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 of (art) theory, teaches two theory seminars in the TECHNE axis.

Assistant Professor

As an Assistant Professor Tamara Antonijević organizes and co-hosts the program. She teaches 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 developed courses in the SOMA and TECHNE axes.

Visiting Faculty for the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 academic years 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 roles 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,  New 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

Pilvi Takala is an artist who lives and works in Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities to question social structures. In her practice, she shows that implicit normative rules for behaviour are often only revealed through disruption. The resulting projects have been on view at venues including Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021); Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2021); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2018); CCA Glasgow (2016); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013): New Museum, New York (2012); Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Kunstinstituut Melly (FKA Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2010) and 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005). Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013. Takala represents Finland at the Venice Biennale, 2022

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman 2020), a collection of poems, performances, and essays, and the novel On Hell (Sator/Two Dollar Radio 2018). Their album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom-metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual, was released in January 2021, and their 2019 album The Sun and the Moon had two of its tracks played on the moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, and The White Review, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into ten languages.

Valentina Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London (2003–2006), later did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2011–13) and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She does Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organizes of Performing Arts Forum in France, she speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings and gathers Sensing Salons with Denise Ferreira da Silva, she is a member of the online platform EhChO, she reads and writes.
 

Maria Francesca Scaroni is a dance artist, living in Berlin since 2004. She crossbreeds somatic practices and speculative interests with witchcraft, healing, performance, and choreography. She hosts workshops and gatherings re-purposing post-modern dance legacies towards technologies for mutual empowerment. Maria has been collaborating with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods since 2009 and since 2016 is a part of queer feminist collective Lecken Berlin. Maria currently runs a community space, Social Pleasure Center, an initiative that creates access to somatic practices, craftivism, discourse and community offerings.

Jessika Khazrik (b* 1991, Beirut, based between Berlin and Beirut) is an artist, composer, technologist, writer and DJ whose indisciplinary practice ranges from performance to machine learning, ecotoxicology, cryptography, visual art and history of science and music. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University (LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT (US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.
Scavenging sounds from online and on-site detritus, trans-millennial compendia of healing, and militarised ads and technologies, Jessika Khazrik’s sonic scapes intimately investigate the ecological and technopolitical premises of the economies we inhabit or forget. Often born out of vocoded collaborations with multi-modal neural networks skewed with incomputable Arabic rhythms, Khazrik festively uses spaces of the congregation to search for locally entrenched universalisms that could collectively respond to the dystopias of our current times. In parallel to performing live, teaching speech synthesis and electronic music production, and producing sound installations, Khazrik also composes scores for film, video games and performances and writes about music. She has composed and produced scores for GEOCINEMA, Johanna Hedva, Ahmad Beydoun and Maxim Gorki Theatre, among others.
In 2012-13, she was a fellow at Home Workspace Program in Ashkal Alwan with Matthias Lilienthal, in 2018-19, a fellow at the Digital Earth and in 2020, guest faculty at HfK Bremen and the editor of the International Solidarity Page at the 17teshreen/October17 monthly publication. She is currently a 2021-22 fellow at SHAPE PLATFORM for music, a 2022-23 artist fellow at the performance organization at If I Can’t Dance and a Principal Investigator at the ‘Research on the Arts Programme’ by the Arab Center for Social Sciences (ACSS) and the Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC).