In the art world, a Biennale, Italian for "biennial" or "every other year", is a large-scale international contemporary art exhibition. The term was popularised by the Venice Biennale, which was first held in 1895, but the concept of such a large scale, and intentionally international event goes back to at least the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
Guillaume Bijl is a Belgian conceptual and an installation artist. He lives and works in Antwerp.
Mark Manders is a Dutch artist, currently living and working in Ronse, Belgium. His work consists mainly of installations, drawings and sculptures. He is probably best known for his large bronze figures that look like rough-hewn, wet or peeling clay. Typical of his work is also the arrangement of random objects, such as tables, chairs, light bulbs, blankets and dead animals.
Stefano Cagol is an Italian contemporary artist living in Italy, Germany and Norway. He works with video, photography and installation and performance art in the fields of conceptual art, environmental art / eco art and land art, and has reflected for years on borders, viruses, flags and climate issues.
Thierry De Cordier is a contemporary visual artist. He currently lives and works in the Alpujarras, Spain.
Niek Kemps is a Dutch visual artist and lives and works in Amsterdam and Wenduine, Belgium.
Fiona Tan is a visual artist primarily known for her photography, film and video art installations. With her own complex cultural background, Tan's work is known for its skillful craftsmanship and emotional intensity, which often explores the themes of identity, memory, and history. Tan currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They were the United States Representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale, the 54th International Art Exhibition, in 2011.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an Italian-American writer, art historian and exhibition maker who has been serving as the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin since 2016. She was Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013-2019). She is the recipient of the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.
Jordan Wolfson is an American visual artist who lives in Los Angeles. He has worked in video and film, in sculptural installation, and in virtual reality.
Aïda Ruilova is an American contemporary artist.
Oscar Murillo is an artist working within the painting tradition. He currently lives and works in various locations.
Monica Bonvicini is a German-Italian artist who works with installation, sculpture, video, photography and drawing mediums. Bonvicini describes her practice as an exploration of relationshsips between architecture and space, power, gender and sexuality.
Raúl Cordero is a Cuban born conceptual painter. First known as part of the 90s generation in Cuba, when he started exhibiting his work mostly in Europe and the United States of America. Cordero represents through his work the "other Cuban art." Far from the standards of the Cuban Revolution art, and without falling into topics of other artists from in and out of the island, Cordero samples pretexts whimsically obtained from various referential origins and shows us his work as a result of recycling, of a revival, creating a new reality that refers more to art than to any other apparent content.
Defne Ayas is a curator, educator, and publisher in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. Ayas directed and advised many institutions and collaborative platforms across the world, including in China, South Korea, United States, Netherlands, Russia, Lithuania and Italy. She is known for conceiving exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Until June 2021, Ayas was the Artistic Director of 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.
Sonia Gomes is a contemporary Brazilian artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She is known for her mixed media sculptures made of fabric, wires, and other objects that are either found or given to her.
Rosângela Rennó Gomes is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her work consists of photographic images from public and private archives that question the nature of an image and its symbolic value. With the use of photographs, installations and objects, she appropriates and sheds new light on an anonymous body of photographs and negatives found mostly in flea markets, family albums, newspapers and archives. Rennó's interest in discarded images and habit of collecting were decisive in establishing her work strategies.
Ayşe Erkmen is a visual artist recognized as "one of the foremost Turkish artists." She is living and working in Berlin and in Istanbul.
