Sascia Bailer is a feminist researcher, writer and curator working at the intersection of care, gender, and socially engaged art. In her doctoral dissertation she investigated the ambivalent relationship between curating and care, and formulated propositions towards caring infrastructures within the arts – ideas, which she continues to work on with the CARING CULTURE LAB. In 2019/2020 she initiated a participatory curatorial programming on care as the Artistic Director of M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in rural Northern Germany. Together with Didem Yazıcı, she curated the exhibition “Mothers*, Warriors, and Poets: Care as Resistance” (2023) at StadtPalais Stuttgart. She is the author of the article “Care for Caregivers. Curating against the Care Crisis” (in: “Curating with Care”, Routledge, 2023) and of the booklet “Curating, Care, and Corona” (Verlag der Arthur Boskamp Stiftung, 2020). She co-edited the anthology “Letters to Joan” (2020, HKW) and the artist monographies „Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices“ by Maternal Fantasies (Onomatopee, 2021), and “What We Could Have Become: On Queer Feminist Filmmaking” by Malu Blume (Onomatopee, 2021). She regularly writes for Monopol magazine on art, care, and gender justice. She has worked internationally within the arts, including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
sasciabailer.com
Samantha Bohatsch (*1984 in Berlin) is based in Berlin. They studied in Vienna, Berlin and Karlsruhe where they finished their studies as Meisterschülerin of Silvia Bächli. Bohatsch makes reading performances, text-based sound pieces and installations. They deal with interpersonal relationships and transformation processes, inspired by personal experiences, observations from the internet, queer and feminist literature, history and pop culture. Bohatsch has received artist fellowships by the Federal State Baden-Württemberg, the Arts Foundation Baden-Württemberg and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Their works have been recently shown at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Galerie Bernau and Kunsthalle Mainz among others.
Hannah Cooke (*1986 in Munich) currently lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her work has been exhibited at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein, Kunstverein Freiburg, Contemporary Art Space in Baku (Azerbaijan), A4 Art Museum in Chengdu (China) and Kleine Humboldt Galerie Berlin, among others. So far she has received funding by the “Neustart Kultur” 2020, the Federal Prize for Art Students 2015, a six month residency at Cité internationale des arts Paris, as well as project funding by the City of Karlsruhe, the Mother Art Prize 2018 (London) and numerous other awards, prizes and working scholarships. Her media art studies at HfG Karlsruhe with Prof. Fishkin, Prof. Jermolaewa, Prof. Clegg and Prof. Linke brought her to the University of Amsterdam for a semester in 2012.
hannahcooke.de
Chloé Coomans was born in Brussels in 1976. At the age of 15, she decided to become an artist and devote her life to creation. She began to study sculpture and graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1998. Sculpture and installation already offered her great creative freedom, but she felt the need to explore other artistic mediums and forms of expression. She attended the “Experimental Practices” workshop at the Braine-L'Alleud art school, where she discovered video, silkscreen printing, etc.
Limitlessly, she developed her own poetic, committed, visionary vocabulary_ universal, without any restraint.
Chloé Coomans’ artistic practice is like a bet: to give a face to our inner experience. No doubt because she has the intuition that our body functions like the archaic memory of our existence, her protean work is above all the language of intimacy.www.chloécoomans.com
www.chloecoomans.com
Sara Ehsan, born in Iran in 1977, works as a certified coach and anti-discrimination consultant, author and sworn translator/interpreter in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied Literature, European Art History and Iranian Studies at the University of Heidelberg and graduated with a Master of Arts in 2008. During her studies, she began publishing poetry in various anthologies and magazines. To date, four volumes of her poetry have been published in Germany. After graduating, she worked for an aid organization in Afghanistan and later as an integration course instructor and social counselor for refugees. For her second degree, she studied Nonprofit Management & Governance at the University of Heidelberg. As a certified coach and author, she has in-depth knowledge of cultural and social issues. Her services are aimed at individuals, teams or organizations that need support in the following areas: potential development, mindset change, structuring, performance, motivation, emotion management, relationship development, communication, organization, goal and vision setting, etc. As a certified anti-discrimination consultant, she also helps clients with issues such as bullying and discrimination. As a coach, she accompanied the M*WP team on their journey as a team.
www.saraehsan.de
Antje Engelmann (*1980 in Ulm) multimedia works, films and performances pose questions about forms of narration. Based on biographical material, interviews and found footage Engelmann as narrator creates new contexts of complex systems.Her artistic interests include ethnographic and sociological questions as well as image theories and body discourses. As a trained dance pedagogue, in her concrete approach as a teacher at numerous art universities, she always includes the body as a carrier of knowledge, generator of knowledge and constant actor. Drawing on tools from disciplines such as improvisation, choreography and performance is not only a process of knowledge but a formal aesthetic engagement. Engelmann is involved as a jury member for the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Karl Schmidt- Rottluff Stipendium. She works as a professor and lecturer at various art colleges and universities and is a mentor in the women's education network Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e.V. With her works, performances and films she is represented internationally in exhibitions and film festivals and has been awarded numerous prizes and scholarships, including the Karl Schmidt Rottluff Scholarship, the DAAD Scholarship, the working scholarship of the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Berlin Senate for Los Angeles. There she was a visiting professor at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Currently, Engelmann is a visiting professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee.
www.antjeengelmann.net
Alessandra Eramo (*1982 Taranto, IT) is a sound artist, vocalist and composer based in Berlin who works with performance and installation, text-sound composition, video and drawing, exploring latent acoustic territories of the human voice and noise as socio-political matter. She was trained in classical singing, piano and music theory since an early age, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Stuttgart and completed her Master's Degree in Performance Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice. In her cross-media practice, she develops artistic projects and live-performances that address questions of the body, memory and identity, often adopting participatory actions, field recording, site-specific modes, and experimental approaches to composition. Her current research focuses on the invisible and the materiality of the voice, the tension between vocality and writing, performative rituals and trance-like states with singing.
She has exhibited widely at festivals, radio, museums, galleries and institutions such as: Centrale Fies Dro (2021), Kira A. Princess of Prussia Foundation/Istituto Italiano di Cultura Brussels (2021), Deutschlandfunk Kultur Klangkunst (2020), SAVVY Contemporary Berlin (2019), Liminaria/Manifesta12 Palermo (2018), Heroines of Sound Festival Berlin (2018), Tempo Reale Festival Firenze (2017), 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017), Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival Valparaíso Chile(2016), PACT Zollverein Essen (2015), Museum FLUXUS+ Potsdam (2014), Liverpool Biennial (2013), Galerie Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin (2012), Roulette New York, (2012) Padiglione Italia nel Mondo/54th Venice Biennale (2011)
www.ezramo.com
Anna Gohmert’s work examines intergenerational communication, togetherness, womanhood and parenthood. In her artistic practice, she seeks out a wide variety of people in order to explore, for example, the themes of loss, disorientation, loneliness and hope. She asks and listens to other people's experiences and perspectives, which she considers an integral part of her work. In her work, it is therefore important for her to find a formal language for intimacy without theorising the personal and losing the tenderness or rawness of the private. Themes such as social justice, health challenges, generational conflicts and dealing with self-efficacy and powerlessness play a central role. The media the artist chooses are therefore always oriented towards the themes, which has so far led the artist to create video works, multimedia space/sound installations, but also self-sewn quilts.
Anna Gohmert lives and works in Stuttgart. She studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Most recently, she was a resident at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris in 2022. She is one of the founders of “Mothers*, Warriors and Poets”, a platform that produces exhibitions and events around the theme of motherhood, parenting, carework and art.
www.annagohmert.de
www.mothers-warriors-and-poets.net
Zsuzsanna’s fresh, colorful, graphic illustrations can be found in magazines, newspapers and books from all over the world. Originally from Hungary/Serbia, Zsuzsanna grew up in Germany and studied communication design at SABK in Stuttgart with Prof. Niklaus Troxler. In Amsterdam she worked for various graphic design studios. Her work has received several international awards. Since 2008 she has been working independently under the name Helloyellowstudio, developing visual concepts in the print sector.
In the ranking of the best illustrators in Berlin 2018 Pagemagazin.
www.helloyellowstudio.com
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is currently chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with “art” in the title.
Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which opened at the Arnolfini in Bristol on 9 March 2024, and tours to MAC in Birmingham, Millennium Gallery in Sheffield and DCA Dundee during 2024/2025.
The standalone book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will be published in the UK and Europe by Thames & Hudson on 4 July 2024, and in the US and Canada on 3 September 2024
Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 16 languages. She regularly talks about art and with artists for colleges, as well as museum and gallery events. A supporter of Arts Emergency she has mentored artists and students through a variety of different schemes. As a broadcaster she can be heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022 / Penguin, NY, 2023).
In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, Hettie co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance — a supportive network and campaigning group for curators, academics, gallerists, technicians, educators and others working in the arts. Find out more and join the network here.
www.hettiejudah.co.uk
Renate Liebel is a visual artist who was born and raised in Upper Swabia, Germany and Southern California,USA. She studied painting and intermedia design at the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain before traveling through Europe with a mobile animation studio and then founding a studio for objects and spatial installation in the studios of the KV Wagenhalle in Stuttgart. There she researches plant structures and the perception of nature, caring decoration practices and order. She is involved as a neighborhood planter, art mediator and is one of the persons who founded “Mothers*, Warriors and Poets”. She lives with her family of five in Stuttgart, Germany.
www.renateliebel.de
Marie Lienhard is an artist living and working in Stuttgart. The driving force behind her artistic practice is a fascination for the elasticity of our perceptual behavior. She examines and questions realities at the limits of physical laws and fragile equilibriums. Installation, virtual reality, performance, photography and drawing are the media of her artistic production, which is represented internationally in exhibitions and public art collections. Her work oscillates between physical experience and the suggestive forces released by pictorial means, as well as natural phenomena and societal questions. She addresses our perceptive senses to create aesthetic experiences that invite us to become aware of our supposed limits, and to go beyond them. The human will to overcome physical laws governing body and mind through allegories of flight, levitation or falling are central to her practice. She is one of the founding members of „Mothers, Warriors and Poets“ a platform that produces exhibitions and exhibition programme revolving around motherhood and arts.
www.marie-lienhard.com
Joanne Masding is an artist working in Birmingham, UK. She is currently working on public artwork commission #makefuturevillagehistory, in Cardiff, Wales. Recent exhibitions include In the Peaceful Dome, Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2018; Touche Eclat, Workplace, Gateshead, 2017; Plaster Ghost Finger Cast, New Art Gallery, Walsall (solo), 2017. She has undertaken artist residencies with 501 Artspace, Chongqing, China, 2013; Research and Cultural Collections at University of Birmingham, UK, 2016; and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2014. She made permanent commission Flimsy Signals, for developers Bruntwood in 2018, and received a fellowship from John Feeney Trust in 2017. In 2020 she received by nomination an Artist Award from Henry Moore Foundation. Joanne also runs online sales platform Studio Outlet, and is a director member of ceramics coop Modern Clay.
www.joannemasding.com
www.studio-outlet.com
www.modernclay.org
Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro's work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles & colonial memory focusing on queer indigenous and feminist biopolitics. The artist creates immersive performative environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German diaspora and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives of testimonial Black queer experiences of sonic nature archives, revolt, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments which reacts to the different tones of societies shared between delusions & ritual. The work offers complex non-binary readings pushing new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records. She has developed frameworks of rituals and healing in performance work that often reveal the entangled colonial histories of migration at site-specific spaces to dismantle prejudices and organise accessible levels of consciousness through testimonial archives of local communities to build independant emancipatory tools for liberation, education, consciousness, intimacy and healing.
She is lecturer in Curating Black Visual Cultures & Philosophy at TransArt Institute New York & Fine Arts practice at the University of Liverpool, artistic & curatorial supervisor of the Artists in Training Programme at the UdK and the University of Bergen Norway. She is Artistic Director of Nyabinghi_Lab Collective, recently curating the performance programme 'Radical Mutations' at Hebbel Am Ufer Theatre Berlin with Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio and Free State Of Barackia. She moderates the annual Berlinale Film Festival & currently has an Artistic Fellowship from the Goethe Institute In Bahia Salvador. Her work was recently featured in ARTE Twists series "Our Colonial Heritage" and Deutsche Welle TV in a series of short films on German Colonialism and Black Resistance. Her work has been featured in several international exhibitions and Biennales including the Havana Biennale (2019), Dak'art Biennale (2012; 2018), Venice Biennale (2016) and La Otra Biennale in Bogota (2013) and RAVVY Performance Biennale Yaoundé (2018). For more information on their work:
www.anguezomo-bikoro.com
Katharina Pethke is a filmmaker and former professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (2012–2019). She mostly works with moving images and the idea of the personal being political. In her autobiographical films she unravels bigger questions in an essayistic approach with the research being part of the work. Her studies in German literature, art history and audiovisual media in Hamburg and Cologne were followed by internationally acclaimed works in the field of documentary filmmaking. Her film REPRODUCTION celebrated its world premiere at 74th Berlinale 2024 (Forum section). Currently, Katharina Pethke is a PhD candidate at the Film University Babelsberg where she investigates in the field of portrait film.
www.katharinapethke.com
Anna Schiefer is an artist and researcher living in Stuttgart and Berlin. Her practice draws from architecture, the performing and the visual arts. She investigates the formal languages of tools and energy architecture. Since the birth of her second child in 2022, she has been increasingly concerned with the early childhood perceptual apparatus. The installation "Tokamak" was created in this context and is part of a new group of works for ultra young audiences.
Anna Schiefer is also a founding member of the publishing house Verlag für Handbücher and is currently a lecturer in visual arts and architecture at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. In 2020, she received her PHD in artistic research on "Reciprocal Props: On the Interaction of Work and Tool" from the École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image Angoulême & Poitiers in France.
www.annaschiefer.de
www.verlagfuerhandbuecher.de
Verena studied philosophy and communication design in Stuttgart and Darmstadt. She works as a copywriter, graphic designer and coordinator in various projects. At Mothers*, Warriors & Poets, she is responsible for the exhibition‘s public relations discourse on art and care at GEDOK.
Lerato Shadi’s work challenges common assumptions to critique Western notions of history and make visible that which is invisible or overlooked. Working across video, performance and installation, and often employing repetitive processes, she argues the importance of centering – not just including – the marginalised body as a main figure of narrative experience. Her works have been shown internationally in numerous solo and group exhibition, i. a. at Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2024), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2024 and 2023), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), Palais de la Porte Dorée and in the Musée d’art moderne both in Paris (2021); in solo shows at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin and at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2020); during the 14th Curitiba Biennial in Brasil. Shadi’s video work ‘Mabogo Dinku’ was part of the Artists’ Film International programme 2020, organized by Whitechapel Gallery London, and presented in art institutions around the globe. In spring 2022 her monograph was published with Archive Books, Berlin.
Jordan Troeller (*1985 in Santa Clara, CA, USA) holds a fixed-term lectureship in modern and contemporary art history and theory at the University of Graz in Austria, where her research focuses on the intersection between art and politics, particularly the politics involved in writing art’s histories. She is currently completing the monograph “Sculpture’s Progeny: Ruth Asawa and the Maternal Work of Art,” which is the first critical study devoted to several self-defined “artist-mothers” in postwar San Francisco. The book emerged out of her ongoing inquiry into how gender and sexuality shapes the visibility of artistic labor—a topic explored in her recent article “Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands” (OCTOBER 172, Summer 2020).
Dr. Troeller is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University, and has held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Goethe-Institut Boston. Her scholarship can be found in numerous publications, including Art Journal, The Burlington Magazine, Hyperallergic, The History of Photography, and Women's Art Journal, as well as the exhibition catalogue Object Lessons:The Bauhaus and Harvard (2021).
Lisa Tuyala is a singer and cultural manager. She studied jazz singing at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and arts and cultural management (M. A.) with a focus on social transformation processes at Leuphana University Lüneburg in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. She completed her musical education with Rachel Gould, Lydia van Dam and Anette von Eichel, among others. In her artistic work she dedicates herself to the expressive possibilities of spoken word and singing in the field of improvised music. Her works, songs and lyrics during the last years revolve around storytelling and our view of the Other. Since 2010 she lives with her family in Stuttgart. She is the initiator of “Sonntags:Musik” series in Stuttgart West (2014–2016) and the women* music network Women* of Music (W*oM). Since 2016 she has been working at KKT (Kulturkabinett e. V.), since 2017 as deputy managing director. In this role, she is head of press and public relations as well as of various interdisciplinary projects. Among other things, she initiated and curated (2017–2021) the JAZZKABINETT – a music series organically dedicated to the interconnectedness of musical practice and current social discourses.
Julia Wirsching develops situations in her works that offer visitors a space of experience that allow them to test their own limits. The sensual experience of the work goes hand in hand with an experience and its corporeality. The themes of her works are usually closely connected to her life and the society in which she lives. In doing so, she considers the body as a political entity in which it is the performer and enactor of social rules, constraints and conventions. She examines and deconstructs the images of others and of the self that surround her.
Julia Wirsching’s works consist of multimedia situations made up of performances, videos, installations or drawings. By crossing the usual boundary between intimacy and the public sphere, a confrontation takes place that, in addition to a sensual experience, also provides space to reflect on one's own experience.
Julia Wirsching lives and works in Stuttgart. She studied music, philosophy and fine arts in Stuttgart and Tel Aviv.
www.juliawirsching.com
www.instagram.com/julia_wirsching
Didem Yazıcı is an Istanbul and Karlsruhe-based curator and writer. She has been working as Director of Exhibitions at Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts in Istanbul since 2022. Her curatorial work is inspired by thinking across disciplines in and outside of art as well as engaging socio-political dynamics. She has worked in institutions such as Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2017–18); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2015–16); 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2014); and dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012-13). She was Curator-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut Cairo in 2016, and took part in the Curatorial Workshops by the ICI in New York and A-Desk Barcelona in 2013. She studied Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul (2008) and completed her M. A in Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt (2012). Selected exhibitions include; “Together: Sena Başöz/Noor Abuarafeh” (YKY, İstanbul 2023), “Care As Resistance” (Stadtpalais Stuttgart, 2023); “Life, Death, Love and Justice” (YKY, Istanbul, 2022) and “Unconquered Spirits” (Sumac Space, 2020) and “Freedom is a State of Mind” (The 11th Shanghai Biennale, 2016).
Sascia Bailer is a feminist researcher, writer and curator working at the intersection of care, gender, and socially engaged art. In her doctoral dissertation she investigated the ambivalent relationship between curating and care, and formulated propositions towards caring infrastructures within the arts – ideas, which she continues to work on with the CARING CULTURE LAB. In 2019/2020 she initiated a participatory curatorial programming on care as the Artistic Director of M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in rural Northern Germany. Together with Didem Yazıcı, she curated the exhibition “Mothers*, Warriors, and Poets: Care as Resistance” (2023) at StadtPalais Stuttgart. She is the author of the article “Care for Caregivers. Curating against the Care Crisis” (in: “Curating with Care”, Routledge, 2023) and of the booklet “Curating, Care, and Corona” (Verlag der Arthur Boskamp Stiftung, 2020). She co-edited the anthology “Letters to Joan” (2020, HKW) and the artist monographies „Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices“ by Maternal Fantasies (Onomatopee, 2021), and “What We Could Have Become: On Queer Feminist Filmmaking” by Malu Blume (Onomatopee, 2021). She regularly writes for Monopol magazine on art, care, and gender justice. She has worked internationally within the arts, including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
sasciabailer.com
Samantha Bohatsch (*1984 in Berlin) is based in Berlin. They studied in Vienna, Berlin and Karlsruhe where they finished their studies as Meisterschülerin of Silvia Bächli. Bohatsch makes reading performances, text-based sound pieces and installations. They deal with interpersonal relationships and transformation processes, inspired by personal experiences, observations from the internet, queer and feminist literature, history and pop culture. Bohatsch has received artist fellowships by the Federal State Baden-Württemberg, the Arts Foundation Baden-Württemberg and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Their works have been recently shown at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Galerie Bernau and Kunsthalle Mainz among others.
Hannah Cooke (*1986 in Munich) currently lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her work has been exhibited at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein, Kunstverein Freiburg, Contemporary Art Space in Baku (Azerbaijan), A4 Art Museum in Chengdu (China) and Kleine Humboldt Galerie Berlin, among others. So far she has received funding by the “Neustart Kultur” 2020, the Federal Prize for Art Students 2015, a six month residency at Cité internationale des arts Paris, as well as project funding by the City of Karlsruhe, the Mother Art Prize 2018 (London) and numerous other awards, prizes and working scholarships. Her media art studies at HfG Karlsruhe with Prof. Fishkin, Prof. Jermolaewa, Prof. Clegg and Prof. Linke brought her to the University of Amsterdam for a semester in 2012.
hannahcooke.de
Chloé Coomans was born in Brussels in 1976. At the age of 15, she decided to become an artist and devote her life to creation. She began to study sculpture and graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1998. Sculpture and installation already offered her great creative freedom, but she felt the need to explore other artistic mediums and forms of expression. She attended the “Experimental Practices” workshop at the Braine-L'Alleud art school, where she discovered video, silkscreen printing, etc.
Limitlessly, she developed her own poetic, committed, visionary vocabulary_ universal, without any restraint.
Chloé Coomans’ artistic practice is like a bet: to give a face to our inner experience. No doubt because she has the intuition that our body functions like the archaic memory of our existence, her protean work is above all the language of intimacy.www.chloécoomans.com
www.chloecoomans.com
Sara Ehsan, born in Iran in 1977, works as a certified coach and anti-discrimination consultant, author and sworn translator/interpreter in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied Literature, European Art History and Iranian Studies at the University of Heidelberg and graduated with a Master of Arts in 2008. During her studies, she began publishing poetry in various anthologies and magazines. To date, four volumes of her poetry have been published in Germany. After graduating, she worked for an aid organization in Afghanistan and later as an integration course instructor and social counselor for refugees. For her second degree, she studied Nonprofit Management & Governance at the University of Heidelberg. As a certified coach and author, she has in-depth knowledge of cultural and social issues. Her services are aimed at individuals, teams or organizations that need support in the following areas: potential development, mindset change, structuring, performance, motivation, emotion management, relationship development, communication, organization, goal and vision setting, etc. As a certified anti-discrimination consultant, she also helps clients with issues such as bullying and discrimination. As a coach, she accompanied the M*WP team on their journey as a team.
www.saraehsan.de
Antje Engelmann (*1980 in Ulm) multimedia works, films and performances pose questions about forms of narration. Based on biographical material, interviews and found footage Engelmann as narrator creates new contexts of complex systems.Her artistic interests include ethnographic and sociological questions as well as image theories and body discourses. As a trained dance pedagogue, in her concrete approach as a teacher at numerous art universities, she always includes the body as a carrier of knowledge, generator of knowledge and constant actor. Drawing on tools from disciplines such as improvisation, choreography and performance is not only a process of knowledge but a formal aesthetic engagement. Engelmann is involved as a jury member for the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Karl Schmidt- Rottluff Stipendium. She works as a professor and lecturer at various art colleges and universities and is a mentor in the women's education network Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e.V. With her works, performances and films she is represented internationally in exhibitions and film festivals and has been awarded numerous prizes and scholarships, including the Karl Schmidt Rottluff Scholarship, the DAAD Scholarship, the working scholarship of the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Berlin Senate for Los Angeles. There she was a visiting professor at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Currently, Engelmann is a visiting professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee.
www.antjeengelmann.net
Alessandra Eramo (*1982 Taranto, IT) is a sound artist, vocalist and composer based in Berlin who works with performance and installation, text-sound composition, video and drawing, exploring latent acoustic territories of the human voice and noise as socio-political matter. She was trained in classical singing, piano and music theory since an early age, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and Stuttgart and completed her Master's Degree in Performance Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice. In her cross-media practice, she develops artistic projects and live-performances that address questions of the body, memory and identity, often adopting participatory actions, field recording, site-specific modes, and experimental approaches to composition. Her current research focuses on the invisible and the materiality of the voice, the tension between vocality and writing, performative rituals and trance-like states with singing.
She has exhibited widely at festivals, radio, museums, galleries and institutions such as: Centrale Fies Dro (2021), Kira A. Princess of Prussia Foundation/Istituto Italiano di Cultura Brussels (2021), Deutschlandfunk Kultur Klangkunst (2020), SAVVY Contemporary Berlin (2019), Liminaria/Manifesta12 Palermo (2018), Heroines of Sound Festival Berlin (2018), Tempo Reale Festival Firenze (2017), 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017), Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival Valparaíso Chile(2016), PACT Zollverein Essen (2015), Museum FLUXUS+ Potsdam (2014), Liverpool Biennial (2013), Galerie Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin (2012), Roulette New York, (2012) Padiglione Italia nel Mondo/54th Venice Biennale (2011)
www.ezramo.com
Anna Gohmert’s work examines intergenerational communication, togetherness, womanhood and parenthood. In her artistic practice, she seeks out a wide variety of people in order to explore, for example, the themes of loss, disorientation, loneliness and hope. She asks and listens to other people's experiences and perspectives, which she considers an integral part of her work. In her work, it is therefore important for her to find a formal language for intimacy without theorising the personal and losing the tenderness or rawness of the private. Themes such as social justice, health challenges, generational conflicts and dealing with self-efficacy and powerlessness play a central role. The media the artist chooses are therefore always oriented towards the themes, which has so far led the artist to create video works, multimedia space/sound installations, but also self-sewn quilts.
Anna Gohmert lives and works in Stuttgart. She studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Most recently, she was a resident at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris in 2022. She is one of the founders of “Mothers*, Warriors and Poets”, a platform that produces exhibitions and events around the theme of motherhood, parenting, carework and art.
www.annagohmert.de
www.mothers-warriors-and-poets.net
Zsuzsanna’s fresh, colorful, graphic illustrations can be found in magazines, newspapers and books from all over the world. Originally from Hungary/Serbia, Zsuzsanna grew up in Germany and studied communication design at SABK in Stuttgart with Prof. Niklaus Troxler. In Amsterdam she worked for various graphic design studios. Her work has received several international awards. Since 2008 she has been working independently under the name Helloyellowstudio, developing visual concepts in the print sector.
In the ranking of the best illustrators in Berlin 2018 Pagemagazin.
www.helloyellowstudio.com
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is currently chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with “art” in the title.
Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which opened at the Arnolfini in Bristol on 9 March 2024, and tours to MAC in Birmingham, Millennium Gallery in Sheffield and DCA Dundee during 2024/2025.
The standalone book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will be published in the UK and Europe by Thames & Hudson on 4 July 2024, and in the US and Canada on 3 September 2024
Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 16 languages. She regularly talks about art and with artists for colleges, as well as museum and gallery events. A supporter of Arts Emergency she has mentored artists and students through a variety of different schemes. As a broadcaster she can be heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022 / Penguin, NY, 2023).
In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, Hettie co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance — a supportive network and campaigning group for curators, academics, gallerists, technicians, educators and others working in the arts. Find out more and join the network here.
www.hettiejudah.co.uk
Renate Liebel is a visual artist who was born and raised in Upper Swabia, Germany and Southern California,USA. She studied painting and intermedia design at the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain before traveling through Europe with a mobile animation studio and then founding a studio for objects and spatial installation in the studios of the KV Wagenhalle in Stuttgart. There she researches plant structures and the perception of nature, caring decoration practices and order. She is involved as a neighborhood planter, art mediator and is one of the persons who founded “Mothers*, Warriors and Poets”. She lives with her family of five in Stuttgart, Germany.
www.renateliebel.de
Marie Lienhard is an artist living and working in Stuttgart. The driving force behind her artistic practice is a fascination for the elasticity of our perceptual behavior. She examines and questions realities at the limits of physical laws and fragile equilibriums. Installation, virtual reality, performance, photography and drawing are the media of her artistic production, which is represented internationally in exhibitions and public art collections. Her work oscillates between physical experience and the suggestive forces released by pictorial means, as well as natural phenomena and societal questions. She addresses our perceptive senses to create aesthetic experiences that invite us to become aware of our supposed limits, and to go beyond them. The human will to overcome physical laws governing body and mind through allegories of flight, levitation or falling are central to her practice. She is one of the founding members of „Mothers, Warriors and Poets“ a platform that produces exhibitions and exhibition programme revolving around motherhood and arts.
www.marie-lienhard.com
Joanne Masding is an artist working in Birmingham, UK. She is currently working on public artwork commission #makefuturevillagehistory, in Cardiff, Wales. Recent exhibitions include In the Peaceful Dome, Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2018; Touche Eclat, Workplace, Gateshead, 2017; Plaster Ghost Finger Cast, New Art Gallery, Walsall (solo), 2017. She has undertaken artist residencies with 501 Artspace, Chongqing, China, 2013; Research and Cultural Collections at University of Birmingham, UK, 2016; and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2014. She made permanent commission Flimsy Signals, for developers Bruntwood in 2018, and received a fellowship from John Feeney Trust in 2017. In 2020 she received by nomination an Artist Award from Henry Moore Foundation. Joanne also runs online sales platform Studio Outlet, and is a director member of ceramics coop Modern Clay.
www.joannemasding.com
www.studio-outlet.com
www.modernclay.org
Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro's work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles & colonial memory focusing on queer indigenous and feminist biopolitics. The artist creates immersive performative environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German diaspora and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives of testimonial Black queer experiences of sonic nature archives, revolt, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments which reacts to the different tones of societies shared between delusions & ritual. The work offers complex non-binary readings pushing new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records. She has developed frameworks of rituals and healing in performance work that often reveal the entangled colonial histories of migration at site-specific spaces to dismantle prejudices and organise accessible levels of consciousness through testimonial archives of local communities to build independant emancipatory tools for liberation, education, consciousness, intimacy and healing.
She is lecturer in Curating Black Visual Cultures & Philosophy at TransArt Institute New York & Fine Arts practice at the University of Liverpool, artistic & curatorial supervisor of the Artists in Training Programme at the UdK and the University of Bergen Norway. She is Artistic Director of Nyabinghi_Lab Collective, recently curating the performance programme 'Radical Mutations' at Hebbel Am Ufer Theatre Berlin with Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio and Free State Of Barackia. She moderates the annual Berlinale Film Festival & currently has an Artistic Fellowship from the Goethe Institute In Bahia Salvador. Her work was recently featured in ARTE Twists series "Our Colonial Heritage" and Deutsche Welle TV in a series of short films on German Colonialism and Black Resistance. Her work has been featured in several international exhibitions and Biennales including the Havana Biennale (2019), Dak'art Biennale (2012; 2018), Venice Biennale (2016) and La Otra Biennale in Bogota (2013) and RAVVY Performance Biennale Yaoundé (2018). For more information on their work:
www.anguezomo-bikoro.com
Katharina Pethke is a filmmaker and former professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (2012–2019). She mostly works with moving images and the idea of the personal being political. In her autobiographical films she unravels bigger questions in an essayistic approach with the research being part of the work. Her studies in German literature, art history and audiovisual media in Hamburg and Cologne were followed by internationally acclaimed works in the field of documentary filmmaking. Her film REPRODUCTION celebrated its world premiere at 74th Berlinale 2024 (Forum section). Currently, Katharina Pethke is a PhD candidate at the Film University Babelsberg where she investigates in the field of portrait film.
www.katharinapethke.com
Anna Schiefer is an artist and researcher living in Stuttgart and Berlin. Her practice draws from architecture, the performing and the visual arts. She investigates the formal languages of tools and energy architecture. Since the birth of her second child in 2022, she has been increasingly concerned with the early childhood perceptual apparatus. The installation "Tokamak" was created in this context and is part of a new group of works for ultra young audiences.
Anna Schiefer is also a founding member of the publishing house Verlag für Handbücher and is currently a lecturer in visual arts and architecture at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. In 2020, she received her PHD in artistic research on "Reciprocal Props: On the Interaction of Work and Tool" from the École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image Angoulême & Poitiers in France.
www.annaschiefer.de
www.verlagfuerhandbuecher.de
Verena studied philosophy and communication design in Stuttgart and Darmstadt. She works as a copywriter, graphic designer and coordinator in various projects. At Mothers*, Warriors & Poets, she is responsible for the exhibition‘s public relations discourse on art and care at GEDOK.
Lerato Shadi’s work challenges common assumptions to critique Western notions of history and make visible that which is invisible or overlooked. Working across video, performance and installation, and often employing repetitive processes, she argues the importance of centering – not just including – the marginalised body as a main figure of narrative experience. Her works have been shown internationally in numerous solo and group exhibition, i. a. at Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2024), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2024 and 2023), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), Palais de la Porte Dorée and in the Musée d’art moderne both in Paris (2021); in solo shows at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin and at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2020); during the 14th Curitiba Biennial in Brasil. Shadi’s video work ‘Mabogo Dinku’ was part of the Artists’ Film International programme 2020, organized by Whitechapel Gallery London, and presented in art institutions around the globe. In spring 2022 her monograph was published with Archive Books, Berlin.
Jordan Troeller (*1985 in Santa Clara, CA, USA) holds a fixed-term lectureship in modern and contemporary art history and theory at the University of Graz in Austria, where her research focuses on the intersection between art and politics, particularly the politics involved in writing art’s histories. She is currently completing the monograph “Sculpture’s Progeny: Ruth Asawa and the Maternal Work of Art,” which is the first critical study devoted to several self-defined “artist-mothers” in postwar San Francisco. The book emerged out of her ongoing inquiry into how gender and sexuality shapes the visibility of artistic labor—a topic explored in her recent article “Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands” (OCTOBER 172, Summer 2020).
Dr. Troeller is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University, and has held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Goethe-Institut Boston. Her scholarship can be found in numerous publications, including Art Journal, The Burlington Magazine, Hyperallergic, The History of Photography, and Women's Art Journal, as well as the exhibition catalogue Object Lessons:The Bauhaus and Harvard (2021).
Lisa Tuyala is a singer and cultural manager. She studied jazz singing at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and arts and cultural management (M. A.) with a focus on social transformation processes at Leuphana University Lüneburg in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. She completed her musical education with Rachel Gould, Lydia van Dam and Anette von Eichel, among others. In her artistic work she dedicates herself to the expressive possibilities of spoken word and singing in the field of improvised music. Her works, songs and lyrics during the last years revolve around storytelling and our view of the Other. Since 2010 she lives with her family in Stuttgart. She is the initiator of “Sonntags:Musik” series in Stuttgart West (2014–2016) and the women* music network Women* of Music (W*oM). Since 2016 she has been working at KKT (Kulturkabinett e. V.), since 2017 as deputy managing director. In this role, she is head of press and public relations as well as of various interdisciplinary projects. Among other things, she initiated and curated (2017–2021) the JAZZKABINETT – a music series organically dedicated to the interconnectedness of musical practice and current social discourses.
Julia Wirsching develops situations in her works that offer visitors a space of experience that allow them to test their own limits. The sensual experience of the work goes hand in hand with an experience and its corporeality. The themes of her works are usually closely connected to her life and the society in which she lives. In doing so, she considers the body as a political entity in which it is the performer and enactor of social rules, constraints and conventions. She examines and deconstructs the images of others and of the self that surround her.
Julia Wirsching’s works consist of multimedia situations made up of performances, videos, installations or drawings. By crossing the usual boundary between intimacy and the public sphere, a confrontation takes place that, in addition to a sensual experience, also provides space to reflect on one's own experience.
Julia Wirsching lives and works in Stuttgart. She studied music, philosophy and fine arts in Stuttgart and Tel Aviv.
www.juliawirsching.com
www.instagram.com/julia_wirsching
Didem Yazıcı is an Istanbul and Karlsruhe-based curator and writer. She has been working as Director of Exhibitions at Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts in Istanbul since 2022. Her curatorial work is inspired by thinking across disciplines in and outside of art as well as engaging socio-political dynamics. She has worked in institutions such as Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2017–18); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2015–16); 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2014); and dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012-13). She was Curator-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut Cairo in 2016, and took part in the Curatorial Workshops by the ICI in New York and A-Desk Barcelona in 2013. She studied Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul (2008) and completed her M. A in Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt (2012). Selected exhibitions include; “Together: Sena Başöz/Noor Abuarafeh” (YKY, İstanbul 2023), “Care As Resistance” (Stadtpalais Stuttgart, 2023); “Life, Death, Love and Justice” (YKY, Istanbul, 2022) and “Unconquered Spirits” (Sumac Space, 2020) and “Freedom is a State of Mind” (The 11th Shanghai Biennale, 2016).