Unaimed Sessions with League of Tenders

Artist  (website)

The primary incentive for her artistic work has been the exploration of Swiss-Haitian roots and identity via colonial history. This approach has broadened out considerably to include a range of histories and postcolonial realities. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography, and collaborations.

She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign. This long-term project (since 2008) has been concerned with unearthing and redressing the little-known history and cultural legacies of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), an influential proponent of “scientific” racism who advocated for segregation and “racial hygiene”.

Sasha holds an MA from the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Presently she is undertaking practice-based PhD studies at the Department of Art and Media at the Zurich University of the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions such as at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th la Biennale di Venezia in 2015 (collateral exhibition: Frontier Reimagined), the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014. Huber also works in a creative partnership with artist Petri Saarikko. Together they have initiated the long-term project Remedies Universe (since 2011) which explores aural family-knowlege in different geographical and cultural contexts. In 2018 Huber was the recipient of the State Art Award in the category visual arts given by the Arts Promotion Center Finland.

Sasha Huber has Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Artist, curator

In her artistic and curatorial projects Katerina concerns the issues of local, national, and gender identity, questioning conventional notions of its shaping and development. Several of her works are based on interaction and communication and made in form of social sculptures such as 50 Stars — School of Contemporary Art — educational initiative for those who are over 50 or the exhibition Parallel Flight in trolleybuses — city transport of Novorossiysk.

Currently Katerina is working on the project Cypress Rehabilitation. Referring to her own family archives, research trips, and found documents, she approaches the deportation of Crimean tatars and concurrent deforestation of Cypress trees in Crimea in 1950th. The project will be displayed at the Weird exhibition at Typography CCA at April 2021.

Katerina graduated from Kuban State University, art and graphic department (2013), Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KICA, 2017) and School of Researchers and Organisers at Typography CCA (2019). Nominee for Kuryokhin Prize in  Art in public space nomination for the exhibition Parallel Flight (2019). Katerina have also organised and curated exhibition Kavkazskaya Svobodnitsa on female identity in former fitness club space (2020). Katerina is a participant of the Second curatorial school NEMOSKVA.

Katerina was born in 1981 in Novorossiysk, she lives and works there.

In several online conversations, Katerina Verba and Sasha Huber talked about the search for their own identity through artistic practices, about the past as an unstable historical process that we can transform and change, and about art as a way of caring for the wounds borne by our ancestors.

Publication is available on Transitory White via the link.

Artist duo based in Basel (CH).

Both are 2012 graduates of the Royal College of Art in London. Their work spans performance, installation, fragrance, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video. In their works, the duo explores artistic production through collaboration and search for aberrant media that land themselves for creating speculative environments. Formally, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė explore incompleteness and linguistic ingraspability, apparent both in their approach to performance as in the sculptural objects and environments that they propose, offering ways to renegotiate our complex relationship to Nature — an ecological system that we have historically defined as separate to ourselves, as outside.

They are the founders of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–) and co-initiators of its online archive. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė are among the finalists of the Swiss Art Awards 2021.

Website

A collaboration between artists Uliana Bychenkova (Kiev) and Janna Dolgova (St. Petersburg).

It began in 2016 as part of theirs studies at the School of Involved Art, founded by the art group Chto Delat? Their practice takes forms of fictitious institutions, performative situations, educational conversations, video postcards, material propaganda, coffee sets constellations, celebrations, feminist artistic theoretical writing, and editorial work.

The current research interest is aimed at studying the internal structures of the female duo creative assembly phenomenon, primarily through the introversion vector, which becomes a response to touching the “side” problem of explosiveness and temporality.

How are the roles in women artist duo distributed, why are the conflicts are essential, and how could we find a common language: League of Tenders tries to talk with Dorota Gawęda, Eglė Kulbokaitė, Uliana Bychankova, and Janna Dolgova. The published text keeps the original language of every speaker in order to reflect the course of conversation, communication difficulties, and insufficiency of amateur interpretation (conducted sequentially by Elena, Maria, and Joana and skipped during the work at publication.)

The publication is available on Syg.ma via the link.

Researcher.

PhD in Education with a specialization in Intercultural Psychology at the University of Geneva, Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences.

Research interests focus on international migration — its geopolitics and intercultural relations, psychological aspects, stability and rights of migrants and refugees, social work.

He has a degree in Political Science and International Relations at the Jean Moulin University of Lyon. He also lectured on intercultural approaches to education and psychology at the University of Geneva (2005-2007), on clinical psychosociology at the University of Lausanne (2004). His doctoral dissertation at the University of Geneva focused on the resilience of young Rwandan refugees in France and Switzerland.

He also has experience teaching for adolescents and young people in difficult situations in Switzerland and other countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Senegal).

Théogène-Octave Gakuba lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Cultural worker, educator, and curator.

Alexander has initiated artistic, pedagogical, and community projects. He is the curator of the Perspektivy Art Studio at the Psycho-Neurological Internat №3 in Peterhof, Russia.

His sphere of professional interest is critical and institutional pedagogies, aesthetics of inclusion, the educational turn in art, and disability studies. His current curatorial practice focuses on the study of contemporary Russian «inclusiveness» as a territory of collision of various interests that promote (or resist) the emergence of new forms of aesthetics and social relations within the art world and beyond.

He collaborated with a number of Russian and international institutions (the 10th edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Hermitage Youth Educational Centre, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, National Center of Contemporary Art, CEC ArtsLink, CYLAND, Ў Gallery in Minsk, etc.).

He is the co-editor (with Joana Monbaron, Marina Gržinić, Aneta Stojnić) of the anthology «Tracings out of thin air: establishing oppositional practices and collaborative communities in art and culture» (2018).

Alexander Ivanov lives in Saint Petersburg.

The third Unaimed Session organised by the League of Tenders addresses issues of social work, racism and xenophobia within museums and other cultural institutions.

The text below is an attempt to talk about complex issues not from an expert position. Rather, we held this conversation driven by a sense of scarcity, lack of experience and knowledge, and the need to discuss what tends to be supplanted or silenced in day-to-day work communication.

The conversation took place in French, English and Russian and was translated into Russian and then into English by Joana Monbaron and Elena Ishchenko.

The publication is available on Syg.ma via link (rus, eng soon).

Artist, researcher.

Her work relates to ideas of networks and ecologies of trust and care and emphasizes imagination as a central instrument for new temporalities. Bruckner’s work is informed by the conditions of labour that have been emerging in response to the technologies of communicative capitalism. Moreover, she unsettles and expands notions on the human body, intimacies and emotional worlds produced by the ongoing transformation of technology. She conceives of the hybridization of the nonhuman and human is a starting point for the indeterminacy and queerness of being.

In 2019 Johanna Bruckner together with other fellows of Paul Klee Sommer Academy (Bahar Noorzadeh, Alexis Kyle Mitchell, Luiza Crosman, Alexandros Kyriakatos, Crystal Z Campbell) developed educational curriculum BLOCC, which is a system of learning that tackles the relationship between contemporary art and gentrification and aligns local struggles with planetary-scale infrastructural analysis.

Recent exhibitions and screenings include MAXXI — National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, ICA, Institute for Contemporary Art, Milano, Löwenbraukunst, LUMA Westbau Zürich, Galerie Roehrs & Boetsch, Zürich, ZKM Karlsruhe, Digital Art Center Taipeh, the transmediale 2020, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, the Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Wien, the 57th Venice Biennial, Arebyte Gallery, London, Galerie EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin; CAC, Centre d’art contemporain Genève, MAMCO, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Genève, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Sammlung Falckenberg, the KW, Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, the Villa Croce, Museum for Contemporary Art, Genoa, the Kunsthaus in Hamburg, the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof. She was a Visual Arts Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rom, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Banff Center for Visual Arts in Canada.

He is currently a fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Academie. She received the Recognition Award for Fine Arts of Lower Austria, 2020, and the re:humanism Prize & Artificial intelligence in 2021.

Johanna lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Photo: Ruth Bruckner.

Sociologist.

Rita Kuleva lives in Saint Petersburg.

Publication will be available on December 15

Artist, choreographer

Stefanie Knobel’s practice is a polyphonic breathing that echoes the technogenic substances in our alienated bodies. What finds form in her work as choreography, text or installation refers to performance in an extended sense: Performances in which everyday situations suddenly become noticeable through slight hesitations or stumbling; performances that tell many-voiced and controversial stories; performances that let the past resonate in the present;  that look back to the viewer through distinguished images or allow textiles and tactiles to appear as more-than-human; performances that put present value-systems at stake and manifest themselves fleshly, in a passage of resistance.

Stefanie’s website

Stefanie Knobel lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Artist

Alisa is working in the spaces of the city, exploring urban choreography and urban archaeology, traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Alisa holds a BA and MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths. Her projects have manifested as a series of interactive situations, performances, movements scores, personal and intimate encounters and situations, parkour, walkshops, and audio walks.

She holds a BA and MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths.

Alisa’s website 

Alisa Oleva was born in Moscow and now she lives in London, Great Britain.