Gabor Erlich
Gabor Erlich is an artist, activist, researcher from Eastern Europe who grew up in a working class family in rural Hungary. Erlich’s research project as FEINART ESR1 at the University of Wolverhampton, supervised by Prof. John Roberts and Dr. Alexei Penzin, is a Marxian cultural analysis, one that considers culture as an integral part of our material reality in the current world-system, Capitalocene.
Piu-Wai Chan
Waiwai Chan was a former Research Analyst (Digital Insights and Data) at the global newspaper, South China Morning Post. Chan was a full-time teaching staff in Information Systems and Fintech Compliance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology after graduated with a degree in fine art at Manchester School of Art and a master’s degree in digital media at University of Art and Industrial Design Linz.
Maria Mkrtycheva
Maria Mkrtycheva is a curator with focus on public and education programs. She lives in Moscow and has been working with various art institutions across Russia. She is interested in discursive and process-based artistic and curatorial practices as vehicles for knowledge production, sharing and distribution, and examines changing roles of the viewer and modes of access to art and culture. Earlier she has been working as a Curator of Public Program in the city of Vyksa (2018-2019) and as a Head of Education at the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow (2011-2017).
Jenny Fadranski
Jenny Fadranski is a cultural theorist and journalist from Berlin. She holds an M.A. in History and Culture of Science and Technology (TU Berlin) and a B.A. in Governance & Political Management (Zeppelin University). Her ongoing self-directed study of collective practices and collective learning contexts at the intersections of voice improvisation, dialogue practices, regenerative agency, community building and systemic change weaves into her academic work.
Claude Nassar
Claude Nassar works at the intersection of philosophical research, sound production and film making to think about the dissonance between individuated abstraction and the irreducible collectivity of life. Nassar is interested in the conjunction of subsistence in time and space as a coherent social and political unity, and infrastructures of domination and extraction of labour. Nassar’s textual, auditory, and visual work, evolves around investigating the ways notions of knowledge and art in a modernised world issuing from the logics of post-enlightenment Europe, become instruments of safeguarding the infrastructures of governance that validate, record, and archive them. As such, Nassar’s practice explores the potential of decolonial onto-epistemologies, and methodologies of non-deterministic recording of abstraction in cultivating social and political cooperation beyond both, territorial unities, and delocalised unities of individuated absolutes; exploring modalities of producing art and knowledge that challenge the logics of production according to which collective living processes are stratified into individuated professionalised labour, rationalised through de-particularised significance.
Bilge Hasdemir
Bilge Hasdemir is a curator and reseacher, having a background in Sociology and Media Arts Management and Curating. She was previously Curator at the Aalto University in Finland. She is an active member of AIVAG (Artists in Iceland Visa Action Group), an advocacy group in Iceland working for a fair immigration policy and better and desirable living and working conditions for artists and culture professionals toward a more inclusive, accessible and diverse culture sector.
Noa Mamrud
Noa is a dancer, researcher, and organiser. Her interrogation into the intersection of art, society, and politics she currently continues in her capacity as a Phd candidate at Zeppelin University and a research member at the FEINART network. In 2019, Noa graduated the MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths University of London (distinction). Her academic studies followed a dance career, during which she worked with independent choreographers in Tel Aviv and Berlin and later at the Danish Dance Theatre in Copenhagen. Her dance training she received at the Maslool TLV programme for professional dancers in Israel. Noa had spent her adolescence in the socialist youth movement ‘Hanoar HaOved VeHalomed’ which has been formative to her political thought. Committed to the learning of contemporary forms of racism and oppression, she is interested in the role of Jewish history, and how it can contribute to a related discourse and action. Noa currently lives in Berlin and combines her theoretical work with movement research teaching and dancing.
Marteinn Sindri Jónsson
Marteinn Sindri Jónsson studied philosophy (BA/MA first class with distinction) at the University of Iceland, comprising two year-long study exchanges in Germany. Since 2009 he has contributed as a cultural journalist and producer for Iceland National Broadcasting and between 2015 and 2019, he lectured at the Iceland University of the Arts. Furthermore, he is active across a variety of artistic and cultural fields in his native Iceland through practice, collaborations, publishing, and research. Since January 2021, he develops his PhD as an early-stage researcher within the FEINART research network at the Chair of Art Theory and Curation, focusing on socially engaged independent art spaces in Germany.
Sophie Mak-Schram
Sophie Mak-Schram is an art historian, producer, educator and occasional practitioner. She holds a Research MA (cum laude) in Arts and Culture from Leiden University, a Postgraduate Certificate (merit) in Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy from the University of Leeds, and a BA (hons) in English Literature and History of Art from the University of York. She has worked for, amongst others, immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, global university Minerva Schools, artists development organisation, UK New Artists and art platform for the global South, the Cera Project, as well as for various arts collectives and initiatives. She likes to think-work-make-be with other people around knowledges constituted through art, and what political, social and cultural implications these knowledges (can) have. At the moment, she’s particularly interested in radical pedagogies, decolonial and feminist approaches, and the ‘and’ between art and education.
Anna Fech
Anna Fech studied art history and economics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen. In 2014, she graduated from Zurich University of the Arts in MAS CURATING with a focus on postcolonial discussion in exhibition practice related to post-soviet countries. From 2016 to 2021 she worked as curator for YARAT Contemporary Art Space (Azerbaijan) being responsible for the international residency program and ARTIM PROJECT Space directed at young artists with an intention to support and encourage emergent talent.
Fabiola Fiocco
Fabiola Fiocco is a researcher, curator, and organiser. Currently, she is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD fellow at the University of Edinburgh, with a research project on gender and labour in the curating and production of socially engaged art and independent instituting. She holds an MA in Museology from the Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam and an MA in Art History from Roma Tre University in Rome. She previously obtained a BA in Arts Management from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. As part of her academic and curatorial practice, she has focused on art and activism, feminism and biopolitics, and on the sociopolitical agency of the contemporary art museum. She has worked in independent art spaces, museums, and foundations – both in Italy and abroad – and collaborated with various online magazines. She is a founding member of [AWI] – Art Workers Italia.