible Community’ was presented at the Moscow Museum for Modern Art (2011). Since October 2010 he is Chairman of the International Foundation Manifesta, as well as a Professor at the Nuova Academia Belle Arti (NABA), Milan, Italy and an honorary Doctorate at the Helsinki University for Art and Design, Finland.

Diserens has graduated from Art history studies, University Paris, and Independent Study Program of the Whitney museum of American art. She was curator at IVAM, Valencia; freelance curator and founder of Carta Blanca Editions, Madrid/Paris; Director of the Museums of Marseille, and then of the Fine Arts Museum of Nantes; Currently she is Director of Museion, Bolzano.

Sven Augustijnen studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium; the Hoger Sint-Lukas Instituut in Brussels, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands. His films have been included in exhibitions and festivals in Athens, Greece; Basel and Fribourg, Switzerland; San Sebastián, Spain; Siegen, Germany; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Tunis, Tunisia; Tel Aviv, Israel; Tokyo, Japan and Vilnius, Lithuania, among others. In 2007 he participated in the documenta 12 magazines project, in collaboration with A Prior, and in 2011 he was awarded the Evens Prize for Visual Arts.

Mike Sperlinger is Professor of Writing and Theory at The Academy of Fine Art Oslo. Before that, he worked for more than a decade at LUX, a London-based agency for artists working with the moving image, which he co-founded with Benjamin Cook in 2002. As a writer he has contributed to a variety of publications including Afterall, Art Monthly, Dot Dot Dot, frieze, Radical Philosophy and Texte zur Kunst, as well as catalogue texts for artists including Ed Atkins, Gerard Byrne and Hong-Kai Wang. He has edited publications including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’Cinema (2008). He has also curated a number of exhibitions, including ‘Let's Take Back Our Space’ (Focal Point Gallery, 2009) and a solo exhibition by Marianne Wex (Badischer Kunstverein, 2012). He was the producer of the film Crippled Symmetries by the artist Beatrice Gibson, which won the Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2015. He is currently working on a volume of selected writings by the late artist Ian White and an anthology of Tracks: a journal of writing by artists published in New York in the 1970s.

Rotor is participating in OCA's International Studio Programme in conjunction with their curatorial development and presentation of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2013.
Rotor is a young working collective of architects, engineers, designers and researchers based. In addition to bringing architecture and design projects to life, Rotor question the use of architecture and design, materials and waste through research, exhibitions and writings. Rotor received international recognition for their contribution at La Biennale di Venezia in 2010 and the OMA exhibition at the Barbican in London, UK, in 2011.

Peter Watkins is a film-maker and television director. He is the author of several landmark films since the 1950s, such as The War Game (1965), Punishment Park (1970), Edvard Munch (1973), The Freethinker (1992–94) and La Commune (de Paris, 1871) (1999) – films that investigate the current political conjuncture through contemporary or historical settings, and that critically address the limits and possibilities of the documentary form. Central to his work is the critical assessment of the mass media, the media crisis and the monoform, as reflected, for example, in his book Media Crisis (2004).

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a philosopher and a Professor of French at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. He works in the areas of the history of logic, the history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature, and is the author, among other titles, of Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989), Comment Philosopher en Islam (Paris: Panama, 2008), Islam and the Open Society:Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar: Codesria, 2011), and African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Calcutta, London and New York: Seagull, 2011). His latest book, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011) was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011. He is the co-director of the journal Éthiopiques, and a member of UNESCO’s Council of the Future.

Manthia Diawara is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and a professor of comparative literature at the New York University (NYU), New York, NY, USA. He is Director of NYU’s Institute of Afro-American Affairs and Director of the Africana Studies Programme, which focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of black culture, literature and politics.

Diawara received his education in France to later travel to the United States for his university studies. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, CA, USA and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), In Search of Africa (1998), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993) and African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.

In 1974 Issa Samb founded, together with a group of artists, writers, film-makers, performance artists and musicians, the Laboratoire Agit’Art, whose aim was to transform the nature of artistic practice from a formalist, object-bound sensibility to practices based on experimentation and agitation, process rather than product, ephemerality rather than permanence. With a focus on the contingent character of actions, the Laboratoire was informed by a critique of institutional power. Samb also co-founded the Gallery TENQ – Village des Arts in Dakar. He is the author of numerous plays, poems and essays. A retrospective of his work was held at the National Art Gallery, Dakar in 2010. His work has been included in exhibitions such as dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012), the Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, Dak’Art, Dakar (2008) and ‘Seven Stories of Modern Art in Africa’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (1995).

Peter Watkins is a film-maker and television director. He is the author of several landmark films since the 1950s, such as The War Game (1965), Punishment Park (1970), Edvard Munch (1973), The Freethinker (1992–94) and La Commune (de Paris, 1871) (1999) – films that investigate the current political conjuncture through contemporary or historical settings, and that critically address the limits and possibilities of the documentary form. Central to his work is the critical assessment of the mass media, the media crisis and the monoform, as reflected, for example, in his book Media Crisis (2004).

Sven Augustijnen studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium; the Hoger Sint-Lukas Instituut in Brussels, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands. His films have been included in exhibitions and festivals in Athens, Greece; Basel and Fribourg, Switzerland; San Sebastián, Spain; Siegen, Germany; Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Tunis, Tunisia; Tel Aviv, Israel; Tokyo, Japan and Vilnius, Lithuania, among others. In 2007 he participated in the documenta 12 magazines project, in collaboration with A Prior, and in 2011 he was awarded the Evens Prize for Visual Arts.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Corey McCorkle is interested in the Utopian ideas of nature and transcendence, which he pursues in many of his installations. McCorkle's work has been included in the surveys Make It Now at Sculpture Center (2005) and Greater New York 2005at PS1, and was featured in a solo exhibition in 2006 at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. McCorkle's work has also been included in The Plain of Heaven by Creative Time in NYC (2005) and in Monopolis at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2005). Most recently, his work was included in Just Kick It Till It Breaks at The Kitchen in NYC (2007). McCorkle will have upcoming exhibitions at Pompidou Center, Paris and SMAK in Gent. He is featured in the November 2007 issue of Frieze.

This residency is made possibly with 03 Funding: specifically designated funds made available by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for exchange with countries of the South in the field of contemporary art, discourse and production.

According to Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Mark Leckey is best known for manipulating pop images and music into dreamy, druggy, disjointed variants on music videos. Sometimes his work has a rough-edged energy, as in his 1999 club-life classic, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. Londonatella (2002) and Parade (2003) are nocturnal fantasies of beautiful people and consumer culture related to the 1980's photo based work of Richard Prince. He is also known for working with his band Jack2Jack in music video combinations as in The March of the Big White Barbarians - a sarcastic tour of public sculpture in London using only still images, and Shade of Destruction, a dark and baroque narrative based on a Graham Greene story about the destruction of a house in post-blitz London.

Mark Leckey is currently Professor of Film Studies at the Staelschule in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He is together with Ed Liq, Bonnie Camplin, and Enrico David, the founder of the band donAtelier. In 2008 he had a solo exhibition,Industrial Light and Magic, at Le Consortium in Dijon, with previous projects at Portikus in Frankfurt, Migros Museum in Zürich, Tate Britain, London and within group exhibitions at P.S.1/MoMA, Dundee Contemporary Arts, BALTIC, Manifesta 5, Salzburger Kunstverein, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art among others. He is represented by Cabinet in London, Buchholz Galerie in Cologne, and Gavin Brown in NYC.

Rosalind Nashashibi uses her 16mm camera as a catalyst, an accelerator of the real. Her films investigate the divide between reality and its extra-dimension - which could be fiction, the world of archetypes or spiritual realms, combining an interest in epic narrative with close observation of details. Throughout her work, she has observed small communities (Hreash House, 2004 and Midwest, 2002); investigated the unconsciously symbolic function of objects (Park Ambassador, 2004, Proximity Machines, 2007) and of a human standing in for an idea (Ambassador, 2004, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer); she has found mythological figures in the urban fabric of New York (Eyeballing, 2006) and attempted to reanimate encased objects in a museum (Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer). Her recent production focuses on the notion of bachelor machines. Bachelor Machines Part 1 combines the observation of a closed community - a cargo ship crew - with the attribution of an anthropomorphic character to the ship as a machine in itself. Conversely, Bachelor Machines Part 2 revolves around Thomas Bayrle's meditation on the invention of the machine, in particular the diesel engine, as man's materialisation of the desires once conveyed abstractly through the repetition of the rosary. Nashashibi conceives her practice more as a tool offered to the viewer to interrogate the world with her, than a report on our current state of affairs. Winner of Beck's Futures in 2003, Nashashibi has had solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and CCA Glasgow (2004). In 2006 she participated in Momentum, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway and in an OCA residency in February 2007 with a later solo show at the Chisenhale. In 2007 she also represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and exhibited in Contour, third Biennial for Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium and at Matrix, Berkeley Art Museum Berkeley California.

Pierre Bismuth tackles the challenges of contemporary art by addressing the representation and the reception of a work of art; by playing on the modalities and power of language and image; and by reappropriating art history and modern cultural references, from fashion to cinema. In doing so, he incorporates all artistic mediums available, from origami and collage to screenwriting and art installations. Bismuth has exhibited his works extensively throughout Europe, and North America. He earned an Academy Award in 2005 for co-authoring the screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Dessislava Dimova is a writer and curator. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She holds an MA in philosophy from CRMEP, Middlesex University, London and in Art History from the Bulgarian Academy of Arts, Sofia. In 2010 she curated 'Thank You for Your Understanding – 2', International Antakya Biennial, Antakya, Turkey. Recent projects include 'In 15 minutes everyone will be in the future. An opera' (18th Week of Contemporary Art, Plovdiv Bulgaria, 2012)and 'Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, Material Culture: Things in our Hands' (Christine Koenig Gallery, Vienna, 2011). Dessislava Dimova is a founding member of Art Affairs and Documents Foundation, Sofia and founding editor of blistermagazine.com. Her first novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in Bulgarian in 2009 (Razvitie, Sofia).

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.

Recent shows include, How to?, Kunsthalle Zürich; Grey Flags, The Sculpture Center, New York; Group Therapy, Museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Bolzano; Incipit, Espace Paul Ricard, Paris and The Look of Law, University of California, Irvine. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York.

Helen Mirra is an artist whose work occurs in varied scrap media, and engages structural and conceptual logics. Mirra engages quite directly in relation to poetry, but her interest is as much in the metrical as in the lyrical. This metricality, even percussiveness, inflects her work which is informed by anxieties related to the conflicting ecologies of the modern world. Within the various forms in which she operates, there is always a source material upon which decisions are made. Recent projects include Instance the Determination, which indexes works by John Dewey and Jane Addams, at the University of Chicago, Cloud, the, 3, published by JRP Ringier/Christoph Keller Editions in 2007, as well as solo shows at Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe; Peter Freeman, New York; Galerie Nelson, Paris; Dallas Art Museum; Berkeley Art Museum and the Whitney Museum, New York. Mirra completed her MFA at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1996, and has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, and Artadia: the Fund for Art and Dialogue. Mirra was a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm in 2005-06, and teaches at Harvard University.

Gabriel Kuri is an artist whose sculptural practice addresses issues of coding experience, temporality and space. His work encompasses an array of media grounded on the grammar of everyday lexicon and exchange. His vocabulary of forms places emphasis on process and the open and unstable nature of meaning. He studied at ENAP UNAM Mexico (88-92) and Goldsmiths College London (93-95). Recent solo shows include 2006 Govett Brewster National Art Gallery New Zealand, 2004 and 2006 Galleria Franco Noero Torino, 2004 MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2003 and 2007 Galeria Kurimanzutto Mexico. Recent Group shows include 2006 Brighton Photo Bienale, 2004 State of Play Serpentine Gallery London, 2003 Interludes L Venice Bienale.

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.

Chin-tao Wu is an author and academic who specializes in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed to New Left Review and New Statesman. Her latest book, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s, published by Verso in 2002, is being translated into Chinese. The Turkish edition was published in 2005, the Portuguese edition in October 2006, and its Spanish edition was published in February 2007. She is currently Assistant Research Fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London.

Marko Lulic reworks examples of modernism and exhibits them in iconic architectural spaces. In 2005, Lulic constructed a project in the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC, using large-scale monuments built throughout the former Yugoslavia under Tito's regime as a point of departure. He has exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Kunstraum, Innsbruck; MAK/Schindler House, Los Angeles; Grazer Kunstverein; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg. His upcoming solo projects in 2007 will take place at the Kunstverein Heilbronn, Kunstverein Oldenburg, and the Kunstverein Arnsberg. The artist published Modernity and YU with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade and Tesla 21 with the Bawag Foundation, Vienna. In 2007, he will publish new catalogues -Durch weichen Beton (Soft Concrete), with Grazer Kunstverein and Revolver Books, Frankfurt; and with Kunstverein Heilbronn and Snoeck, Cologne.

Thomas Bayrle is an artist who was trained as a weaver and currently works with drawings, collages, film and computer graphics. Bayrle focuses on ideas around the masses in his drawings, photocopy collages and film animation sequences dating from the 1960s, and further into ideas around generating superstructures through geometric patterns of images with a variety of techniques and materials. In doing so, his work reveals contradictions within the forms of organization upon which society rests. Bayrle taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stadelschule in Frankfurt from 1975 to 2002. He has received several awards and prizes including the Prix Arts Electronica, Linz (1995) and the Cologne Art Prize (2000). Bayrle's work has been shown in over thirty solo exhibitions internationally including in Documenta III and VI.

Rosalind Nashashibi uses her 16mm camera as a catalyst, an accelerator of the real. Her films investigate the divide between reality and its extra-dimension - which could be fiction, the world of archetypes or spiritual realms, combining an interest in epic narrative with close observation of details. Throughout her work, she has observed small communities (Hreash House, 2004 and Midwest, 2002); investigated the unconsciously symbolic function of objects (Park Ambassador, 2004, Proximity Machines, 2007) and of a human standing in for an idea (Ambassador, 2004, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer); she has found mythological figures in the urban fabric of New York (Eyeballing, 2006) and attempted to reanimate encased objects in a museum (Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer). Her recent production focuses on the notion of bachelor machines. Bachelor Machines Part 1 combines the observation of a closed community - a cargo ship crew - with the attribution of an anthropomorphic character to the ship as a machine in itself. Conversely, Bachelor Machines Part 2 revolves around Thomas Bayrle's meditation on the invention of the machine, in particular the diesel engine, as man's materialisation of the desires once conveyed abstractly through the repetition of the rosary. Nashashibi conceives her practice more as a tool offered to the viewer to interrogate the world with her, than a report on our current state of affairs. Winner of Beck's Futures in 2003, Nashashibi has had solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and CCA Glasgow (2004). In 2006 she participated in Momentum, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway and in an OCA residency in February 2007 with a later solo show at the Chisenhale. In 2007 she also represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and exhibited in Contour, third Biennial for Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium and at Matrix, Berkeley Art Museum Berkeley California.

Francesco Manacorda is a tutor in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London, and a writer and a freelance curator. In 2004 he curated the exhibition The Mythological Machine at the Mead Gallery, Warwick University, on the impact of mass-media images, and in 2005 A Certain Tendency in Representation - Cineclub at Thomas Dane, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and he organised the symposium Ecology and Artistic Practice for the programme Arts&Ecology at the Royal Society of Arts, London. The same year he also was the curatorial correspondent for the Turin Triennial The Pantagruel Syndrome. In 2006 he curated Subcontingent - The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Satellites at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. He just published a monograph on Maurizio Cattelan (2006, Electa), and regularly contributes to Flash Art, Metropolis M and Domus.

In his photography, video and text projects, Sean Snyder dissects the role of representation and ideology through examples of architecture, urban and media space. Using both self-produced and reprocessed material, densely grouped systems of reference are configured as tactical counterpoints to the interpretation of dominant knowledge. Sean Snyder has recently participated in the 9^th Istanbul Biennale, 6^th Gwangju Biennale and 5^th Busan Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Portikus, Frankfurt; Secession, Vienna and forthcoming at the Stedelijk Musuem CS, Amsterdam, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao and the Lisson Gallery, London.

Laura Horelli's photo, text and video installations focus on communicative forms of relations in public, media and psychological spaces. The artist often links documentary material with her own pictures and information. Laura Horelli studied in Helsinki as well as at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Recent exhibitions include 6^th Gwangju Biennale (2006), South Korea, Periferic 7, Iasi, Romania (2006), In 2052 Malmö Will No Longer Be Swedish, Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden (2005), Laura Horelli, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria (2004) and Manifesta 5, San Sebastian, Spain (2004).

Bouchet's performative, sculptural artistic projects often physically traverse the globe. These deadpan works - serious art, which hinges on not-so-serious issues or impossible situations - demonstrate his illogical and even absurd approach to the world itself. As he says, they constitute "an attempt at something".

Pooja Sood is a founding member and Director of Khoj International Artists’ Association which is an autonomous, not for profit society committed to experimentation and exchange in the visual arts in India. Under her stewardship, Khoj has grown from an annual event in 1997 to a small but vibrant institution which plays a central role in the development of experimental, interdisciplinary and critical contemporary art practice in India. As Director of Khoj, she has worked actively to build a robust network of experimental spaces across south Asia resulting in the South Asian Network for the Arts (SANA). Pooja Sood’s contribution has been in the field of curating alternative contemporary art practices in India as well as exploring different models of collaboration and institution building in India and South Asia.

Amongst other projects, she was Artistic Director and curator of ’48C. Public Art. Ecology’, the first public art project which commissioned 25 art projects by renowned Indian and international artist across ten public sites in New Delhi. Since 2009 she has been the Director of of ArThinkSouthAsia (ATSA) which is an arts management programme for young cultural leaders in south Asia. She has served on several international juries, most recently being the IAPA award of the Institute of Public Art, Shanghai (2014), the APB Signature prize hosted by the Singapore Art Museum (2014–15) and the Korean Art prize, Seoul (2013).

Pooja Sood has spoken and participated in various forums on Indian contemporary art, art management and South Asian art in India and abroad and is the editor of the SANA (South Asian Network for the Arts) publication, 2014, The Khoj Book 1997-2007 contemporary art practice in India, published by Harper Collins, 2010, Video Art in India, 2003 and is currently working on a book on the project ’48C. Public Art. Ecology’. She is a Chevening scholar on the Clore Leadership Programme, UK (2009-2011).

Claire Bishop is an art historian and critic. She is currently Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art. In October she will take up a new job in the History of Art Department at Warwick University. She has also taught at Essex University (where she completed her PhD) and Tate Modern. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate, 2005), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (October no.110, 2004) and contributes regularly to Artforum, Flash Art, Untitled, and Tate Etc.

Her latest publication is Participation, an edited anthology of key texts on participation in art from the late 1950s to the present day, and will be published in September by Whitechapel Art Gallery & MIT Press. She recently presented the paperLive Installations and Constructed Situations: The Use of "Real People" in Art, at OCA's Verksted seminar on the Art of Welfare, which is published, along with the other participants' contributions, as a book September 2006.

Her current research interests concern post-medium-specific art, the history of exhibition display, and the politics of spectatorship in socially-engaged and relational art.

Lars Bang Larsen is a free-lance critic and curator. He writes regularly for Frieze and Artforum, and has co-curated the Momentum biennial in 1998 and the group shows Pyramids of Mars (2000), Fundamentalisms of the New Order (2002), The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds (2005) and Populism (2005). He has written about the art and culture of the 1960s, for example in 'Sture Johannesson' (2002), about Johannesson's psychedelic posters and digital graphics. At the moment Lars teaches at Konsthögskolan in Stockholm and at the academies in Copenhagen and Århus, and is doing research for a book about the history of psychedelic art in a global context.

Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. Currently she is the Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland. Previously she was the Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, in 2008 she served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. During her tenure as Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein she curated solo exhibitions of Wilhelm Sasnal, among others, and a series of group exhibitions including ‘Pensée Sauvage' and ‘The Great Game To Come’. She was also the founder of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program for international artists, art writers and curators. While at MACBA, Martínez curated the Thomas Bayrle retrospective, an Otolith Group monographic show, and an exhibition devoted to television, ‘Are you ready for TV?’. In 2008, Martínez was the curator of the Deimantas Narkevicius retrospective exhibition, ‘The Unanimous Life’, at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which travelled to major European museums. Martínez lectures and writes regularly, including numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum among other international art journals.

Seth Siegelaub has been active as an art dealer, publisher and independent exhibition organizer, including 35 art-related projects and the "Artist's Rights Agreement" from 1964 - 1971; a researcher and publisher of left books on communication and culture; a bibliographer of the history of textiles; and currently a researcher studying the theory of time and causality.

Marja Bloom is an independent curator, frequently writing on contemporary art. From 1971 to 2005 she worked at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam as Curator for Exhibitions where she was responsible for organizing innumerable important group and solo exhibitions including by Agnes Martin, Kazimir Malevich, Lawrence Weiner, JCJ Vanderheyden, Berend Strik, Rini Hurkmans, Richard Tuttle, Marina Abramovic, Gerhard Richter, Imi Knoebel, Georg Herold, Lucio Fontana and Colin McCahon. During that period she was also head of the music program at the museum where she organized weekly concerts by avant-garde musicians, music workshops and exhibitions of musical installations. During the past few years she has organized the first international retrospective exhibition of the major Australasian painter Colin McCahon in New Zealand and Australia. Bloem holds a PhD in art history from Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. She is a board member of several Dutch music foundations, and has also served on a number of art foundations, committees and juries.

Michael Sailstorfer takes interest in everyday objects; materials that surround us and the associations they trigger. In inflicting transformations, contextual adjustments and spatial appropriation, Sailstorfer deforms the meaning and function of the original object - leading to a renewed configuration. His work explores the unstable relationship between form and content, emphasizing that the function of an object and its material manifestations are subject to change based on historical dynamic.

Solo exhibitions include Attitudes Geneva, 2004; Welttour Galerie Markus Richter, Berlin, 2003; D-IBRB, Galerie Transit, Mechelen, Belgia, 2003; Und sie bewegt sich doch!Stadt. Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 2003; and heimatlied Galerie Markus Richter, Berlin, 2002. Group exhibitions include Bewegte Teile Kunsthaus Graz, Austria and Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2004; the Liverpool Biennial, 2004; Degree Show 2004, MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London; Sydney Biennial 2004; Manifesta 5, San Sebastian, 2004; Wings of Art Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen, 2003; Fuori Uso Ferrotel, Pescara, 2003; At least begin to make an end W 139, Amsterdam, 2003; Bewegt Kunstverein Ingolstadt, Germany, 2002; Acht mal andersCentro de arte joven, Madrid, 2001; and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Germany, 2001.

Olav Westphalen breaks with the standards of art by setting up an insidious competition between high-minded autonomy and lowly pleasure, where highbrow art is undermined by vicious jokes and burlesque actions. But although there is a parodying element to his art, it never produces parody. Rather, his objects and performances shake up art's logic by over-fulfilling all the standards employed by critics and the public to gauge and exploit the work of art.

Westphalen had his first solo show in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 1995. Since then, he has been exhibiting internationally in exhibitions and venues such asMonuments for America Wattis Gallery, Oakland, USA (2005); Global Players Bankart, Yakohama, Japan (2005); Milliken Art Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden, (2005); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art (2004). In 2006 he will have a solo exhibition in Michael Neff Gallery in Frankfurt (May); Galerie Georges-Philip and Natalie Vallois in Paris, France; and at Kunstverein Brandenburg, Potsdam, Germany.

Serhiy Bratkov is a photographer active in The Fast Reaction Group, an urban interventionist collective prominent in Ukraine during the mid-1990s (together with Boris Mikhailov, Serhiy Solonsky and Victoria Mikhailova). His work arrives out of a consciousness of his own time gauged against the political, social and economic contingencies of the "just past". Bratkov's subjects are seemingly listless within a liminal space inscribed by the temporal gap between Ukraine's Soviet period and its subsequent reincarnation as an evolving market economy and political anomaly. In recent work, Bratkov remixes images that approach the child as a subject beyond common juvenile clichés approaching a generation of children that hold a residual consciousness of what transgressed while prematurely entering adolescence located in an antithetical elsewhere. These kids, forever, parentless and invulnerable, are consumed by an alienating experience of youth that is often reduced to exchange value by the international demand for adoption and abundant sex trafficking.

Greenfort discovers the details of city life, which are largely unknown or go unseen due to their normalcy. In his work, Greenfort deals with these kinds of situations in space and in everyday life and reveals the structures behind urbanity through small changes or mechanisms. With the help of artistic intervention, occurrences become visible and their existence questioned.

Since the mid-1960s, Dan Graham has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video and television are among the focuses of his investigations, which are translated into essays, performances, installations, videotapes and architectural/sculptural designs.

Graham began using film and video in the 1970s, creating installation and performance works that actively engage the viewer in an inquiry into public and private, audience and performer, objectivity and subjectivity. In installations focusing on the social implications of television, as articulated in private and public viewing spaces, Graham refers to video's semiotic function in architecture in relation to both window and mirror. Graham has also published numerous critical and theoretical essays that investigate the cultural ideology of such contemporary social phenomena as punk music, suburbia and public architecture. Graham has published numerous critical essays, and is the author of Video-Architecture-Television (1980). His work is in the collections of major institutions in USA and Europe, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Tate Gallery, London. He has had retrospective exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England; The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and has been represented internationally in group exhibitions/institutions such as Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; P.S.1, New York; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other festivals and institutions.

Carol Bove's work reflects on social, political, and artistic movements of America in the 1960s and 1970s. Bove has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2004); Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany (2003); Team Gallery, New York (2003); Art Basel|33, Basel, Switzerland (2002); and Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, New York (2000).

Bove has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including The Joy of Sex: Carol Bove and Charles Raymond at Cubitt, London (2004);Influence, Anxiety, and Gratitude at the List Visual Arts Center, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA (2003);Reproduction II at Georg Kargl, Vienna, Austria (2003); and Transformer at La Panaderia, Mexico City (2001).

Corey McCorkle is interested in the Utopian ideas of nature and transcendence, which he pursues in many of his installations. McCorkle's work has been included in the surveys Make It Now at Sculpture Center (2005) and Greater New York 2005at PS1, and was featured in a solo exhibition in 2006 at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. McCorkle's work has also been included in The Plain of Heaven by Creative Time in NYC (2005) and in Monopolis at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2005). Most recently, his work was included in Just Kick It Till It Breaks at The Kitchen in NYC (2007). McCorkle will have upcoming exhibitions at Pompidou Center, Paris and SMAK in Gent. He is featured in the November 2007 issue of Frieze.

This residency is made possibly with 03 Funding: specifically designated funds made available by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for exchange with countries of the South in the field of contemporary art, discourse and production.

The late fifties and early sixties Weiner spent travelling throughout North America (USA, Mexico, and Canada). The first presentation of his work was Mill Valley California in 1960. He participates in public and private projects and exhibitions, in both the new and old world, maintaining that Art is the empirical fact of the relationships of objects to objects in relations to human beings, and not dependant upon historical precedent for either use or legitimacy.

Kristina Leko is an artist working in the medium of video, photography, text, and social interaction. Her work includes a collection of found objects, actions in public space, and communication and documentary projects in collaboration with different social groups.

Projects: Sarajevo International, a video-communication project in collaboration with twelve Sarajevo immigrants, 2001; On Milk and People, an exhibition in collaboration with Croatian and Hungarian farmers, 2002/03; Cheese and Cream, various actions and artifacts dedicated to protection of the milkmaids of Zagreb, since 2002; Verfassungs-korrekturbuerro, an action in progress improving the American Constitution, 2004.

Phil Collins is referred to as a neo-conceptualist artist whose photographs and videos share in Nan Goldin's intimacy. His recent series The World Won't Listen is video work focused on desire and innocence and the ability of popular music to provide wisdom and solace around the globe. Its title is drawn from a 1986 album by the British band the Smiths re-performed in karaoke by Turkish youths. Another work, The Return of the Realinvolves the artist inviting a dozen people who had been on reality and talk shows to discuss the effects of these appearances on their lives in a panel and in individual interviews resulting in intimate autobiographies and therapy sessions. Collins has exhibited widely in venues such as Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Espacio la Rebeca, Bogotá; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Modern Art, Oxford; Tate Britain, London; Barbican Centre, London; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; The Wrong Gallery, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. He recently participated in the ninth Istanbul Biennale.

OCA has launched an experimental off-site residency in collaboration with the Nordic biennial, Momentum. The participating artist Phil Collins (UK) will be traveling to Kenya for research associated with his project to be realized at the event in September. The project is realized both as part of OCA Open Studios on 31 August and in the exhibition platform of Momentum.