Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil and water, as in the recent projects Acoustic Ocean (2018), Forest Law (2014), Deep Weather (2013), and Egyptian Chemistry (2012). In her earlier art and curatorial work she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis, for example, in the widely exhibited art and research project Sahara Chronicle (2006-2009) on clandestine migration networks. Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and the International Art Biennials of Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai, São Paulo, Sevilla, Istanbul, and Venice. Biemann has published several books and is founding member of the collaborative art and media project World of Matter. Biemann has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (1988). She received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea and the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art, and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics.
Mikhail Karikis is a Greek/British artist based in London and Lisbon. Through his work in moving image, sound, performance, and other media, he employs listening as an artistic strategy and form of activism. He develops projects with communities located outside the context of contemporary art who may be pushed into economic and socio-geographic fringes. In recent years, Karikis has been collaborating with children, teenagers, young adults and people with disabilities to explore narratives of social, environmental, and economic injustice. While prompting participatory and activist imaginaries, Karikis’ projects rouse the potential for people to imagine futures of self-determination and potency. His work highlights alternative modes of human action and solidarity, while nurturing critical attention, dignity, and tenderness.
Select solo exhibitions include Sounds of a Revolution, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal (2024); Songs for the Storm to Come, HOME Manchester, UK (2024); Because We Are Together, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), GR (2023); Acoustics of Resistance, Carpintarias de São Lázaro/Lisboa Soa, PT (2022); Ferocious Love, Tate Liverpool, UK (2020); Children of Unquiet, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, IT (2019); For Many Voices, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2019-2020); I Hear You, De la Warr Pavilion, UK (2019-2020); Mikhail Karikis, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, JP (2019); No Ordinary Protest, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2018-2019). Karikis was shortlisted for the 2019 and the 2016 Film London Jarman Award, UK, and the 2015 Daiwa Art Prize, UK-JP. Select group exhibitions include: A Outra Vida Dos Animais, MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, PT (2022); 5th Mardin Biennial, TR (2022); 2nd Riga Biennial, LV (2020); Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, IN; British Art Show 8, UK (2015-2017); Steirischer Herbst, AT (2015); 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, GR (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney, AU (2014); Mediacity Seoul/SeMA Biennale, Seoul, KR (2014); Videonale 14, Kunstmusuem Bonn, DE (2013); 2nd Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, JP (2013); Manifesta 9, Ghenk, BE (2012); Danish Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, IT (2011).
Susan Schuppli is an artist and researcher whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. Recent commissioned works include Learning from Ice, Toronto Biennial; Nature Represents Itself, SculptureCenter; Delay Decay, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Trace Evidence, Extra City, Antwerp & Bildmuseet, Umea; and Atmospheric Feedback Loops, a Vertical Cinema project for Sonic Acts, Amsterdam. She has published widely within the context of media and politics and received the ICP Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research in 2016. Her book, MATERIAL WITNESS: Media • Forensics • Evidence, published by MIT Press, will be released in 2020. Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and is an affiliated artist-researcher as well as board chair of Forensic Architecture.
Jol Thomson is an artist, sound designer, and researcher interested in the potential to bypass dominant Western rationality through critical engagements with the matter(s) and meanings of contemporary (particle) physics. Thomson completed his HBA at the University of Toronto in 2009 and received his meisterschüler in Fine Art from Professor Simon Starling at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in 2013. He was recently awarded an international studentship to pursue a practice-based PhD at the University of Westminster in London, where he is currently based. Between 2014–2016 he developed and taught an experimental interdisciplinary arts pedagogy for architects with artist Tomás Saraceno at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany. In 2016 he won the MERU ArtScience Award for his audio-visual composition G24|0vßß. That year he was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude and in 2017 he was a resident of the Bosch GmbH’s Centre for Research and Advanced Engineering, Stuttgart. Recent screenings and selected exhibitions include Recontres Internationales: Contemporary Moving Image, Pompidou, Paris and HKW, Berlin (2019); Quantum Real: Spectral Exchange, Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool (2019); Galleria d’Arte Moderne e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2019); Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art, Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2018); Open Codes: Living in Digital Worlds, ZKM (Center for Art and Technology), Karlsruhe (2017-2018). In 2017 he published Intra-acting With the IceCube Neutrino Observatory; or, how the technosphere may come to matter, with Dr. Sasha Engelmann in a special issue of the Anthropocene Review*.
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).