Professors

Johannes Paul Raether hosts and directs the Live Art Forms program and teaches performative practices.

www.alifveforms.earth
@transformella @protektorama @schwarmwesen

Kerstin Stakemeier, professor for (art) theory, teaches two theory seminars in the TECHNE axis.

Assistant Professor

As an assistant Professor Tamara Antonijević organizes and co-hosts the program. They teach expanded dramaturgy in the SOMA axis.

Visiting Artist Lecturers and Mentors

Coming from a variety of artistic practices and beyond, mentors advise students on their project development in individual mentoring sessions. They also share experiences from their field of practice and hold presentations as well as lectures.
Visiting Artist Lecturers organize and teach workshops that bring their specific professional knowledge and practices to collaboratively deveoped courses in the SOMA and TECHNE axes.

Visiting Faculty for the 2021/2022 academic year will be among others:

Pauline Curnier Jardin (born 1980, Marseille, France) is a visual artist working mainly in film, installation, performance and drawing. She lives in Rome and Berlin. In her work, Curnier Jardin has revisited Joan of Arc, Bernadette Soubirous, the Goddess Demeter, the birth of Jesus and his saint Family, the Anatomical theatre of the Renaissance, as well as pagan and catholic rites in Central and Southern Europe. In 2019 she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie. Working across the mediums of drawing, performance, music, installation, and film, Curnier Jardin, use an approach that combines ethnography and fantasy; with a particular awareness of the role’s women have played in mythology, folklore, and conventional narrative cinema; roles that are commonly stereotyped as saint, witch, mother, or mystic.

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire.
Previous and solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2019); Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2018); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2017). Baczynski-Jenkins has also presented work at: the 58th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019); Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2017); Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, Νew York (2016); Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2016); and Basel Liste (2014).
He is co-founder of the feminist and queer project space Kemin Warsaw. Kem have recently realised projects at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (Kem Care, 2017) and at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Three Springs, 2018–2019). He was a fellow at the Home Workspace Program, Beirut between 2012–2013. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Arts Foundation Award and the Frieze Artist Award.

Melanie Bonajo 
Digital eco-feminist, hyper elf, witch or devil, Melanie Bonajo challenges the traditional divisions between men and women, nature and technology. Through their videos, performances, photographs and installations, Bonajo studies subjects related to how technological advances and commodity based pleasures increase feelings of alienation, removing a sense of belonging in an individual. Captivated by concepts of the divine, Bonajo explores the spiritual emptiness of their generation, examines peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by reflecting on our domestic situation, ideas around classification, concepts of home, gender and attitudes towards value.
 
Since 2015, Melanie Bonajo has been working on their monumental Night Soil Trilogy, consisting of Night Soil – Fake Paradise (2014), Night Soil—Economy of Love (2015) and Night Soil – Nocturnal Gardening (2016). Night Soil is a trilogy of short documentaries presenting progressive (sometimes illegal) approaches through the portraits of ayahuasca consumers, sex worker activists or women farmers. Progress vs Regress was released in 2016, followed by Progress vs Sunsets in 2017. This new Trilogy examinines extinction or endangerment of vulnerable groups through techno-capital development, but also extinction in an abstract sense, extinction of feelings and thoughts. TouchMETell is Bonajo’s most recent film (2019). In collaboration with Michael Beharie, Melanie Bonajo released a music album called Single Mother Songs from the End of Nature (2019), produced by Bonnefantenmuseum.
Instagram: @melanie_bonajo

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] works internationally but lives in Kumasi, Ghana. sHit is a multidisciplinary “artivist”, founder and artistic director of perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR) which aimed at promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and thinkers. As a performer and installation artist, crazinisT investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics and conflicts,  sexual stigma and their consequences for marginalized groups or individuals. With rituals and a gender-fluid persona, sHit employs sHits own body as a thought-provoking tool in performances, photography, video, and installations, ‘life-and-live-art’ confronting issues such as disenfranchisement, social justice, violence, objectification, internalized oppression, anti-blackness, systemic indoctrination and many more.
As a mentor in the GEOS module, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] will share her multidisciplinary knowledge in group work meetings and advise students on their projects in individual mentoring sessions.
Instagram: @crazinist_artist    

Doireann O’Malley has developed a multidisciplinary, research-led practice using collaborative methodologies, video installation, virtual reality and performance to diffract the history and emergence of 20th and 21st century techno-bodies and the endless trap of representation and identity.
Through the staging of an immersive, world-building, their work, critically rehearses multiple and exhaustive readings of art history, theory, psychoanalysis, physics, computational science and science fiction, and the seemingly endless ways in which these different fields and histories merge and interact to capture emergent modes of subjectivity that have moved beyond the narrow gender binaries and racial stereotypes inherited from a western-centric scientific and philosophical tradition.

Doireann O’Malley will teach as a mentor in the GEOS modula. 
 

Omsk Social Club works closely with networks of viewers, everything is unique and unrehearsed. The living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences and political phenomena. Al-lowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside the participant's unique personal experiences.
Omsk Social Club will teach a group workshop in the SOMA module that frames the intensive mentoring week.

@omsk_social_club

The Agency / Yana Thönnes is a performance artist and theatre director interested in the uncanny of the performance of emotions. As part of the artistic direction of THE AGENCY she develops immersive performances that involve the audience as a player, a user, a LARPer, a customer, a political subject. These works evolve around the search for a subversive option of agency in times of neoliberal post-digital capitalism: How can we create counter-desires, counter-identities and counter-movements?

Yana Eva Thönnes is a mentor in the GEOS module. She will share her knowledge as performer and director and advise students on their projects in group work meetings and individual mentoring sessions. 
 

Jelena Viskovic is an artist and software developer. Her work combines sculpture and simulation. She uses video game engines to respond to new and archaic technologies, social organisational platforms, and public spaces.
Jelena Viscovic teaches Digital Performance Technologies in the TECHNE module.
Instagram: @jelovix Twitter: @nullinventories