Abbas Akhavan's practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, and performance. The domestic sphere, as a forked space between hospitality and hostility, has been an ongoing area of research in Akhavan’s work. More recent works have shifted focus, wandering into spaces just outside the home—the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes. Akhavan is the recipient of the Kunstpreis Berlin (2012), the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), and the Sobey Art Award (2015).

Bureau d'études is a French artist group that has researched and mapped structures of political-economic power and capitalism for the past fifteen years, sometimes in collaboration with writer Brian Holmes. Bureau d’études initiated a zone de gratuité in Paris from March 1999 to September 2000, and founded, with Ewen Chardronnet, the newspaper Laboratory Planet. The group now lives and works in the countryside in Saint Menoux, France, where it works on collective projects across agriculture, commons, and cartographic research at Ferme de la Mhotte.

Emma Charles is a London-based artist. Working with photography and the moving image, her practice explores the way contemporary value systems of time, productivity, and labour are altered through technological progress. Recently, Charles has oriented her research towards the materiality of the Internet, going beneath the urban veneer to uncover the infrastructures within our technologically driven modern life. Charles holds a Master’s in Photography from the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited and screened at Jerwood Visual Arts (London), ZKM (Karlsruhe), HKW (Berlin), Jeu de Paume (Paris), LUX (Scotland), and ICA (London). Charles is the recipient of a 2016 Arts Council England award and a ZKM commission, and was recently published in Reset Modernity!, edited by Bruno Latour (The MIT Press, 2016).

Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen work across objects, installation, and film that explore process of production as cultural, personal and political practices. Their work was recently shown at the Renaissance Society in Chicago; Serpentine Cinema, London; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Para Site Hong Kong; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Vienna; HKW in Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and Congo International Film Festival. It is part of the permanent collections of the MoMA, New York, and M+ Museum in Hong Kong. They work and live in London.

Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge live and work in Toronto. They have collaborated with various trade union and community organizations in the production of their staged photographic work over the past forty years. Their work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in both the trade union movement and art galleries and museums. Recently, their work has been included in the Noorderlicht Photofestival (Groningen), Manif d'art 7, Québec City Biennial, and the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid). Condé and Beveridge have been active in several labour arts initiatives including the Mayworks Festival (Toronto) and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton). They received the Ontario Federation of Labour’s Cultural Award (1997), Honorary Doctorates from OCAD University (2010) and NSCAD University (2015), and the Prix de mérite artistique from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2013).

Mark Curran is an artist-researcher and educator who lives and works in Berlin and Dublin. He holds a practice-led PhD, is Lecturer in the Photography program at the Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Dublin, and Visiting Professor in the MA program in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Incorporating multimedia installation and informed by ethnography, Curran has undertaken a cycle of long-term research projects which critically address the predatory context of global capital. He has exhibited at DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), Xuhui Art Museum (Shanghai), Encontros da Imagem (Braga), Grimmuseum (Berlin), FORMAT (Derby), Gallery of Photography (Dublin), Belfast Exposed, Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris), Noorderlicht (Groningen), and Limerick City Gallery of Art.

Wally Dion (b. 1976 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) is a visual artist living and working in Binghamton, New York. He is a member of Yellow Quill First Nation (Salteaux). Dion holds a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Dion’s work has contributed to a broad conversation in the art world about identity and power. Dion has participated in numerous solo and groups exhibitions, including at the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Esker Foundation (Calgary), and MASS MoCA (North Adams). His work can be found in collections of the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau) and Canada Council Art Bank, among others.

Keith Hennessy is a performer, choreographer, teacher, writer, and activist. Born in Sudbury, he lives in San Francisco and tours internationally. Ideas and practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, punk, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s creative and activist projects. Hennessy directs Circo Zero, and was a member of the collaborative performance companies Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann, CORE, and Cahin-caha, cirque bâtard.

Instigated by Keith Hennessy in 2001, Circo Zero makes live performances responding to political crises, while centring queer bodies and ideas. For the 2017 performance of Turbulence (a dance about the economy), the group consisted of Laura Larry Arrington, Jorge De Hoyos, Ruairí Donovan, Empress Jupiter, keyon gaskin, Jesse Hewit, Jassem Hind, Shaista Latif, Emily Leap, Allyson Mitchell, Julie Phelps, Brian Solomon, Gabriel Todd, Alley Wilde, and Ravyn Wngz.

Ashley Hunt uses photography, the moving image, performance, map-making, and writing to engage social movements, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. The bulk of his art-making documents the expansion of the US prison system and its effects on communities as one way to address structures that either allow some people to accumulate power or keep others from getting power, while learning from the ways people come to know, contribute to, or resist these structures. Hunt’s work has been exhibited in venues ranging from DiverseWorks (Houston), MoMA, Tate Modern, Documenta 12, and Project Row Houses in Houston through to community centers and prisons. Hunt is the Co-Director of the Program in Photography and Media at CalArts and is on the Visual Art faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Jeremy Hutchison is a British artist based in London. After studying linguistics, he received an MFA with distinction from the University College London Slade School of Fine Art. His practice examines performance as a mode of manufacture: a way to produce realities. He constructs situations that disorder socio-economic procedures, reimagining the power relations encoded in dominant discourse. Hutchison’s work has been exhibited internationally, including recent shows at the ICA (London), Modern Art Oxford, V&A (London), Z33 (Hasselt), Nassauischer Kunstverein (Weisbaden). EVA International Biennale (Limerick) Saatchi New Sensations (London), Rurart (Poitiers), Galeri Mana (Istanbul), Paradise Row (London) and Southbank Centre (London). He was recently a member of the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens have developed a collaborative practice that combines a concise approach to the form and construction of the art object with a desire to make ideas visible. Spanning multiple media, including video, performance, and installation, their work explores the material, affective, and sensory dimensions of experience that cannot be fully translated into signs or systems. They have examined the rationale upon which economic actions are described and represented, and how the logic of economy has come to infiltrate intimate aspects of life. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York), Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal), VOX - Centre de l’image contemporaine (Montreal), and Trinity Square Video (Toronto), among others. They have participated in several group exhibitions including, recently, the XIII Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador), 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms (Istanbul), La Biennale de Montréal, L'avenir (looking forward), 27th Images Festival (Toronto), Manif d’art 7: Quebec City Biennial, and La Filature, Scène Nationale (Mulhouse, France). They live and work in Montreal and Durham-Sud, Quebec.

Will Kwan is a Hong Kong-born, Canadian media artist. His work has been exhibited at the 2014 Folkestone Triennial, 2010 Liverpool Biennial, 2007 Montréal Biennale, 2003 Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, Cooper Union, ZKM (Karlsruhe), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius), Polish National Museum, Zendai Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai), Art Museum at the University of Toronto, The Power Plant (Toronto), and the Western Front (Vancouver). Kwan has been artist-in-residence at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (Manchester), Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Kwan’s work is held in the collections of the M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Folkestone Artworks (Kent), and the University of Toronto. Kwan is an Associate Professor in Studio at the University of Toronto Scarborough and graduate faculty in Visual Studies at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto.

Gerald Nestler is an artist and author who combines theory and postdisciplinary conversation with video, installation, performance, objects, graphics, text, and sound to explore what he terms the “derivative condition” of contemporary social relations and its paradigmatic (financial) models, narratives, and operations. He is currently working on the aesthetics of resolution as a means to produce counter-fictions and imaginations that support renegade activism. Nestler graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1992). After collaborating in early net art projects he examined financial markets as a broker and trader. His work has been shown internationally and has received several grants and awards. He is a practice-based PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Public Recordings develops and presents projects that test hypotheses about group work through performance, education, publishing, and other collective gestures. With the goal of providing a readable index of problems and solutions in and through experiential practice, we use the structural and administrative framework of a dance company to question the meanings and possibilities of shared space. Based in Toronto, Public Recordings has staged projects in Calgary, Cardiff, Chalon-sur-Saône, Edmonton, Ghent, Halifax, Kitchener, Leuven, Ljubljana, Montreal, Nottingham, Ottawa, Paris, Pula, Terni, Toronto, St. John’s, Vancouver, Vienna, Yokohama, and Zagreb.

Public Studio is the collective art practice of filmmaker Elle Flanders and architect Tamira Sawatzky. Their multidisciplinary practice spans a wide range of topics such as war and militarization, globalization, ecology, and political dissent. With backgrounds in photography, film and architecture, the point of departure for Public Studio is an image that is often formed and informed spatially. Their photographs and immersive film installations consider the relationship between ethics and aesthetics through landscape. Central to their work is the role of aesthetic judgment and not just how to “make meaning,” but how to “make meaning matter.”

Their most recent work includes: The Accelerators (2015), an exhibition about trade, colonialism, and a networked constellation of events; The Dialogues (2014), a series of films displayed in public spaces — subways and advertising LED billboards — addressing revolution through the extraction of dialogue from the history of cinema; Drone Wedding (2014), an eight-channel film installation examining surveillance in the everyday; Visit Palestine: Change Your View (2014), in which they turned their art studio into a travel agency running tours to the West Bank; What Isn’t There (1999-2014), a fifteen-year ongoing installation project that documents Palestinian villages that no longer exist; Road Movie (2011), a six screen installation on the segregated roads of Palestine; and Kino Pravda 3G (2010), a series of video installations addressing public dissent and protests across the globe. Their work has screened and exhibited internationally including: the Museum of Modern Art; Berlin International Film Festival; The Toronto International Film Festival, and the MoCCA. Public Studio is currently working on a new feature film called HarMageddon addressing war and deterritorialization, and several large-scale public art installations.

Elle Flanders is a filmmaker and artist based in Toronto. She was raised in Montreal and Jerusalem and holds a PhD in Visual Arts. She is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program where she mentored with Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler.

Tamira Sawatzky is an architect and artist working in Toronto. After working for the award-winning firm MJM Architects (1999-2010), she founded her independent practice, Public Studio Architecture.

Hank Willis Thomas is a photo-conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. He received a BFA in Photography and Africana studies from New York University and his MFA/MA in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts. Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture. He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the International Center of Photography, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Thomas’ work is in numerous public collections including the MoMA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.

Christopher Myers is an author, illustrator of books for children and young adults, and an artist who lives and works in New York. He has written numerous books and notable essays, amongst them the much-discussed “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” which ran in The New York Times in 2014. He has illustrated books for authors including E.E. Cummings, Zora Neale Hurston, his father Walter Dean Myers, and Misty Copeland. He has collaborated with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Vietnam, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, and weavers in Luxor. He also co-directed with Hank Willis Thomas the documentary film Am I Going Too Fast? Myers’ work has been shown at MoMA PS1 (New York), Contrasts Gallery (Shanghai), Prospect Biennial (New Orleans), and The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard (Cambridge).

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the co-author of Cartographies of the Absolute and author of Fanaticism and The Theatre of Production. He edits the Italian List for Seagull Books and sits on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism.

Letters & Handshakes is a collaboration of Greig de Peuter (Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) and Christine Shaw (Blackwood Gallery and Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga).
Letters & Handshakes’ past projects include the exhibitions I stood before the source and Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge, the forum Fighting Foreclosed Futures: Politics of Student Debt, and the symposium and micropublication Surplus3: Labour and the Digital.

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).

Greig de Peuter collaborates on Cultural Workers Organize, an international research project exploring collective responses to precarity in the cultural and creative industries. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. He is a co-founder of Letters & Handshakes.

Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).