BIOGRAPHIES - ART, ANCESTORS, GHOSTS, & THE DEAD
Biographies
Korakrit Arunanondchai
The work of Korakrit Arunanondchai (*1986, Bangkok,
Thailand) focuses on the transformative potential of storytelling. With
each project, the artist expands his cosmos of interconnected stories
told through expansive video installations, paintings, objects, and
performative works. In his videos, he processes experiences in his
personal environment just as he does political events, history and
questions to our crisis-ridden present. Born in Bangkok and working
primarily in Bangkok and New York, Arunanondchai often draws upon the
cultural contexts in his own biography as well as spaces with
postcolonial trauma. Using essayistic and experimental approaches, the
artist works with multiple collaborators to assemble audio and visual
materials from various sources. With references to philosophy and myth,
his narratives weave together questions about consciousness, empathy,
and community.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist and cultural
organizer whose work resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of
historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and
reimagining. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject,
exploring their poetic and political implications. Sofía has been a
fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, Cisneros Institute at MoMA and the
Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, among others. Her work has been exhibited
in the Whitney Museum, MoMA, Queens Museum, Savvy Contemporary in
Berlin, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, as well as
galleries like El Kilómetro and Embajada. From 2014 to 2020, she
co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in Puerto Rico.
Shaun Leonardo
Shaun Leonardo's multidisciplinary work negotiates societal
expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown
masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective
identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored
by his work in Assembly – an arts-based diversion program for
system-impacted youth at the Brooklyn-based, non-profit Recess – is
participatory and invested in a process of embodiment. Since co-founding
the Assembly program 7 years ago, Shaun has served as its lead artist,
implementing research and partnerships for the program’s growth. In
2021, Shaun expanded his role to Co-Director, guiding the organization's
continuous evolution as an engine of social change. Leonardo is a
Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. His work has been
featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, and
profiled in the NewYork Times and CNN. He was recently honored as a
Community Innovator for his work in diversion by the Center for Justice
Innovation. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was
presented at MICA, MASS MoCA and The Bronx Museum. And his first major
public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, recently premiered at Four
Freedoms Park Conservancy.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they), grapples with the
poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information
technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. They are a recipient
of a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, a 2022 Creative
Capital Award, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed
is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks
(Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Their writing has appeared in Triple
Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer.
They are an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement
of Science and Art, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and a
Mentor-in-Residence with NEW Inc. Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery
in Berlin, Germany.
Pınar Öğrenci
Artist, filmmaker and lecturer Pınar
Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Öğrenci has a background in
architecture, which informs her poetic and experiential video-based
work and installations that accumulate traces of ‘material culture’
related to forced displacement across geographies. Her works are
decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social,
political and anthropological research, everyday practices, and human
stories that follow agents of displacement, migration, survival and
resistance. She is nominated to Böttcher Strasse Kunst Prize 2022 in
Bremen and won Villa Romana Prize for 2023. Her works have been
exhibited widely at museums and art institutions including at documenta
fifteen, Kassel (2022), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens
Biennial (2018), Tensta Konsthall Stockholm (2018), Kunst Haus Wien -
Hundertwasser Museum (2017), the Istanbul off-site project for Sharjah
Biennial13 (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2015- 6) and SALT Galata,
Istanbul (2015-6). Her first solo exhibition abroad was realized at
Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna in 2017. Her films are shown
and nominated by many film festivals including Visions du Reel (Aşît,
2022) and İstanbul Film Festival (Gurbet is a home now, 2020 and Turkish
Delight 2023) and her first documentary film 'Gurbet is a home now' won
special Jury Award of Documentarist Film Festival, İstanbul in 2021.
Laura Raicovich
Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator. She is
editor and curator of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring
artists’ perspectives on transcontinental political, social, economic,
and environmental concerns; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito
and Protocinema in 2022. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and
Museums in an Age of Protest, was published in 2021 by Verso Books. With
a collective of artists, musicians, and culture workers, Raicovich will
open Francis Kite Club, a bar/cultural/activist space in NYC’s East
Village in 2023. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Interim
Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and as Director of the
Queens Museum; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio
Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at
Hyperallergic.
Shahzia Sikander
Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and
South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with
contemporary international art practices and launching the form known
today as neo-miniature. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander earned a
B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore and was
the first artist from the department to challenge the medium’s
technical and aesthetic framework. Sikander’s breakthrough work, The
Scroll, 1989–90, received national critical acclaim in Pakistan, which
brought international recognition to this medium within contemporary art
practices. Sikander went on to pursue an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island
School of Design from 1993 to 1995. Over the subsequent twenty years,
Sikander’s work includes paintings, video animations, mosaic, and
sculpture. Solo exhibitions include shows at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston in Texas; the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the RISD
Museum in Providence, Rhode Island; Jesus College in Cambridge, United
Kingdom; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Hirshhorn Museum in
Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, among many
others. Sikander has also been featured in group exhibitions at
international venues, including the Sharjah Biennial 11; the 8th and
13th Istanbul Biennials; the Smithsonian Museum, National Portrait
Gallery in Washington, DC; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the 54th Venice Biennale in
Italy. Sikander has been the recipient of many notable awards, including
most recently the Pollock Prize for Creativity in 2023, the Fukuoka
Arts and Culture Prize in 2022, as well as the Asia Society Award for
Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art in 2015, a Medal of Art by
the U.S. Department of State in 2012, and a MacArthur Fellowship in
2006. Sikander's major new outdoor project, an 18 foot and an 8 foot
bronze female sculpture, are currently on view in Madison Square Park
and on the roof of the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan till June 2023.
Mari Spirito
Mari Spirito is Executive Director and Curator of Protocinema, a cross-cultural art organization, founded in 2011, which commissions and presents site-aware art around the world. Recent exhibitions include Running In Place (Istanbul, 2022); A Few In Many Places (multi-city show in Santurce, Istanbul, New York, Bangkok, Seoul, Guatemala City, 2021). In 2022 Spirito, with Laura Raicovich, launched Protodispatch, a monthly digital publication featuring artists' perspectives on contemporary life and transcontinental political, social & cultural issues, with equal-exchange publication partners. She launched Protocinema’s Emerging Curator Series mentorship program in 2015. From 2013 to 2018 she programmed the Conversations program for both Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2020 Spirito was commissioning curator of Theo Triantafyllidis' "Anti-Gone" mixed-media performance and music with VR, and digital content, that premiered at Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier; In 2019 she wrote “Flies Bite, It's Going To Rain'' catalog text on Vajiko Chachkhiani’s installation of the same name and co-curated public talks, with Colin Chinnery, for Beijing Art Summit, 798 Art Center and UCCA. In 2018 Spirito was faculty for Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive, Bangkok, and guest curator, Alserkal Arts Foundation Public Commission, Dubai, with Hale Tenger. Spirito served as International Advisory Committee Member for the Inaugural High Line Plinth Commissions, New York, 2017. She was Curator and Director of Alt Art Space, Bomonti, Istanbul from 2015 to 2017; Advisor to the 2nd Mardin Biennial, Turkey, 2012; and Director of 303 Gallery New York from 2000 to 2012. Spirito is on the Advisory Committees of AGYU, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; Board Member of Participant Inc, New York, and holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.
Laura Rivera-Ayala
Laura Rivera-Ayala holds a BA in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus and earned an MA in Visual Arts Administration at New York University. As an arts professional, she has worked for organizations such as The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, The Mellon Foundation, and independent curatorial projects. Laura is also a fellow of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute 2021. Her writing has appeared in the Caribbean Studies Association Journal, Intervenxions (New York University), Visión Doble (University of Puerto Rico), and The Puerto Rico Review.
Eva Mayhabal Davis
Eva Mayhabal (b. Toluca, Mexico) is a cultural advocate and curator, collaborating with artists and creatives in the production of exhibitions, texts, and events. Recently the co-curator of ‘Bronx Calling: The Bronx 5th Biennial’ at The Bronx Museum of Arts and a co-director at Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial initiative in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been featured in exhibition catalogs and various art publications. Her work in advocacy and equity for social justice values through the arts and culture is rooted in her work as a paralegal at UnLocal, Inc. She’s been a fellow of the Art & Law Program (2018), The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Advocacy (2019), New York Foundation of the Arts Leadership Boot Camp (2019), and the Artistic Freedom Initiative Art & Cultural Heritage Law Certificate Program (2020). She is a founding member of El Salón, a creative meetup based on a soulful potluck. She is a guest working from the occupied territory of Lenapehoking (New York City).