Lene Berg was educated a film director at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm. She is currently the Norwegian ISCP fellow in New York and will participate in the next Sydney Biennale. She works with video and installations, photography and text. Characteristic for her work is among other things the mix of medias and fictions within the same project, and the use of so-called real persons and events as points of departure in her projects. Her video 33 minutes, from a boxing-match, won the Elephant Award at the Nordic Biennial Momentum in 2000. Since then, Berg has participated in a number of group shows, and realized multiple solo shows and projects, some in public spaces — including Darwin in Warsaw on the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw in 2005. In 2006 she presented the project Gentlemen & Arseholes, a publication and a video evolving around art and propaganda during the Cold War in Western Europe, shown at among other places Frankfurter Kunstverein and Midway Contemporary. In 2007 she finished the videos The Weimar Conspiracy, dealing with presentations of history and the desire to forget, and Sketches for Nietzsche's Laughter, part of a series presenting moving portraits of chosen personalities who never actually were filmed. Berg has previously been Artist in residence at IASPIS in Sweden and Akademie Solitude in Germany. She has taught and had workshops at several art schools in Scandinavia, such as the Art academy in Stockholm and Oslo.
Boris Buden (Ph.D.) studied philosophy in Zagreb and cultural studies at HU Berlin. In the '90s he was editor in the magazine Arkzin Zagreb. He has contributed regularly to a variety of newspapers, magazines and cultural journals in former Yugoslavia, Europe and USA. His essays and articles cover topics of philosophy, politics, cultural and art criticism. Among his translations into Croatian are two books of Sigmund Freud. Buden is the author of Barikade Zagreb, 1996/1997, Kaptolski Kolodvor, Belgrade 2001 and Der Schacht von Babel, Berlin 2004.
Kodwo Eshun studied English Literature (BA Hons, MA Hons) at University College, Oxford University. His writings, videos and curatorial projects coalesce around the notion of archaeologies of futurity. Eshun is author of More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet, 1998) and co-editor of The Ghosts of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (Liverpool University Press, 2007). He is currently preparing Dan Graham: Rock My Religion for Afterall Books and Hat and Beard, a photo-essay on the cultural imaginary of the Black Panthers for Bookworks. He is co-founder of The Otolith Group whose videos have been presented at international exhibitions including Destroy Athens, 1st Athens Biennial (2007) Imagine Action, Lisson Gallery (2007) and New British Art: Tate Triennal (2006). Eshun is Convenor of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Harun Farocki was born 1944 in Neutitschein, in what was then part of German-annexed Czechoslovakia. In 1966 he started his study at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. Since then he did free-lance work for cinema and television, later on also for art spaces. From 1974 on he was an editor and author of the famous magazin "filmkritik", its last issue came out in 1983. From 1993 to 1999 Farocki was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2004 Farocki is Professor for Media Arts, at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria. In 2006 he curated together with Antje Ehmann the exhibition Cinema as never before, commissioned by the Generali Foundation Wien, Vienna; the exhibtion was presented in an extended version in 2007 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Since 1995 Farocki had many group and solo exhibitions. Harun Farockis ouevre includes more than 100 works.
Pablo Lafuente is born in Spain in 1976. Pablo Lafuente is the managing editor of Afterall, a journal of contemporary art co-published by Central St. Martins College of Art, London and California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. Afterall is published twice a year, and focuses on contemporary art practice in relation to artistic, theoretical, social and political contexts. He is currently developing a series of books for Afterall Books analysing the history of curatorial practice. He has curated several exhibitions, including Watch out ... it's real! at greengrassi, London (2006) and Unit Structures at Lisboa 20, Lisbon (2006). In 2005 he edited the book Display: recent installation photographs from London galleries and venues (London: Rachmaninoff's). His writing has been published in several art and culture magazines, including Flash Art, Art Monthly, frieze and The Wire, and in the volume Continuous Project no. 8, edited by Bettina Funcke (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2006). He is currently working on a PhD at Middlesex University on Jacques Rancière and the relation between aesthetics and politics.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She has made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980) and with Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994).
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London and editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000) and Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002). He has contributed widely on questions about the philosophical status and character of contemporary art, with a special emphasis on Concept and Construction in Contemporary Art.
Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her first book, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988) examined left political culture of the late 19th century. Her cultural history of the French 1950s, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995), won the Laurence Wylie award for French cultural studies and a Critic's Choice award; it has just been re-published in France under the title Rouler plus vite, laver plus blanc (Flammarion, 2006). May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002), a study of French memory of the political upheavals of the 1960s, was published in France as Mai 68 et ses vies antérieures (Complexe et Le Monde Diplomatique, 2005). A volume of essays she co-edited entitled Antiamericanism was published in 2004 by NYU Press. She is the translator of Jacques Rancière's Le Maître ignorant (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford, 1991, and of several essays by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou.
Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist and translator based in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous one person shows and has been included in major survey exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, and festivals such as OVNI (Barcelona), The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Hong Kong Videotage, and Ostranenie (Dessau). His theoretical work has appeared in a range of publications from journals such as Artforum and books, such as Kunst nach Ground Zero to exhibition catalogues published by MOMA (New York), Exit Art, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. He has translated into English the work of Guy Debord, René Viénet, Gil Wolman, Georges Bataille and Napoleon among others. He has also acted as an independent curator, working with such institutions as the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Exit Art, Artists Space, the Pacific Film Archive, CinemaTexas and others. He teaches at Princeton University, where he is a Lecturer in the Program in Visual Arts.
Hito Steyerl, author and filmmaker, Berlin. Dr. phil. Currently guest professor at University of Arts Berlin.
Ian White is Adjunct Film Curator for the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Most recently he has also curated Kinomuseum for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and coordinated The Artists Cinema at Frieze Art Fair (2005/2006). He is a writer, contributing to various publications including frieze, Art Monthly and Art Review and his essay on Gerry Schum is included in Afterthought: New writing on conceptual art (pub. Rachmaninoff's, ed. Mike Sperlinger). As an artist recent projects include 6 things we couldn't do, but can do now, a collaboration with Jimmy Robert for Art Now at Tate Britain, with whom he is working on a new piece being performed at STUK, Belgium and De Appel, Amsterdam in 2007/2008.
Zhang Xian Min is a Chinese filmmaker and lecturer at the Beijing Film Academy. As an actor since 1994, he has starred in Rainclouds over Wushan, Summer Palace and Raised from Dust. A film critic from 2000–2004, Xian Min discontinued his work due to restrictions on the permissibility of writing about public image making in China. During this time, he wrote two books — All About DV and Invisible Images at which time he collaborated with Cahier du Cinema of France. Since 2005, he has produced feature films as Raised from the Dust and Fujian Blue (best film in the Vancouver Film Festival in 2007). He has curated events related to Chinese independent cinema since 2001 and organized the China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing for which he remains the president of its organizing committee.