Participants

SYMPOSIUM
Gender Check – Narratives and Exhibition Practises, 19-20 November 2010, MUMOK

Christine Böhler is deputy managing director of ERSTE Foundation and director of the Culture Programme. She is also chairwoman of Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group. She has worked as a journalist and curator and was director of the reading and exhibition programme at the Literaturhaus Vienna. She has directed various international festivals focusing on literature, arts and new media. She developed the concept of the Lichtzeile – an LED billboard and a ticker on the Web as a form of literary publication. In 2001 she published the book Literatur im Netz. Projekte, Hintergründe, Strukturen und Verlage im Netz [Literature on the Web. Projects, backgrounds, structures and publishing companies on the Web] (Triton Verlag). Christine Böhler studied Comparative Literature and Spanish in Vienna and Madrid and gave classes at the University of Innsbruck on cross-cultural topics.

Angela Dimitrakaki is lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research largely addresses art in its political manifestations, with an emphasis on gender in a geopolitical context and the complexities of European cultural space. Her recent work includes ‘Labour, Conflict and Art in the Age of Global Capital’ in the Blackwell-Wiley reader Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (launch: February 2011). The essay has been translated into Dutch by De Witte Raaf 143 (Jan-Feb 2010). She is currently writing a book entitled Gender, Art/Work and The Global Imperative: A Materialist-Feminist Critique (Manchester University Press), co-editing the volume Politics in A Glass Case: Exhibiting Feminist and Women’s Art (Liverpool University Press) and she just completed a study in Greek entitled Τέχνη και Παγκοσμιοποίηση [Art and Globalization] (Hestia Publishers). She is a member of the Leverhulme research network ‘Transnational Perspectives on Women’s Art, Feminism and Curating’ and corresponding editor of the interdisciplinary journal HM: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

Rainer Fuchs has been vice director and head of the scientific department at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) since 1991. Exhibitions include: Self Construction (1996), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1998), Lois Weinberger (1999), Public Rituals – Video/Art from Poland (2003), Christian Hutzinger (2004), John Baldessari (2005), Keren Cytter (2007), Peter Kogler (2008), Mind Expander (2008), Brigitte Kowanz (2010), Painting: Process and Expansion (2010). Various publications on modernism and contemporary art in monographs, catalogues and art reviews. He studied art history, history and philosophy in Graz and Vienna. Rainer Fuchs lives and works in Vienna.

Amelia Jones’ work explores queer, anti-racist, feminist history and the theory of twentieth- and twenty-first century Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation – articulated in relation to increasingly global frameworks. She is currently professor and Grierson chair in Visual Culture at McGill University, Montreal. Jones is the author of a number of books, including Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (1994), and Self-Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006). This latter book expands on her work on body art, exploring the experience and understanding of the self in relation to performances of the body via technologies of representation from analogue photography to the Internet. Jones has curated exhibitions (including Sexual Politics [1996]), organised performance and creative events (including Theorising Queer Visualities [2005] and Faith and Identity in Contemporary Visual Culture [2006]), and edited volumes, such as Contemporary Art, 1945-2003 (2005) and Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2010), which collectively attempt to rethink standard chronologies and modes of thinking about areas of visual culture studies and art history by including voices that were previously marginalized, or otherwise not fully accounted for, in debates and histories of these fields. This goal of (un)doing and/or rethinking art’s histories (including the very structures through which these histories unfold and are institutionally embedded) is also reflected in the new series Jones is co-editing with Marsha Meskimmon at University of Manchester Press, entitled “Rethinking Art’s Histories.”

Katrin Kivimaa. Now head of the Institute of Art History and acting professor of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Katrin Kivimaa received her PhD in Art History from the School of Fine Arts, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She also holds an MPhil in Gender Studies from the Program on Gender and Culture of the Central European University in Budapest and the Open University, UK (1997-1999). Her research focuses on Estonian 20th century and contemporary art, feminist art history, nationalism and art, and visual culture. She has written extensively about women’s and feminist art in Estonia and is co-editor of a collection of Estonian translations of key feminist art history texts. Her latest book deals with representations of national and modern femininities in 19th and 20th century Estonian art (Tartu University Press, 2009). Other edited publications include: So Communication: Translating Each Other’s Words (together with Clare Charnley, 2007) and Opening Acts: New Media and Art in Estonia / Avalöök: uus meedia ja kunsti Eestis (2004). In 2010 she co-curated (with Kädi Talvoja) the exhibition The Soviet Woman in Estonian Art in Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn and co-edited the exhibition catalogue.

Katarzyna Kozyra is an artist. She lives in Warsaw and Berlin. Katarzyna Kozyra studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1988-1993), graduating from the Sculpture Department under Prof. Grzegorz Kowalski. In 1999 she received the Honourable Mention at the 48th International Biennale of Art in Venice for her video installation Men’s Bathhouse. In 2003 she was awarded a scholarship from the Berlin Artists’ Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In 2003 she started the project In Art Dreams Come True, linking different forms of visual, musical and performance arts. The title of the project refers to the utopia of personality transformation that can only become a reality in art. She is currently preparing a retrospective exhibition in the Zacheta National Gallery of Art. www.katarzynakozyra.com.pl

www.themidgetgallery.com

Christian Kravagna is an art historian, critic and curator. He is professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and editor of the books Privileg Blick. Kritik der visuellen Kultur, Berlin 1997; Agenda. Perspektiven kritischer Kunst, Vienna/Bolzano 2000; The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique, Cologne 2001 and Routes: Imaging travel and migration, Frankfurt 2007. He is curator (with Hedwig Saxenhuber) at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt. In 2008 he curated the exhibition Planetary Consciousness at Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. His most recent exhibition, Living Across: Spaces of Migration, runs at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 5 November to 5 December.

Laima Kreivytė is an art critic and curator based in Vilnius. From 1999 to 2000 she received the fellowship for gender and cultural studies at the Central European University, Budapest. Kreivytė currently teaches at the Vilnius Academy of Art, European Humanities University and at the Gender Studies Center at Vilnius University. She is an editor for cultural politics at the Lithuanian cultural weekly 7 meno dienos [7 Days of Art]. From 2007 to 2009 she worked as a Visual Arts Program manager at Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009. Kreivytė has curated a number of exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad. In 2007 she co-curated Baltic mythologies in the 3rd Prague Biennale (together with Luigi Fassi). In 2009 she was a curator of the Lithuanian pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale and a researcher from Lithuania for the Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe exhibition. This year Kreivytė co-curated Woman’s Time. Sculpture and Film at the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art (together with Elona Lubytė and Živile Pipinytė). Kreivytė has edited a monograph on Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė (Vilnius, 2006) and co-edited a collection of articles, Challenges of Representation with Erika Grigoravičienė (Vilnius, 2005). She is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics).

Suzana Milevska is a theorist and curator based in Skopje and is currently teaching Art History and Theory at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia. Her main research and theoretical interests include the history of Balkan feminist art, globalisation, representations of women warriors, post-Communist visual cultures, historical archives, and social and cultural change in the Balkans. She has authored numerous publications on these topics, including the book Gender Difference in the Balkans (2010) and edited the readers Capital and Gender (2001) and The Renaming Machine (2010). Milevska holds a PhD from the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London (2006). In 2004 she was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA. In 2005 she curated the project Workers’ Club for the International Contemporary Art Biennale at the National Gallery in Prague.

She has participated in numerous conferences, including Humanities Symposium: New Directions for the Humanities, Columbia University, New York, USA (2007). She was the keynote speaker at the conference On Participation, NGBK and Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2008), and at the IKT Annual Congress of curators in Helsinki (2009).

Ruth Noack is an art historian, critic and curator. She curated Documenta 12 in 2007. Other exhibitions include: Scenes of a Theory (Vienna 1995), Things we don’t understand (Vienna 2000), Organisational Form (Lüneburg, Ljubljana, Leipzig 2002-3), The Government (Lüneburg, Miami, Vienna, Rotterdam 2003-5). From 2000 to 2010 she taught courses on film, contemporary art and curating at art schools and universities in Vienna, Lüneburg and Kassel. Her numerous texts and lectures cover feminist theory and contemporary art. She is writing a book on Sanja Iveković and researching trans-local museums. She is currently working on an exhibition called Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life. www.goethe.de/kue/bku/kur/kur/mr/noa/deindex.htm

Martina Pachmanová is an art historian, independent curator and writer. She is assistant professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czech Republic. Over the last fifteen years, she has curated more than twenty exhibitions. Her essays and articles on modern and contemporary art, many of them dealing with issues of gender, sexual politics and feminism, have been published in periodicals and exhibition catalogues in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Pachmanová is author of several books: Mobile Fidelities: Conversations on Feminism, History, and Visuality (Prague 2001, English version: www.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa), Invisible Woman: Anthology of Contemporary Texts on Feminism, History, and Visual Culture in the U.S. (Prague 2002), Unknown Territories of Czech Modern Art: Through the Looking Glass of Gender (Prague 2004), and a monograph of a forgotten Czech female modernist Milada Marešová: Painter of New Objectivity (Prague, Brno 2008). Together with Milena Bartlová, she co-edited the book Artemis and Dr. Faust: Women in Czech and Slovak Art History (Prague 2008). Last year, Pachmanová launched a website focusing on gender and modern visual culture www.zenyvumeni.cz (in Czech only).

Bojana Pejić was born in Belgrade in 1948 and studied History of Art in the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. She has lived in Berlin since 1991. From 1977 to 1991 she was a curator at Belgrade University’s Student Cultural Centre and organised many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. In 1971 she began to write art reviews and worked as an editor for the art-theory journal Moment in Belgrade (1984 to 1991). In 1995 she organised an international symposium, The Body in Communism, at the Literaturhaus in Berlin. She was chief curator of the exhibition After the Wall – Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, organised by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999), which was also shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig in Budapest (2000) and at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2000-2001). In 1999 she was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions at the MUMOK Vienna (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien). She was chief curator of the October Salon in Belgrade in 2008. In 2009 she was curator of the exhibition Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, which was on show at MUMOK Vienna (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In 2010 she edited Gender Check: A Reader – Art and Theory in Eastern Europe.

Angelika Richter is a curator and art historian based in Berlin. She is currently working in the field of contemporary art production and the cultural sphere of the GDR and writing her PhD on Female subversion in the art of the GDR of the 1980s at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, where she was visiting lecturer from 2007 to 2009. Her exhibition und jetzt. Künstlerinnen aus der DDR that was curated together with Beatrice E. Stammer and co-curated by Bettina Knaup at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 2009, was dedicated to female artists from the GDR. It will travel to Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art Gdansk in 2012. Under the title Staging of Self-Will, Richter has contributed to the exhibition Puzzle at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (2010) with a selection of works relating to performativity in East Germany. In 2008 she conducted the GDR research for the exhibition Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. From 2003 to 2006 Angelika Richter was artistic director of the Werkleitz Gesellschaft, Centre for Media Art in Halle (Saale), Germany. She was curatorial assistant of Liverpool Biennial 2002, UK, director of the 6th Werkleitz Biennale Common property (2004) and co-curator of the 7th Werkleitz Biennale Happy Believers (2006). She has cooperated on projects with Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Kunst Haus Dresden, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein, Potsdam, Biennial of Moving Image at LUX, London, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, and Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow. She is currently curating the exhibition of the Marion Ermer Prize 2010. She has participated in international conferences and has authored numerous publications.

Johanna Schaffer is part of the team developing the PhD in practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She researches, teaches, and translates in the areas of visual culture and material aesthetics with a queer-feminist, anti-racist focus. At present, she is also involved in Troubling Research. Performing knowledge in the arts – a collaborative research project involving nine artists and theorists on the historical, ideological, and institutional conditions of artistic research as a concept, and as contemporary practice (with a special emphasis on the performance of research and the research dimensions of performance arts). http://blogs.akbild.ac.at/troublingresearch/ For a recent publication, see Barbara Paul, Johanna Schaffer (ed.), Mehr(wert) queer – Queer Added (Value). Visuelle Kultur, Kunst und Gender-Politiken – Visual Culture, Art, and Gender Politics. Bielefeld: transcript 2009.

Mara Traumane is a researcher, art critic and curator working in Berlin and Riga. The main focus of her research is post-WWII art and culture in Eastern Europe and media art. She is writing her PhD, entitled Interdisciplinary art collectives in Riga and Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s at the Humboldt University, Berlin. She is editing an anthology of the Latvian artists group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (NSRD). In summer 2008 Traumane conducted the Latvian research for Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. In 2009, together with Bojana Pejić, Büro Trafo.K and ERSTE Foundation, she organised the symposium READING GENDER. Art, Power and Politics of Representation in Eastern Europe (MUMOK Vienna, November 2009). In November 2010 she is co-curating the exhibition And Others: Movements, Explorations and Artists1960-1984, which focuses on the unofficial and experimental art practices in Latvia in the post-WWII period. Her contributions to the show include happenings and performance art sections.

Hanna Wróblewska is a curator based in Warsaw, Poland. She has been deputy director of Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw since 2002.

For the detailled programme click here