In alphabatical order
Finlay Clark
Finlay Clark (b. 1995 in London, England) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, as an interdisciplinary Artist. Clark’s practice involves constructing installations of paintings, textiles, and photographs, allowing the irregular marks to visually represent the aural aspect of the performance around them. Both metaphorically and literally sewing together aspects of Clark’s work echoes the process employed to create the fragmented text pieces which inform them. These pieces also harness conversation from life to create a fictional world of script-orientated text, using colloquialisms to envelop the reader, or listener, in an abstract monologue. Clark is involved in performance group Still House Plants – a group of collaborating musicians and Artists who, using a variety of image and instrumentation, create an environment which pursues the middle ground between the visual and the aural. The way in which set lists are formed as sculptural, diagrammatic drawing references the influence of improvised music, as well as the additions and subtractions allowing for a unique assemblage of motifs each time. Still House Plants first played within an installation of work at the Glasgow Open House Festival, 2015, and are due to play at Glasgow International, Counterflows Festival, and with Joe McPhee. They have since been played on the ‘New Scottish Music’ BBC 6Music Radio. Clark is currently working on an improvised duet, playing the violin, with cellist Atzi Muramatsu.
Rami George
ramigeorge.net
Jessica Harvey
Jessica Harvey is a Chicago-based artist who explores the myths we create for ourselves and nature while trying to preserve a more desired history. Digging through public and private archives, she conducts long-term investigations on historical and personal events based on “facts,” reinterpreting these stories through the use of photography, video, archival resources, and objects constructed from everyday materials. The images and installations act as a catalyst for a fantastical exploration of the psychology that one attaches to memory and place, She received an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2009 and a BA in film and video from Columbia College in 2005. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Iceland for the 2011-2012 year. She has attended residencies at ACRE, Anderson Ranch, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, Hardesty Arts Center, The Luminary, and Vermont Studio Center. She has participated in group shows at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), Johalla Projects (Chicago, IL), The Center for Contemporary Photography (Detroit, MI), and the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI). Recent solo and two person exhibitions include shows at Black Hills State University (Spearfish, SD), Hardesty Arts Center (Tulsa, OK), ACRE Projects (Chicago, IL), Good Weather (North Little Rock, AR), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), and Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL).
Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach
Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach’s work is concerned with value in the immaterial and everyday. Her work intimately observes the translation of experience, with the internet acting as both informant and facilitator.
Ruslana Lichtzier
Ruslana Lichtzier is a creative researcher, curator, writer and educator. Her state as a constant migrant underlines her motivation to create cultural productions that push toward the radicalization of differences while highlighting ethical stands. Considering herself a subject of history, her work links between the highly personal and the political sphere. The different productions surpass the limit of their predefined form, whether a publication, lecture or show, and provide a stage for multiple voices that refuse to be heard “in-sync.” Her recent projects include speculative research in form of a group exhibition Terrorists in The Library (Presidents Gallery, Harold Washington College, Chicago, IL, 2015), and the group exhibition Familiar Malaise (as part of the curatorial fellowship at ACRE, Chicago, IL, 2015). Her writing is published in Newcity (Chicago), The Seen Magazine (EXPO Chicago), Open Systems (Vienna, Austria); as well as in publications for Noga Gallery (Tel Aviv, Israel) and Ashdod Museum for Contemporary Art (Ashdod, Israel. As an instructor at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Lichtzier fully integrates her multidisciplinary approach into her curriculum to foster an active experimental laboratory.
Orr Menirom
My videos look into language as a border— geographical, political and psychological. Focusing on the relationship between media, language, politics and identity, I mix found footage with self-shot imagery. I re-edit sentences, dub words and generate new messages from existing footage. Consequently, language becomes a method to question the formation of the narrative. Whose voice speaks in the video? Whose message is being heard?
Niloofar Nedaei
Niloofar Nedaei is a writer, director, performance and theatre artist from Tehran. Acting and performing in Farsi and German she often challenges theatre as a site and container of language, action and bodies in which the narrative oscilates on a thin border between fact and fiction. She has been showing and performing intensively in various venues in Iran, Serbia, Germany and Poland. She holds a BFA in Theatre and Literature from University of Tehran and is currently pursuing her MA in Artistic Research at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran.
Daniel Spangler
Daniel Spangler is an American filmmaker, artist, and writer. Through fictions, half-truths, and hoaxes, his work examines, celebrates, and exploits the emergent confusion between mass-media and personal language, the visual conventions of authority and honesty, intimacy and ego, desire and nonsense, nonsense and nonsense. He is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rambod Vala
Rambod Vala is an artist, graphic designer and educator working with moving images. His early education and practice as a graphic designer in Tehran, where he has since been a member of the renowned “Studio Tehran” has equipped him with a contemplated understanding of type, text, language and storytelling all of which he employs in his current body of work. After moving to Chicago to pursue his Master of Fine Arts at Northwestern University where he was awarded a two-year fellowship, he has continued to work with video, installation and various narrative structures which weave realism and fantasy, politics and romance, skepticism and belief. Vala’s work is a coalesce of satire stories of love, immigration, labor and institutional criticism which he diligently narrates and illustrates. His work has been exhibited in a multitude of international exhibitions, among those are Post-Past exhibition at Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Vala has won the prize for typographic excellence at the 2nd Chicago international poster biennial in 2010 and Stephan Bundi jury award at the 5th China international poster biennial in 2011.
Farhad Yassavoli
Farhad Yassavoli is a photographer, graphic designer and publisher in Tehran. Yassavoli’s ongoing photography project in which he documents his daily life, family and friends is an invisible homage to the history of snapshot photography and yet it subtly separates itself from all the other images one may have seen from the genre. Yassavoli holds a BFA and MFA from University of Tehran.