Disobedience Archive (Canopy for Broken Time)

Biographies

Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective (*1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta). The hybrid practice of Raqs occupies a ground that is expressively poetic while being rigorously analytical. Raqs follows its self-declared imperative of 'kinetic contemplation' to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods (sound, image, video, text, object, gesture), often employing speculative procedures. The work presents an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances, opening them out through a conversational practice that embodies a deep ambivalence towards monochrony, and a consistent critique of the operations of power and property. Raqs enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, and sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs.

Raqs has exhibited widely, including at Documenta; the Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney and Sao Paulo Biennales. Some solo exhibitions (and projects) include The Bicyclist who Fell into a Timecone, Cosmic House, London (2023); The Laughter of Tears at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021); Pamphilos at Fast Forward Festival 6, Athens (2019); Still More World at Mathaf Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019); Twilight Language at Manchester Art Gallery (2017–2018); Everything Else is Ordinary at K21 Museum for 21st Century Art, Dusseldorf (2018); If It’s Possible, It’s Possible, MUAC, Mexico City (2015); and Untimely Calendar at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi (2014–2015). Exhibitions curated by Raqs include Afterglow, Yokohama Triennale (2020); In The Open or in Stealth, MACBA, Barcelona (2018–2019); Why Not Ask Again, Shanghai Biennale (2016–2017); INSERT2014, New Delhi (2014); and The Rest of Now & Scenarios, Manifesta 7, Bolzano (2008). Raqs intervened in the collections of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Hungry for Time – an invitation to epistemic disobedience (2021); they were finalists for the design competition for the 22nd July National Memorial in Oslo, Norway (2024); and most recently their solo exhibition Cavalcade showed at the Neubauer Collegium, Chicago (2025).

Samir Abdallah

Samir Abdallah was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to the Egyptian modern art pioneer Hamed Abdalla and his wife, Kirsten Hamed Abdallah, a Danish nurse. He has lived in France since the age of 6, where he acquired French nationality. After studying Dramatic Arts and Film at the University of Nanterre in the early 1980s, he co-founded the IM’Média agency with his brother Mogniss, and produced numerous reports and documentaries on immigration for the program Rencontres on the French channel FR3 between 1988 and 1991.

He has directed, alone or in collaboration, many documentaries, including: L’Islam de France, entre traditions et modernité (Islam in France, Between Tradition and Modernity) in 1990, La Révolte de Veaux-en-Velin (The Veaux-en-Velin Revolt) in 1991, Voyages au Pays de la Peuge (Journeys to the Land of Peugeot) in 1991, La Ballade des sans-papiers (The Ballad of the Undocumented) in 1997, Le Siège (The Siege) in 2002, Ecrivains des Frontières, voyages en Palestine(s) (Writers of the Borders, Journeys in Palestine(s)) in 2004, Quo Va Dis? (What's Going On?) in 2006, Après la guerre, c’est toujours la guerre (After the War, It's Still War) in 2007, and Gaza-strophe, Palestine (Gaza-strophe, Palestine) in 2008. 2009, Candidates for Beur?, in 2012, In Cairo of the Revolution, since 2011…

In 1991, he founded L’Yeux ouverts which organizes workshops in the neighborhoods, and runs an international network of public screenings of films expressing a critical point of view on the contemporary world, with more than 3000 associative and various partners, in France, Europe, Arab countries and Americas, a network named: CINEMETEQUE which develops the film site of the same.

Ravi Agarwal

Ravi Agarwal is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, environmental campaigner, writer, and curator whose practice addresses the entangled relationship between nature and its future through photography, video, text, and installation. His work has been shown at important venues internationally. He has curated large Indo-European public art projects including Yamuna-Elbe, 2009, and Embrace Our Rivers, 2018, besides others and he was Co-Convenor for the triennial - Bergen Assembly 2025 (Norway). Agarwal is alongside the founder of the research based environmental NGO Toxics Link and The Shyama Foundation, which supports artistic initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology.

Irwan Ahmett und Tita Salina (Jakarta)

Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina are a self-taught artist duo, whose early works used performative interventions within the chaotic public spaces of the megapolitan as it struggles with uncontrolled urbanization and pollution. Their connections with art, activist, and scientific networks have driven their practice toward deeper and more complex contexts. They are currently engaged in a long-term project on geopolitical turbulence in the Ring of Fire—one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions marked by recurring ideological violence and its traumatic consequences. Through high mobility across residencies, research, and fieldwork, they seek answers to planetary anxieties surrounding human existence while producing artistic knowledge on injustice, humanity, ecology, and states of emergency.

Navjot Altaf

Navjot Altaf is a multi-media visual artist whose practice negotiates various disciplinary mediums and boundaries. Since 1997, Altaf has been working in collaboration with indigenous artists and communities in Chhattisgarh in Central India. Her methodology ascertains the interactive aspects of collaboration, whereby the work emerges out of an extended dialogical interaction. Her numerous solo exhibitions have taken place in and outside India, including participations at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2022); PAV-Parco Arte Vivente, Turin, Italy (2020); National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2019); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India (2017); KHOJ, New Delhi, India (2017); 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); MMCA Korea (2013); EuropaliaIndia, Liege, Belgium, Germany (2013); and Women In Between: Asian Women Artists (1984–2012), Japan (2012/13)

Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA)

atelier d’architecture autogérée (AAA) (*2001, Paris, France) is a Paris-based collective platform initiated by Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu, which conducts actions and research on participatory urbanism and architecture, involving local residents in creating and sustaining commons in their neighbourhood, in engaging in social and ecological practices and initiating resilient networks. Their well-known projects include Ecobox, Passage56 and R-Urban. The latter is a participative strategy for local resilience in the Parisian Region based on networks of collective eco-hubs run by inhabitants of social neighbourhoods. More recently, they have been working on building Wiki Village Factory – a 7000m2 hub of social and ecological innovation in Paris.

AAA’s work has been exhibited at Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy; MoMA, New York, USA; Architecture Zentrum Wien, Vienna, Austria; Berlin Art Biennale, Berlin, Germany; BETA Timisoara Biennale, Timisoara, Romania, and has received international recognition and numerous awards across the years, including the European Prize for Urban Public Space (2016 and 2010); Curry Stone Design Prize (2011); Zumtobel Prize for Sustainability and Humanity (2012); 100 Projects for the Climate/COP21 (2016); Innovation in Politics Award, Ecology category (2017); Building4Humanity Resilience Design Award (2018); and New European Bauhaus (2022).

Atelier Impopulaire

Pia Bolognesi and Giulio Bursi have worked together as Atelier Impopulaire since 2012. Their practice involves moving-image, writing, installation, sculpture. Favoring collaborative methodologies and collective processes AI rethinks received models of dissemination presenting narrative that highlight moments of rupture in our contemporary culture. With a background in Art & Cinema (PhD in Film and Visual Studies) AI research shifts from investigating the plural identities of visual languages to deconstructing and reinterpreting their politics of representation.

Their projects have been shown at Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Kyoto University of Art and Design, West Bund Shanghai, La Biennale di Venezia, Berlin Art Week, La Triennale di Milano, GAM Santiago, MoMA New York, Power Station of Art Shanghai, Volksbühne Berlin, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Harvard Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, HKW Berlin, The Louvre, Atonal Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg and in independent art spaces and initiatives across Europe, Canada and US.

Petra Bauer

Petra Bauer is an artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm whose practice unfolds through long-term collaborations at the intersection of feminist politics, social movements, and the moving image. She approaches filmmaking not merely as representation but as a shared method – one that listens, questions, and builds solidarities across difference. Her work engages film as a space for collective inquiry, political memory, and the rehearsal of alternative forms of life.

Bauer studied at the Malmö Art Academy and holds a PhD from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. She is currently Professor in Film & Media and responsible for the research area Art, Technology & Materiality at Stockholm University of the Arts, and has held a professorship in moving image at the Royal Institute of Art since 2016.

Over the years, she has co-developed cinematic and pedagogical processes with grassroots networks – ranging from SCOT-PEP’s advocacy for sex workers’ rights in Scotland, to collaborations with Southall Black Sisters in London, feminist archives and women’s centres across Europe. She has also worked closely with activist Carolina Sinisalo and filmmaker Marius Dybwad Brandrud in exploring grief, resistance, and political witnessing through film. These projects are shaped by a politics of listening, where storytelling becomes both a form of resistance and a practice of care.

Her films and research have been presented at venues such as The Showroom, Collective, Fruitmarket, Tensta konsthall, the Venice Biennale, and Museo Reina Sofía, among others.

Ege Berensel

Ege Berensel is a media artist, visual researcher and film archivist based in Ankara. He has been running the Türkiye 8mm Family Films Archive and the Türkiye Militant Film Archive, which has reached 15,000 boxes of films collected from garbage for 20 years. The films he produced from this archives were exhibited in many places such as the Istanbul Biennial, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Fundación Proa, SALT, Depo Istanbul.

Bernadette Corporation

Bernadette Corporation lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2023, 2009); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); Artists Space, New York (2012); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012); Kunsthalle Zürich Parallel, Zurich (2008); and Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg (2006). Their work has been featured in significant group exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv-Yafo (2022); Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2013); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2010); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010), among others.

Bernadette Corporation’s work is in the collections of Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist and author, whose practice centers on fieldwork, often in Indigenous territories, and the creation of networks between different fields of knowledge. Her artistic practice reflects on the political ecologies of forests, oil and water, proposing ecocentric modes of relating to the natural world. Biemann recently had solo exhibitions at MUAC in Mexico City and MQ Freiraum in Vienna. She published the online monograph Becoming Earth on ten years of her ecological video works and the book Forest Mind – On the Interconnection of All Life, with Spector Books (2022).

Black Audio Film Collective

Black Audio Film Collective was formed by seven undergraduates in Portsmouth in 1982, and was based in Dalston, East London from 1983 to 1998.

In response to the civil disturbances in Brixton in 1981, there was a concerted effort by Channel Four Television, the local metropolitan councils and the films and television unions collectively to provide financial and structural support to black media and cultural makers, in order to promote a black cultural presence in the British media and arts. One of the workshops that negotiated the workshop agreement between the media institutions and cultural makers was the Black Audio Film Collective and, in the sixteen years in which they worked as an artist’s atelier, they produced a rosta of groundbreaking and award winning creative documentaries, non-linear feature films, tape-slide installations, film programmes and screenings that examined the diasporic African and Asian experience in Britain’s and across the continents.

Characterised by an interest in memory, history and aesthetics„ the collective created a series of defiantly experimental works that engaged with black popular and political culture in Britain. The group were also instrumental in bringing an awareness of avant-garde film from Africa, India and South America to the UK.

Artists, filmmakers and writers associated with the group include John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, Trevor Mathison .

Seba Calfuqueo

Seba (Sebastiana) Calfuqueo (she/they) (*1991, Santiago, Chile) is a Mapuche Trans Artist and Curator in Espacio218 based in Santiago de Chile. Is also part of the Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü collective and Yene Revista.

Throughout her work, Calfuqueo uses her cultural heritage and lived experience as a starting point to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political dynamics of the Mapuche subject within contemporary Chilean society and Latin America. Her artistic practice spans performance, installation, ceramics, and video. Her work aims to examine the cultural similarities and differences between the crossing of indigenous and Western ways of thinking, as well as their fixed stereotypes, while also tackling the colonial impositions through her theoretical research and vast display of techniques and visual resources. Her work also addresses issues such as feminism, queer theory, and environmental rights, from a First Nations perspective and an empirical view.

In terms of environmental rights, Calfuqueo seeks to convey a contemporary reflection upon the relationship between humans and what we understand as nature, developing a breaking point in which we can understand that both these concepts can coexist. The artist seeks to break down the anthropocentric view of the landscape as something humans tend to inhabit or take leverage of in order to encourage the viewer to think of the imposed relationship we developed towards our environment.

Her work is part of the collections of museums and art galleries such as TATE Modern, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Spain; Whitney Museum, USA; Denver Art Museum, USA; MALBA Museum, Argentina; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Spain; Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul – MAC RS, Brazil; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chile; and MAC, Chile. She participated in the 60th Biennale of Venice, the Whitney Biennial, the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, the 12th Bienal de Mercosur and 22nd Bienal Paiz.

She was awarded by Fundación FAVA in 2018, by Eyebeam’s Fractal Fellowships Program in 2020, by Fundación Ama Amoedo’a FAARA in 2023, and Premio Cuervo by Zona Maco in 2024.

Simone Cangelosi

Simone Cangelosi (*1968, Pisa) is an Italian film director. Interested in themes of identity and the historicisation of LGBT movements, his documentaries make extensive use of amateur archive material created by political activists.

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson

Libia Castro (Spain) and Ólafur Ólafsson (Iceland) started to work as an artist´s team in The Netherlands in 1997, they live in Rotterdam and reside and work regularly in Reykjavik and Málaga. Their art practice is collaborative, conceptual, socio-politicly engaged and transdisciplinary. Over the years they have joined activists groups and invited other artists and professionals to work in tandem with art and activism, creating temporary elastic DoItTogether – collectives and ongoing long term projects. Their work is processual and a critical situated practice that can evolve in performances, multi media environments, films, workshops, programs, plastic or immaterial interventions and actions within different contexts. They have work with and exhibited in squares, parliaments, streets, facades, roof-tops, socio-cultural and environmental initiatives, civil associations, museums, art biennials, squats, schools and universities.

Mao Chenyu

Mao Chenyu (lives and works in Shanghai) is the founder of Paddyfilm. Since 2003, he has been working around the area of Dongting Lake Watershed on the project Paddyfilm. In 2012, Mao founded the experimental social platform Paddyfilm-farm in Hunan, which investigates and analyzes rural societies in China. Thirty paddy fields have been transformed into self-sufficient farming systems, which nurture the linguistic and film practices of Paddyfilm. In 2015, Mao set up a private Elaphurus Davidianus University within Paddyfilm-farm to carry out social research and education as a kind of institutional practice.

Sim Chi Yin

Sim Chi Yin (*1978, Singapore) is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making.

he has exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Barbican, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017); Datsuijo, Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery, Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). Her work is in the collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, M+ Hong Kong, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022–23) and has a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. She premiered her first theatre performance, an hour-long monologue, in August 2024.

Cráter Invertido

Cráter Invertido is a multidisciplinary collective based in Mexico City, organized cooperatively to generate experimental ways of collective study, artistic production, and diverse practices of self-publication. In this sense, our printing press, Taller XD, and the online radio, Radio Tropiezo, are fundamental in learning that there’s no self-publication without collective labor. Cráter Invertido aims to dismantle the idea of individual efforts, creations, or responsibilities isolated from a community.

Mujeres Creando und Maria Galindo

María Galindo (*1964, La Paz) is an artist, performer, activist, author and co-founder of the Bolivian collective Mujeres Creando (Women Creating). She brings the little-noticed perspective of indigenous women into a dialog with practices of non-white feminism, anarchism and punk and criticizes the prevailing neocolonialist, neoliberal and religious structures. In 2013, she published one of her most important works, No se puede descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar, in which she criticizes patriarchy as the basis of all domination, including racism.

María Galindo is one of the best-known cult figures of Latin American feminism and has created a radical artistic practice over the last 15 years. With her anarcho-feminist performative actions, she has caused high-profile scandals in Bolivia.

Critical Art Ensemble

Critical Art Ensemble (1987–2025). The collective attempted to explore the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The group exhibited and performed at diverse venues internationally, ranging from the street, to the museum, to the internet. The group was composed of tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.

Chto Delat

The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a international workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Berlin with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.

Chto Delat International core group includes Tsaplya Olga Egorova (artist), Artiom Magun (philosopher), Nikolay Oleynikov (artist), Natalia Pershina / Glucklya (artist), Alexey Penzin (philosopher), Alexander Skidan (poet and critic), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher), Dmitry Vilensky (artist) and Nina Gasteva (choreographer). Former members of collective are David Riff and Thomas Cambell.

The group was constituted in May 2003 in St. Petersburg in an action called The Refoundation of Petersburg. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and immediately brings to mind the first socialist worker’s self-organizations and feminists’ co-operatives in Russia, which Lenin actualized in his own publication, What is to be done?, 1902.

The collective becomes part of Journal of Journal, Documenta 12, Kasel (2007); the fellows of the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale in 2016; Garage Museum Field Research Program in 2017; Philipp Otto Runge, Residency and Stipendium in Hamburg, 2013, Participants of Former West, 2010–2014 and it was shortlisted for Visible Art Award in 2017.

Caleb Duarte und Mia Eve Rollow

Caleb Duarte is best known for creating temporary installations using construction type frameworks such as beds of dirt, cement, and objects suggesting basic shelter. His installations within institutional settings become sights for performance as interpretations of his community collaborations. Duarte has created public works and community performances at the World Social Forum in Mumbai India, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, El Pital, Honduras, and throughout Mexico and the United States. He has collaborated with autonomous indigenous Zapatista communities, communities in movement, and working children and refugees.

Mia Eve Rollow is a globally nomadic multidisciplinary artist whose work engages issues of mobility and the disabling acts of power, using site-specific and community-engaged forms such as performance, murals, drawings, video, film, and sculpture to cultivate terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance.

Caleb Duarte and Mia Eve Rollow are founders of EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/Where the United Nations Used to Be) in 2009, she has continued to build webs of collaboration among communities across the world – including in Mexico, Chile, Palestine, and Cuba – grounded in the belief that cultural production is essential to social transformation and offers aesthetic strategies for survival, solidarity, and imagination amid ecological crisis and state-sanctioned violence.

At this pivotal moment in human history, we are mired in crisis, surrounded by irreversible environmental damage, unrelenting greed, and multiplying disabilities as governments increasingly target disenfranchised populations. As a disabled artist working with the communities most impacted, I believe that art can catalyze consciousness raising and collective action, empowering people to come together for meaningful change.

Ali Essafi

Ali Essafi (*1963, Morocco) studied psychology in France, then entered the world of filmmaking. His films include General, Here We Come! (Général, Nous Voilà!), The Silence of the Beet Fields (Le Silence des Champs de Betterave), Ouarzazate Movie and Shikhat’s Blues which have been widely screened on the international circuit including the MoMA, 2011, and Triennale de Paris, 2012. Returning to Morocco in 2002, he worked as an advisor on art direction for the Moroccan public television channel. In parallel to this, he conducted lengthy research on the North-African film and visual archives, which led to new films (Sharjah Art Biennial 2011, Berlinale), installations (Dakar Art Biennale 2014) and publications (Germany, France, Austria, Morocco). His latest archive films were premiered at the Berlinale in 2017 (Crossing the Seventh Gate) and at IDFA in 2020 (Before the Dying of the Light). Ali Essafi works as a filmmaker, visual artist & curator. He is a member of various Art and Film institutes including the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Science.

Marcelo Expósito

Marcelo Expósito (*1966, Spain) is an artist and cultural critic. He has been a resident at the Spanish Academy in Rome and his most recent solo exhibitions have taken place at venues such as La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona; MUAC, Mexico City; Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires; and PAV, Turin. His work has also been shown in recent group exhibitions such as Histórias da ecologia, MASP, São Paulo, 2025; the 16th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador, 2023; and the Biennale Arte, Venezia, 2024, forming part of the Disobedience Archive curated by Marco Scotini. His latest book, Interrupciones y movimientos. El arte politizado en la crisis del neoliberalismo (Interruptions and Movements: Politicised Art in the Crisis of Neoliberalism) has been published in Chile by Metales Pesados. In 2025, he was a guest lecturer at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA, Milan) and at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile in Santiago.

Alberto Grifi

Born in a workshop where his father built trucks and special film cameras, Alberto Grifi (1938–2007) is considered one of the very first authors of what was called "Italian experimental cinema." A painter, director, cameraman, sound technician, actor, advertising photographer for airplanes, and creator of video-cinematic devices such as the "vidigrafo," which in 1972 was used to transcribe "Anna" onto film – the first video-recorded film in Italy, co-directed with Massimo Sarchielli. "Anna" became a cult movie of the post-1968 alternative culture. It was later presented at the Berlin Film Festival and the Venice Biennale in 1975, and at Cannes in 1976.

In 2004, during the 61st Venice International Film Festival, Alberto Grifi participated in the project Secret History of Italian Cinema, part of the Underground Italy retrospective. Among the projects and activities carried out with Interact Spa, in addition to the creation of the lavanastri, was the completion in 2007 of the films Autoritratto Auschwitz/L'occhio è per così dire l'evoluzione biologica di una lacrima (Self-Portrait Auschwitz/The Eye Is, So to Speak, the Biological Evolution of a Tear) and In viaggio con Patrizia (Traveling with Patrizia), both dating back to the 1960s, as well as plans to complete/rework two other films, Michele alla ricerca della felicità (Michele in Search of Happiness) and Dinni e la normalina (Dinni and the Normalina). After his death, his film In viaggio con Patrizia, completed by Interact following Alberto's detailed notes on direction and editing, was presented at the Rome Film Festival.

Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré

Raphaël Grisey (*1979, Berlin, Germany). Artist, researcher and filmmaker, Grisey uses film, editorial and photographic works to address politics of memory, architecture, migration and farming.

Bouba Touré (1948–2022), lived in Paris and Somankidi Coura, Mali. Peasant activist, worker, writer and photographer, Touré lived in France from 1965 and worked at the factory Chausson. He studied at the Vincennes University and was a projectionist at Cinema 14 Juillet and L’entrepôt, Paris. Photographer since the 1970s, he documented the lives and struggles of migrant workers and peasants in France and Mali. Touré co-founded the Co-op of Somankidi Coura in 1977. Since the 1980s, Touré has exhibited works and given talks in associative and foyer’s circles and more recently in art institutions. His photographic work has been presented amongst other places at the Bamako Encounters 2019 and in the Hamburg photography Triennale in 2022.

Since 2006 Touré and Grisey worked together on collaborative projects with the current name of Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive. It lead to various workshops, film for example with the theatre group Kaddu Yaraax in 2017-2019, as well as publications and texts, such as Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive (2017, Archives Book) Their works and their latest film Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) from 2022, were shown in various community and activist spaces, venues, art center and festivals.

El GAC / Grupo de Arte Callejero

El GAC / Grupo de Arte Callejero has been working since 1997. The group currently consists of Lorena Bossi, Carolina Golder, Mariana Corral, Vanesa Bossi, and Fernanda Carrizo.

The group merges art with politics, blurring the boundaries between these two concepts. Many of their projects emerge and/or develop through collective construction processes, with the procedural aspect being a fundamental element of their actions and interventions. Their production dynamic transforms through exchanges with others. They currently manage their own archive independently: https://archivogac.ar/.

In 1999, they won the Sculpture Competition for the Parque de la Memoria with their work Carteles de la Memoria. In 2009, they published the book GAC Pensamientos, prácticas y acciones. In 2019, the editorial Common Notions translated and published the book in English. In 2022, they received the Konex Award for Visual Arts in the category of Artistic Collectives.

They have participated in gatherings, conferences, and numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Highlights include: participation in the Venice Biennales (2003 and 2019); Ex Argentina, Ludwig Museum, Germany (2004); Disobedience Archive (2012, 2013–2014, 2022, 2025); Disobedient Objects, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2015); Resistance Performed, Migros Museum, Zurich (2016); Artivism, Canadian Museum for Human Rights (2021); Giro gráfico, Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain (2022).

Grupo Etcétera…

Formed in 1997 in Buenos Aires, Etcetera is a multidisciplinary collective composed of visual artists and performers. In 2005, they were part of the founding of the International Errorist movement, an international organization that proclaims error as a philosophy of life. They often work with street-art, public interventions, actions, and performances that are necessarily contextual, ephemeral, and circumstantial.

Since 2007 it has been led by co-founders Loreto Garín Guzmán (Chile) and Federico Zukerfeld (Argentina). Their work has been recognized for its denouncement of human rights and environmental abuses through theatrical and poetic actions and statements often exercised at personal risk.

In addition to their activity in the public space, they have participated in numerous international exhibitions and biennials: Berlin Biennial (2025); Bienal Sur (2023/2019); Biennial Performance, BAires (2016/2022); Jakarta Biennial (2015); Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); Athens Biennial (2013); dOCUMENTA 13 (2012); Istanbul Biennial (2009); Taipei Biennial (2008); Collective Creativity, Fridericianum Museum, Kassel (2005); Ex-Argentina, Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2004), among others.

In 2013, they won the second edition of the International Award for Participatory Art in Bologna, Italy, for their project C.R.I.S.I (Commune of Research for Inclusive Social Imagination). In 2015, they received the Prince Claus Award in the Netherlands. During 2020–2022, they developed the project NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM: Protocols for Buen Vivir in the frame of the Boris Lurie – Vera List Center's fellowship in NYC. In 2023, they were recognized with the Platinum Konex Award for Visual Arts (Argentina). From 2022–2024, they have been mentors of the program CAREC: Cultural & Artistic Responses to Environmental Change, a program organized by the Prince Claus Fund & Goethe-Institut.

Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) was a groundbreaking feminist filmmaker, visual artist, and lesbian activist. Working over a span of more than fifty years, she produced over ninety films as well as installations, performances, photographs, collages, and drawings related to themes of gender, sexuality, community, illness, and mortality. Hammer devoted her practice to resisting traditional notions of female sexuality and representing lesbian lives and histories through the feminine lens. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Calparsoro Foundation, Madrid/San Sebastian, and the Akeroyd Collection, US.

Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica

January 9, 1944 born in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein), born in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein), at that time Sudetengau, today Czech Republic. 1966–1968 Admission to the just opened Berlin Film Adacemy, DFFB. 1966 Marriage with Ursula Lefkes. 1968 Birth of the daughters Annabel Lee and Larissa Lu. 1974–1984 Author and editor of the magazine Filmkritik, Munich. 1998–1999 Speaking about Godard / Von Godard sprechen, New York / Berlin. (Together with Kaja Silverman). 1993–1999 Visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. 2001 Marriage with Antje Ehmann. Since 1966 more than 100 productions for Television or Cinema: Children's TV, Documentary Films, Essay Films, Story Films. Since 1996 various solo- and group exhibitions in Museums and Galleries. 2007 with Deep Play participation at documenta 12. Since 2004 Visiting Professor, 2006–2011 full Professorship at the Academy of Art, Vienna. 2011–2014 longterm project Labour in a Single Shot, together with Antje Ehmann.

Andrei Ujica was born in 1951 in Romania. He is an author and director, known for Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), TWST: Things We Said Today (2024), and Out of the Present (1996).

Khaled Jarrar

Khaled Jarrar was born in Jenin, (Occupied) Palestine in 1976. Jarrar completed his studies in interior design at Palestine Polytechnic University in 1996.. Upon graduating he smuggled himself to work as a carpenter in Nazareth, living as an underground “illegal” worker. In 1998 Jarrar enlisted in an intensive military training which resulted in Arafat’s recruiting him as a personal body guard until Arafat’s assassination in 2004. A career spanning 25 years in the Palestinian Authority’s Presidential Guard Jarrar created a life between the military and an artistic practice,

Jarrar entered the field of photography in 2005. He graduated from the International Academy of Art – Palestine, Ramallah in 2011 and completed his MFA in fine art from the University of Arizona in 2019, where he was the recipient of the 2016 Anni and Heinrich Sussman Award.

Jarrar, a multidisciplinary artist, explores modern power struggles and their sociocultural impact on ordinary citizens, through photographs, videos, film, and performance and interactive art.

Sara Jordenö

Sara Jordenö is an award-winning visual artist and filmmaker whose research-based practice mobilizes non-fiction cinema as a site of relational inquiry, foregrounding collaboration, co-authorship, and the ethics of witnessing. Working across art, visual sociology, and activist research, Jordenö examines how encounters – between speaker and listener, camera and subject, institution and community – produce material and political conditions of meaning. Their work has been presented internationally at the Biennale di Venezia, Moderna Museet, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Walker Art Center, MoMA PS1, and The Kitchen, situating questions of migration, spatial injustice, and collective agency within expanded documentary form.

Sanjay Kak

Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose recent work includes the films Red Ant Dream, 2013, Jashn-e-Azadi, 2007, and Words on Water, 2002. He is the editor of the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir and of the critically acclaimed photobook, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers which he published independently under the imprint of Yaarbal Books. At Yaarbal he has also edited and published the recent Cups of nun chai by Alana Hunt.

Karrabing Film Collective

Karrabing Film Collective (*2012, Australia) is a grassroots Indigenous media group consisting of over thirty members. They approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organisation and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop a local artistic language and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Their films represent their lives, create bonds with their land and intervene in global images of Indigeneity.

Their films and installations have been exhibited at MoMA-PS1, New York; Secession, Vienna; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Contour Biennale, Mechelen, Belgium; Berlinale Forum Expanded; Hallucinations, Athens at documenta 14; Sydney Biennale; vdrome.org; e-flux supercommunity at the Venice Biennale; Doc’s Kingdom, Lisbon; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others. They are the recipients of the Visible Award, 2015, Eye Film Prize, Eye Filmmuseum, 2022, amongst others.

Bani Khoshnoudi

Bani Khoshnoudi is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work moves across film, installation, documentary and text. Her practice is grounded in research and memory, often focusing on the role of media in constructing or disrupting histories. She is a University of Texas at Austin alum, and a Whitney ISP Studio program fellow, 2008–2009. She holds a Masters (Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique) in Art from ENSAPC Cergy in France.

She has directed acclaimed films including A People in the Shadows, The Silent Majority Speaks, and The Vanishing Point, winner of the Burning Lights Jury Prize at Visions du Réel in 2025 and works in photography, archive and installation format.

Winner of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video in 2022, Bani has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou and Fondation Cartier in Paris, BOZAR in Brussels, Fundacao Serralves in Porto, MUAC and Museo El Eco in Mexico City, and at the 60e Biennale di Venezia main exhibition, Foreigners everywhere, in 2024 as part of Disobedience Archive.

Pedro Lemebel

Pedro Lemebel (1952–2015) is considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth century Latin America. Born in Santiago, Chile, he became a renowned voice of Latin American counterculture throughout the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. In 1999 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to compile stories of homosexuality in Chile, and in 2013 he received the José Donoso Prize. His only novel, My Tender Matador, was adapted in 2020 into a critically-acclaimed film by Chilean director Rodrigo Sepúlveda.

LIMINAL and Border Forensics

LIMINAL is a laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities and border violence. Based in the University of Bologna’s Department of the Arts, it builds on more than ten years of experience in developing pioneering techniques of geospatial, media and open-source investigation in the context of the Forensic Oceanography and Border Forensics project.

We work with communities affected by border violence to document and contest the harm created by unequal mobility regimes across multiple geographies and temporalities, mobilising strategies of spatial and visual analysis and forensic imagination.

Our team is composed of architects, designers, and researchers, and we collaborate with a wide range of partners: from human rights organisations to investigative journalists, from activist groups to autonomous research centres, scientists and cultural institutions. Our work has been used as evidence in courts of law, published across different media and academic outlets, as well as exhibited and screened internationally.

Over the 2022–2027 period, LIMINAL will be focusing primarily on the ERC-funded Hostile Environments project, which seeks to unravel the interconnected nature of the so-called migration and environmental crises beyond catastrophist and security-oriented perspectives.

Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson

Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson are filmmakers, artists and researchers whose work explores the porous threshold between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, the audible and what has been silenced, critical thought and the forces of re-enchantment.

Focusing on the reactivation of lost, marginalised or forgotten archives, narratives and histories, their practice is research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary, and includes films (notably Facs of Life, In Search of UIQ, Common Birds and Late Gestures), mixed-media installations, experimental exhibitions, soundworks, film-performances, radio shows and books.

Their work also involves creating vernacular technologies, tools for sharing collective visions and opening time-spaces of conviviality, including the Dark Matter Cinema Tarot and, most recently, the Word Clinic, a nomadic project that aims to heal language collectively. Their works have been presented, installed and screened in art spaces, museums and film festivals worldwide.

Angela Melitopoulos

Angela Melitopoulos art works consist of complex cine(so)matic cartographies that assume the form of video installations, video essays and sound pieces in which moving bodies and site traversals create mnemonic milieus. Her film-installations on collective memory transmissions stand for a post-colonial alliance, resistant subjectivities and of revisions of History, of imperialist violence, fascism and the experience of migrations in the 20th century.

She showed her video in many international exhibitions since 1985. A retrospective of her work took place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2023. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures entitled Machinic Animism and the revolutionary practice of geo-psychiatry. (Goldsmiths University of London). She taught as a professor of Media art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and in the HfG Karlsruhe, Germany

Carlos Motta

Born in Colombia and based in New York, Carlos Motta’s art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities. A chronicler of untold narratives, he explores the experiences of post-colonial subjects and societies through a range of media, including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. The mid-career survey exhibition Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance was on view at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2025 and will travel to OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz in 2026.

Pınar Öğrenci

Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (*1973, Wan, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social and political research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of displacement.

Öğrenci engages with place, site and architecture as the materialization of violence. Her practice serves as a response to a collective past often left in silence and urging her audience to imagine a future built on justice, equality, and collective healing.

Her works have been exhibited widely at museums and art institutions, including HKW, Berlin (2025); Venice Biennial, Disobedience Archive (2024); Harvard Museum (2024); documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) (2024); Berlinische Galerie (2023); Frac Bretagne, Rennes (2024); 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018); Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); Kunst Haus Wien – Hundertwasser Museum (2017); and many others.

Daniela Ortiz

Daniela Ortiz is a Peruvian artist whose work seeks to generate visual narratives and pedagogical tools that analyze concepts of nationality, racialization, social class, and gender to critically understand the structures of colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist power from an anti-imperialist perspective.

She has dedicated her practice to denouncing the European migratory control system, its ties to colonialism, and the reinforcement of institutional racism to impose violence on migrant communities and racialized working classes, while also highlighting resistance against these systems. Since returning to Peru, she has worked on topics related to internationalist solidarity, care from a political perspective, the mechanisms of repression and persecution through "anti-terrorist" policies, as well as anti-imperialist revolutionary processes of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In her early work, Ortiz explored the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers, as well as the role of elites in the mining industry. Recently, her artistic practice has returned to visual and manual techniques, working with ceramics, collage, drawing, and formats such as children's books and puppets, with the intention of distancing herself from Eurocentric conceptual aesthetics.

In addition to her artistic work, Daniela is a mother of three, gives lectures and workshops, and actively participates in various debates and struggles against the colonial order.

Paloma Polo

Selected highlights of Paloma Polo’s trajectory include residencies at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, a Visiting Research Fellow appointment at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and a 2024/25 Fulbright Visiting Scholar position at Syracuse University’s Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice. She has presented solo exhibitions at Museo Reina Sofía and CA2M, Madrid; kurimanzutto and Casa Barragán, Mexico City; Arts Catalyst, London; and SKOR, Amsterdam; among others. Her work has appeared at the 55th Venice Biennale; Turner Contemporary, Kent; High Line Art, New York; Frankfurter Kunstverein, or Le Commun, Geneva. Recognitions include the Ojo Crítico Prize (RNE) and grants from the Botín Foundation, BBVA Foundation (Multiverso), La Caixa Foundation or the Mondriaan Fund.

Oliver Ressler

Oliver Ressler produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, climate breakdown, racism, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler had comprehensive solo exhibitions at National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest; SALT Galata, Istanbul; Museo Espacio, Aguascalientes, Mexico; and Belvedere 21, Vienna. He has participated in 480 group exhibitions as well as biennials in Prague, Seville, Moscow, Taipei, Lyon, Gyumri, Venice, Athens, Quebec, Helsinki, Jeju, Kyiv, Gothenburg, Stavanger, Thessaloniki, and Istanbul.

Güliz Sağlam

Güliz Sağlam is an independent documentary filmmaker and video activist who has long been involved in the feminist movement in Türkiye. Her work grows out of sustained solidarity with women’s struggles, and her documentaries focus on themes such as forced migration, women workers’ efforts to unionize, and resistance to gender-based violence – foregrounding women’s narration of their own experiences. As a feminist activist, she has also documented the campaigns and demonstrations of the feminist movement and the Women’s Peace Initiative. Her camera acts less as a distant observer and more as a participant, gradually building an archive of women’s voices, protests, and the networks that sustain these movements.

She has collaborated with various video-activism collectives and is a co-founder of bak.ma, a platform dedicated to preserving the memory of social movements. Since 2013, she has contributed to the advisory board and coordination of Documentarist Istanbul Documentary Days and the Which Human Rights Film Festival. She also takes part in international workshops, serves on juries, and engages in collaborative initiatives that support documentary filmmaking, including Feminist Frames, a newly formed group of women directors from different countries. Her films have screened internationally, and her first feature A Dream School in the Steppes (2014) has received multiple awards. Sağlam’s body of work stands as both a personal record of long-term engagement and a testament to the continuity of collective feminist struggle.

Roy Samaha

Roy Samaha is a Lebanese artist who lives in Beirut. His videos, have been shown in various film festivals and art exhibitions internationally since 2002. Part of his field research on electronic media in correlation with altered states of perception and a fascination with anthropological studies and accounts about shamanistic rituals and aesthetics, he got involved, parallel to his art practice, in the broadcasting and news industry between 1998 and 2008. He uses these influences to explore the boundaries of cinematic language, the perception of reality and the memory of personal objects in works such as Untitled for Several Reasons (2003), Transparent Evil (2012), Sun Rave (2019) and Legacy//Premonition (2025).

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, a practice-based research that mobilizes art, urbanism, and social inquiry to reimagine civic spaces and ecological relations. Their work has been shown widely, from the São Paulo, Berlin, Lyon, Gwangju, Busan, Taipei, Kaunas, and Helsinki biennials to Manifesta and Documenta, with solo presentations at the Venice Biennale, MACBA, and the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. They founded artistic research-based initiatives such as Jutempus, co-edited Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press); led the long-form research program Zooetics and curated The Swamp School at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; their volume Swamps and the New Imagination is forthcoming from Sternberg Press and MIT Press. They teach internationally, with Gediminas serving as Professor in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, and both holding visiting appointments at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas and NABA in Milan.

Mohanad Yaqubi

Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah based production house, Idioms Film. Yaqubi is one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films that focuses on militant film practices, also, a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute, that focus on supporting, promoting, and preserving Palestinian cinema, he is a resident researcher at The School of the Art (KASK) in Gent, Belgium since 2017. Yaqubi’s first feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory, 2016, made its premiere at TIFF, Berlinale, Cinéma du réel, Dubai IFF, and Yamagata among fifty other premiers and screenings around the world.

Želimir Žilnik

Želimir Žilnik (*1942, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian-Slovenian artist-filmmaker. In his highly prolific career, Žilnik has made over 50 feature and short films, which have been exhibited internationally at film festivals including Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam, Moscow and Oberhausen. From the late 60s, his socially engaged films in former Yugoslavia earned him accolades, but also censorship in the 70s and the 90s for his unflinching criticism of the government apparatus. His power to observe and unleash compelling narratives out of the lives of ordinary people is the common thread throughout his work.

Žilnik has been the subject of major career retrospectives at Harvard Film Archive (2023); Kunsthalle Wien (2020/21); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); Cinemateca Argentina (2018); Mar del Plata International Film Festival (2017); Anthology Film Archive, New York, and others.

His work has been featured in programs of art galleries, museums and art institutes around the world (Documenta, Kassel, Germany; Venice Biennale, Italy; ICA London, UK; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA; MUMOK, Vienna, Austria; MACBA, Spain; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico, etc.).