Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.
Cerith Wyn Evans is a Welsh conceptual artist, sculptor and film-maker. In 2018 he won the £30,000 Hepworth Prize for Sculpture.
Enrico David is an artist based in London. He works in painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, at times employing traditional craft techniques. In the 1990s he garnered acclaim for creating monumental embroidered portraits using sewn canvases, which often began as drawings and collages from fashion magazines. During the past several years David focused on sculpture in a variety of media and returned to more traditional methods of painting. His recent works include large-scale portraits of deeply psychological meaning. Drawing continues to be an important element of his practice.
Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker.
Yael Bartana is an Israeli artist, filmmaker and photographer, whose past works have encompassed multiple mediums, including photography, film, video, sound, and installation. Many of her pieces feature political or feminist themes.
Laure Prouvost is a French artist living and working in Antwerp, Belgium. She won the 2013 Turner Prize. In 2019, she represented France at the Venice Biennale with the multi-media work "The Deep Blue Sea Surrounding You".
Pola Sieverding is a German photographer and video artist. She works in the field of lens based media.
The 56th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held between May and November 2015. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Okwui Enwezor curated its central exhibition, "All The World's Futures".
Victor Man is a Romanian-born artist and painter with Hungarian ancestry.
The 57th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held between May and November 2017. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Christine Macel, the chief curator at the Centre Pompidou, curated its central exhibition, "Viva Arte Viva", as a series of interconnected pavilions designed to reflect art's capacity for expanding humanism. The curator also organized a project, "Unpacking My Library", based on a Walter Benjamin essay, to list artists' favorite books. Macel was the first French director since 1995 and the fourth woman to direct the Biennale. A trend of presenting overlooked, rediscovered, or "emerging dead artists" was a theme of the 57th Biennale.
Kris Lemsalu is a contemporary artist based in Tallinn, Estonia and Vienna, Austria. She studied art at the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Eccentric with color and material, she uses props, costumes, and other natural materials to portray her artwork. In these instillations, Lemsalu sculpts an installation that "that gives birth to a world of shamanic force, visionary weirdness, and collective revival." By playing with traditions, Lemsalu blurs the origin and scenically removes their dogma. She avoids "concrete labeling, simultaneously showing us the absurdity of as well as the effectiveness of rituals. From this collective transformative euphoria emerges a belief in the possibility of human redemption." "A punk pagan trickster feminist sci-fi shaman, Kris Lemsalu gathers together both collected and crafted objects into totemic sculptures and hallucinatory environments, animated with performances by the artist and her coterie of collaborators;" her work being shown in many places, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Tokyo. In 2015, she participated in Frieze Art Fair New York, where her work Whole Alone 2 was selected among of five best exhibits by the Frieze New York jury.
Chus Martínez is a Spanish curator, art historian, and writer. She is currently the director of the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, where she also runs the Institute’s exhibition space Der Tank. Additionally, Martínez is the artistic director of Ocean Space, Venice, a space spearheaded by TBA21–Academy that promotes ocean literacy, research, and advocacy through the arts. In 2017, Martínez was curator of KölnSkulptur #9. She sits on the advisory boards of numerous international art institutions, including Castello di Rivoli, Turin; De Appel, Amsterdam; Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin; and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg.
Banu Cennetoğlu is a visual artist based in Istanbul. She uses photography, installation, and printed matter to explore the classification, appropriation and distribution of data and knowledge. Her work deals with listings, collections, rearrangements, and archives. Cennetoğlu co-represented Turkey at the 53rd International Venice Biennale with Ahmet Öğüt in 2009. Her work has been shown at numerous international institutions such as Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020); Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfallen, Düsseldorf (2019); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); documenta14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2011); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Walker Art Center (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2007); and Berlin Biennial (2003). She is the founding director of BAS (2006–ongoing), an Istanbul-based artist-run initiative that collects and displays artists’ books and printed material as artwork. In Turkey, she is "best known as an apostle of the artist’s book."
The 58th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held between May and November 2019. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Ralph Rugoff curated its central exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times, and 90 countries contributed national pavilions.
The 54th Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held in 2011. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Bice Curiger curated its central exhibition, "ILLUMInations".
The German pavilion houses Germany's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
Ghana Freedom was a Ghanaian art exhibition at the 2019 Venice Biennale, an international contemporary art biennial in which countries represent themselves through self-organizing national pavilions. The country's debut pavilion, also known as the Ghana pavilion, was highly anticipated and named a highlight of the overall Biennale by multiple journalists. The six participating artists—Felicia Abban, John Akomfrah, El Anatsui, Selasi Awusi Sosu, Ibrahim Mahama, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—represented a range of artist age, gender, locations, and prestige, selected by curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim. The show paired young and old artists across sculpture, filmmaking, and portraiture, and emphasized common threads across postcolonial Ghanaian culture in both its current inhabitants and the diaspora. Almost all of the art was commissioned specifically for the pavilion. Architect David Adjaye designed the pavilion with rusty red walls of imported soil to reflect the cylindrical, earthen dwellings of the Gurunsi within the Biennale's Arsenale exhibition space. The project was supported by the Ghana Ministry of Tourism and advised by former Biennale curator Okwui Enwezor. After the show's run, May–November 2019, the exhibition will display in Accra, Ghana's capital.
Shoplifter is a New York-based contemporary artist who works with synthetic and natural hair. When Arnardóttir moved to New York her birth name was mispronounced as Shoplifter and she has gone by that name ever since.
Anselm Franke is a German curator, and writer. He has been the head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013.
