2021 Speakers

Elvira Dyangani Ose is Director of The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Previously, she was Director of The Showroom, London. She is affiliated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada. Previously, she served as Creative Time Senior Curator, Curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary art, and Curator International Art at Tate Modern. She recently joined Tate Modern Advisory Council. 

Lily Hall is a Curator at The Showroom, London, and combines this with an interdependent curatorial practice with a focus on collaborative, process-oriented modes of production. Selected recent international curatorial projects include Muros Blandos, ser entre bordes, [Soft Walls, Being Between Borders], co-curated with Daniela Berger and Mette Kjærgaard Præst at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile, 2017-18; Jaroslav Kyša: Fifth Force at Zahorian & Van Espen, Prague, 2018; Surface Tensions, Pavla and Lucia Sceranková at Pump House Gallery, London in partnership with Czech Centre, London, 2017.
 
Lily has worked in curatorial and editorial capacities with Calvert 22 Foundation (2012-15), Raven Row (2016) and Chisenhale Gallery (2017) amongst others; and on collaborative projects within and beyond these institutional frameworks, often exploring the spaces between publishing, experimental print-based platforms and exhibition making as a curator and writer. Between 2016-17 she was a member of the jury for the Oskár Čepan Award for contemporary art, Slovakia. Recent teaching and visiting lecturer roles have included contributions at the School of Fine Art (MPhil/PhD programmes) at the Royal College of Art, London, 2017; and Exhibition Studies (MRes programme) at Central St Martins, London, 2020-21. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London, and BA in Art History and Literature from the University of East Anglia, UK.

Dr. Mikala Tai is the Head of Visual Arts at Australia Council for the Arts, previously the director of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. As a curator, researcher, and academic specialising in contemporary Asian art, she has collaborated with local, national, and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. Tai has taught at Monash University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), and the University of Melbourne in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Tai’s writing can be found in several exhibition catalogues in addition to periodicals. In 2015, Tai received her PhD, focusing on the influence of the global city on China’s local art infrastructure.

Marc Goldenfein is a creative entrepreneur and the co-founder of ArtsPay, a new initiative attempting to build a sustainable funding source for the arts powered by transaction payments fees. He has deep experience in event technology, payments, partnerships and digital media and is passionate about creating collaborative solutions for supporting independent artists and small arts organisations. Marc has held senior roles at media companies in Australia and the United States where he oversaw strategy, editorial and community building. He has also developed major partnerships with global brands including Founders Forum, Fast Company, GQ, Tablet Hotels, and Frieze Art. Marc also sits on the board of Aphids, a 27 year old experimental arts organisation in Australia that has survived multiple cancellations, closures and shocks during the pandemic, and is an enduring inspiration for ArtsPay's mission to create a more stable arts ecosystem. 

Osei Bonsu is a curator, critic and art historian who has developed projects focused on transnational histories of art, collaborating with museums, galleries and private collections internationally. He curated the 10th edition of Satellites, The Economy of Living Things, 2017, an exhibition co-commissioned by Jeu de Paume and CAPC: Centre for Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, and has worked on a number of projects focusing on African art, including Pangaea II: New Art from Africa and Latin America, Saatchi Gallery, 2015, and 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, 2013-14. Osei has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications including ArtReview, New African and NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, and was an acting contributing editor to frieze. He holds an MA History of Art from University College London. In 2019, he was recently appointed Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern, London. 

Ndidi Dike is a contemporary artist of British-Nigerian ancestry. Although often regarded as a self-trained sculptor with decades of transgressive practice in three dimensions, over the past two decades her work has developed across other media including collage, mixed-media installation, painting, photography, and video. Born in London, she returned to Nigeria to train as a painter and graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, earning a BA degree in Fine and Applied Arts in 1984. 

Rattanamol Singh Johal is an art historian and curator based in New York City.  He is currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and has held fellowships and curatorial roles at The Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Whitney Independent Study Program and Khoj International Artists' Association.
 

As poetic as it is political and biographical, Emily Jacir’s work investigates translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures and in-depth research. Her work spans a range of strategies including film, photography, sculpture, interventions, archiving, performance, video, writing, and sound. She investigates personal and collective movement through public space and its implications on the physical and social experience of Mediterranean space and time. Her works have been widely exhibited, and she has been honored for her achievements with several awards including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) for her work Material for a film; a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2015) among others. She has three permanent public works in Italy: Pietrapertosa, Basilicata; Palermo, Sicily and Milano. Select film juries that Jacir has served on include German Competition 35th International Kurzfilm Hamburg (2018); Visions du Reel Festival international du Cinéma Nyon (2014); Berlinale Shorts International Jury (2012); the Cinema XXI Jury Rome Film Festival (2012). She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and deeply invested in creating alternative spaces of knowledge production internationally.  She formed a school at the Firestation in Dublin in the summer of 2019 Live Free or Die. In conjunction with her survey show Europa at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Dublin in 2016–17 she organized a 2 week workshop for her students in Ramallah alongside Irish participants To Be Determined (for Jean). She was the curator the Young Artist of the Year Award 2018 at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah that she titled We Shall Be Monsters. She is co-founder and the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Aline Khoury is a cultural manager, producer and researcher living and working in Jerusalem. She is currently the Programs Director at Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research (Bethlehem, 2019-present) and has previously worked as a project manager at Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art (Jerusalem, 2014-2019), assistant curator on Subcontracted Nations - A.M.Qattan Foundation’s inaugural exhibition (2019), and has been a member of Qalandiya International (2015-2018) and Shafaq- Jerusalem Arts Network (2015-2019). She is a regional facilitator in Arts Collaboratory, a translocal ecosystem of twenty-five socially engaged arts organizations, which has informed her practice in exploring new ways of working and collaborating together towards more sustainable models of living. She works independently as a strategic consultant and development advisor for arts and cultural organizations with a special focus on Jerusalem and the Palestinian art and cultural scene. Aline studied History of Art and Social-Anthropology (B.A.) in Jerusalem, and Aural & Visual Cultures (M.A.) in Goldsmiths University, London.

Dr. Stephanie Rosenthal, has been Director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin since 2018. She began her programme that year with the exhibition Lee Bul: Crash, which was organised in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery, London. Her subsequent exhibitions have included Garden of Earthly Delights (2019), Wu Tsang: There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody (2019), Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals, Otobong Nkanga: There Is No Such Thing as Solid Ground (2020) and most recently, Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective - A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe (2021), Hella Jongerius: Woven Cosmos (2021) and Zheng Bo: Wanwu Council 萬物社 (2021). 

From 2007 to 2017 she was the Chief Curator at the Hayward Gallery, London. Here she curated numerous exhibitions with celebrated international artists including Robin Rhode: Who Saw Who (2008), MOVE: Choreographing You (2010), Art of Change: New Directions from China (2012), Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage (2012), Ana Mendieta: Traces (2013) and Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer (2013). She was Artistic Director of the 20th Biennial of Sydney in 2016, titled The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed, which brought together more than 80 artists from around the world such as Lee Bul, Boris Charmatz, Lee Mingwei, Helen Marten, Otobong Nkanga and Johanna Calle. 

Prior to that she worked as a curator at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and staged several acclaimed exhibitions, including Paul McCarthy: LaLa Land Parody Paradise (2005), Black Paintings: Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko (2006), Allan Kaprow: Art as Life (2006), Christoph Schlingensief: 18 Images a Second (2007) and Luc Tuymans: When Spring Comes (2008). 
 
Stephanie Rosenthal's exhibitions have travelled to museums worldwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) Seoul; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She studied art history at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich and received her doctorate at the University of Cologne. Since then she has published influential articles and lectures on contemporary art with a focus on performative methods. She is a member of numerous international juries, chairing the International Jury of the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as being a member of the jury of the Hyundai Blue Prize and the Gwangju Biennale.

Photo credit: Victoria Tomaschko.

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Works including The Ark: Center for Interdisciplinary Experimentation; COVERSLUT© fashion and economic project; and performance art series, Healing the Museum, have been shown around the world since 2012. Recently, her debut short film Black Beauty has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 71st Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section and FIDMarseille in 2021. Ndiritu has been featured in TIME magazine, Phaidon’s The 21st Century Art Book, Art Monthly and Elephant magazine. Her work is housed in museum collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The British Council and The Modern Art Museum (Warsaw). Her writing has been published in her critical theory book Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall) in 2021; The Whitechapel Gallery in the Documents of Contemporary Art anthology series; Animal Shelter Journal, Semiotext(e) The MIT Press; Metropolis M; and The Oxford University Press. 

Rana Ayyub is an Indian investigative journalist and a global opinions Editor at the Washington Post. She has worked as a reporter, editor and columnist with some of the leading publications in India and internationally. Her pieces appear in the Time, New York Times, Guardian and Foreign Policy among other publications. She was an Editor with Tehelka which was India's ground-breaking investigative magazine. Rana has reported on religious violence, extrajudicial killings by the state, insurgency in Kashmir , terrorism by the Tamil tigers in Sri Lanka and authored an international bestseller titled “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up', an undercover investigation which exposes the complicity of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in state-sponsored genocide. At the age of 26, post getting the first serving Home Minister (Amit Shah) under arrest , In December 2019, New Yorker profiled her for its cover story on India.
 
In a career spanning fifteen years, Rana has been awarded the Sanskriti award for integrity and excellence in journalism by the President of India. She was the recipient of the Global Shining Light award for Investigative journalism in the year 2017 and the Most Resilient Global Journalist of 2018 at the Peace Palace in Hague. In 2019, she was named by Time magazine among ten global journalists who face maximum threats to their lives across the world. In the year, 2018 The United Nations allotted six special rapporteurs to the Indian government to protect her safety, a first for an individual case in India. In 2020, she was announced as the recipient of the McGill medal for journalistic courage. She is presently working on a memoir and an adaptation of her book Gujarat Files. 

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, writer and editor based in Colombo and Berlin. Ginwala is Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Artistic Director of Colomboscope in Sri Lanka and the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas (2021). Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14, 2017. Since joining Gropius Bau in 2018 she has curated a number of exhibitions including survey shows of Bani Abidi and Akinbode Akinbiyi. Other recent projects include Shadow Circus at SAVVY Contemporary (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung); Arrival, Incision. Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary in the framework of "Hello World. Revising a Collection" at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018; Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa Gallery Berlin and Stuttgart, 2018; My East is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and Corruption: Everybody Knows with e-flux, New York, 2015. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2016–17. Ginwala writes regularly on contemporary art and visual culture. Recent co-edited volumes include Stronger than Bone (Archive Books and Gwangju Biennale Foundation) and Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound  (Columbia University Press).

Photo credit: Victoria Tomaschko.