Jennifer Allora (1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (1971, Cuba) are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Through a research-based approach, their works trace intersections of history, material culture, ecology, and politics, using a multiplicity of artistic media that include performance, sculpture, sound, video, and photography.

Since the beginning of their collaborative practice in 1995, Allora & Calzadilla have presented solo exhibitions at some of the world’s most important museums — including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Neue National galerie, Berlin; The Menil Collection, Houston; Serpentine Gallery, London; the Castello de Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MAXXI, Rome; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. In 2011 they represented the United States of America at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale with an ambitious project, Glória—a performative critique of the narratives and symbols that overlap in America's political, cultural, and economic nationalism. In 2015, they made the site-specific installation Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), a Dia Art Foundation commission on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. The first mid-career survey of the artistic duo is currently on view at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, in Porto Portugal until mid-October.

Adrian Blackwell is an artist, writer, and designer whose work focuses on the relation between physical space and political economy. His art and design have been exhibited at artist-run centres and public institutions in Canada, the UK, the US, and China. In 2014, he showed Circles Describing Spheres at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery, and Furnishing Positions at the Blackwood Gallery.

Blackwell’s research focuses on the intertwined problems of public space and private property. Publications include: “Forms of Enclosure in the Instant Modernization of Shenzhen” in Volume and “What is Property?” in the Journal of Architectural Education. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. He was a member of Toronto’s Anarchist Free School and the Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, and is an editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy.

Cyprien Gaillard was born in Paris in 1980 and currently lives in New York and Los Angeles. He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst (2011), the Prix Marcel Duchamp and the Karl-Ströher-Preis (2010), the Prix academie les David (2010), the Prix Audi Talent Award (2007), the Aide individuelle à la création (2006), and the Aide à l'édition (2005). Solo exhibitions include MoMA PS1 (2013), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2012), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2012), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2008), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Metz (both 2011), Zollamt/Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, and Kunsthalle Basel (both 2010). Major group shows include the Manifesta 10 - The European Biennial of Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (both 2014), the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2013), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (2012-2013), S.M.A.K. Gent and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (both 2012), the 54th Venice Biennale, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (both 2011), Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, MoMA, New York, Gwangju Biennal, South Korea (all 2010), Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, London, and Generali Foundation, Vienna (both 2009), the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008), and the Biennale de Lyon (2007).

Mary Mattingly is an artist based in New York. She has received grants and fellowships from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Eyebeam Art+Technology Center, and the Art Matters Foundation. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Seoul Arts Center, The New York Public Library, the Palais de Tokyo, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She recently participated in MoMA PS1’s EXPO 1 with Triple Canopy magazine and the smARTpower project in the Philippines with the U.S. Department of State and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, ArtNews, Sculpture, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Le Monde Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and on BBC News, MSNBC, Fox News, News 12, NPR, WNBC, New York 1, and PBS’s Art21. Her writings were included in Nature, edited by Jeffrey Kastner, in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series. In 2012, she launched the Flock House Project: three spherical living-systems choreographed throughout New York City’s five boroughs. Mattingly also founded the Waterpod Project, a barge-based public space containing an autonomous habitat that migrated through New York’s waterways.

Laurel Ptak works across curatorial, artistic, and pedagogical boundaries to address the social and political contours of art and technology. Together with artist Marysia Lewandowska, she is co-editor of the book Undoing Property (Sternberg Press, 2013) which explores artistic practices in relationship to immaterial production, political economy, and the commons. Recent collaborative projects include: To Have and To Owe (2012) an exhibition and event series created with numerous artists, theorists, and activists exploring debt’s aesthetic and affective dimensions; What Do We Do Now? (2013) an alternative economies fair featuring discussion around and direct access to practices of mutual aid and cooperation for artists and artworkers; and Wages For Facebook (2014). Ptak teaches in the department of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, The New School in New York City. In 2014 she was appointed Executive Director of Triangle Arts Association in Brooklyn, a more than thirty-year-old artist residency program within an international network of arts organizations around the world. She is currently at work transforming it into a revitalized institution that actively rethinks the site and conditions of artistic production and wonders what an artist residency can be in the year 2014.

Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).

Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).