Participants

Honza Malik is a founding member of the Czech dance company Nanohach, and is producer to all the company's works. He is also a teacher of folk dance at the Duncan Centre in Prague.

Malik graduated from the Duncan Centre Conservatory in 1999. Between 1999-2003, he cooperated with the State Opera Prague as a dancer, and from 2001 he worked as a movement coordinator for the Minor Puppet Theatre in Prague. He was a member of the Folk Dance Group Rokycany from 1981until 2005, serving as a choreographer and chief of dance for this company from 1996. In 2004-2005, he was a member of the Laroque Dance Company Helene Weinzierel. He currently cooperates with the Military Art Ensemble "Ondras" in Brno.

http://www.nanohach.cz/

Przemek Matecki  (born 1976) is a Polish artist. Using fragments of contemporary visual and material culture,  Matecki produces paintings, objects and installations. Magazine covers and advertisements recur in his work, their slick finish standing in stark contrast to the rough impasto of the paint he applies to them. Matecki’s style can seem coarse and agitated something that demonstrates the influence that punk and Pop Art aesthetics have had on his work.

Tom McCarthy (born 1969) is a writer and conceptual artist. He grew up in Greenwich, and was educated at Dulwich College and Oxford University, where he studied English literature. He lived in Prague during the 1990s after graduation from Oxford, and later moved to Berlin and then Amsterdam to work as the literary editor of the local Time Out.

McCarthy's debut novel Remainder received widespread critical attention in the literary and mainstream press. In 2008 Remainder won the fourth annual Believer Book Award and Zadie Smith wrote that it was "one of the great English novels of the last ten years." It has since been translated into nine languages, and an adaptation for cinema by Film4 Productions was begun in 2008, with a script by John Hodge. His other works include Men in Space, C, and Tintin and the Secret of Literature.

Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. A graduate of The Complete Works national mentoring scheme, her poetry appears in Ten: New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) as well as Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Rialto and Magma. This summer she was commissioned to 'translate' her granddad's cockney stories for Modern Poetry in Translation and she will be reading them at the launch of the magazine at Lauderdale House on 10 November. Karen is interested in process and form, which she explores on her blog www.opennotebooks.co.uk

Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. A renowned cultural theorist, feminist and commentator, her early work has examined issues of gender and youth culture. Her current research focuses gender and feminist theory and cultural studies, and ‘precarious labour’ in art worlds and in the new culture industries. Angela McRobbie also writes about the work of key cultural theorists including Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak and others (McRobbie 2005, 2008). In her forthcoming projects further attention will be given to urban cultural studies as context for changing world of work.

Angela McRobbie co-convenes and teaches on the MA Gender and Culture run jointly by the Department of Sociology and the Department of Media and communication.

Her most recent book is The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2008) and has previously authored The Uses of Cultural Studies (2005), In The Culture Society (1999), British Fashion Design (1998), Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994) and Feminism and Youth Culture (1990)

Gustav Metzger (born 1926) is an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966. Metzger is recognized for his protests in the political and artistic realms.

Born 1972 in Great Britain. Lives and works in New York.

Oliver Michaels works across the media of video, photography, print, installation and sound, often focusing on transformations of everyday objects through surreal and mechanical distortions. An example is the video Train (2003), where domestic architecture is imagined as a kaleidoscopic landscape to be explored by the viewer. In Museum Postcards (2010) a number of simple animations of historical sculptures, which are derived from museum postcards, are exhibited on raised structures which form stages for the projected videos. The films feature talking, anthropomorphised stone-faces, whose chatter, rants and cacophonous monologues break the air of art historical authority. Several voices are created out of existing texts, for example Gertrude Stein’s cubistic and obsessive descriptions of objects, Tender Buttons, and the Unabomber Manifesto, a text by the famous university and airline bomber Ted Kaczynski. In The Mourners, the latter is recited by a quietly standing and dignified marble monk. In Lion, a clumsy ceramic lion ponders poetically, pointing to the ways in which the sculptures and their voices create a dichotomy between what is seen and what is heard and imagined.  

Oliver Michaels' website http://cargocollective.com/olivermichaels

Jasiek Mischke graduated gained an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2010 and has shown his work at Quare and Rokeby galleries in London, the paraplufabriek in Nijmegen, Holland and at The Moor, Sheffield.

Xolani Mnyaka is a London-based guitarist and composer, who plays blues covers and originals.

Mobile Studio is a young London-based architectural practice. The practice is actively involved in cultural and socially aware projects within the public realm. It is a design-orientated practice, and places a strong emphasis on collaborative working and public engagement. Mobile Studio is interested in art and architecture, and everything in between.

Lynda Morris, Curator EASTinternational and AHRC Research Fellow at Norwich University College of the Arts

Lynda Morris is Professor of Curation and Curator of EASTinternational, the international open submission exhibition, which has been realised in collaboration with a series of eminent invited selectors since 1991. Her activities as a curator and a writer have been concerned with issues of perception, conceptual art, and resistance in art and politics. She is also the Principal Investigator for the major AHRC funded research project 'Picasso; Peace and Freedom' with Tate Liverpool, the Albertina (Vienna) and the Louisiana (Copenhagen).

Paul O'Neill is a curator, artist and writer who lives in London. He is interested in addressing the systems of interpretation that are involved in making sense of the world around us, as much as he is concerned with the compulsions that lead to interpretation and meaning itself. His practice explores the experience of moving across things, of traversing territory rather than patrolling boundaries. Sometimes this exploration takes the form of curatorial projects, art-making, writing or lectures.

He was Gallery Curator at londonprintstudio Gallery between 2001-2003, where he curated shows such as Private Views, Frictions, A Timely Place..., Phil Collins Jumble Sale and All That is Solid. He is Artistic Director of MultiplesX, an organisation that commissions and supports curated exhibitions of artist’s editions, which he set up in 1997. As an artist, he has exhibited internationally, including at Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw; The Irish Museum of Modern Art; Villa Arson, Nice; The South London Gallery and Cell, London; Project and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin.

Currently he is a PhD scholar at Middlesex University, researching histories of curating as a critical and professional practice. He is currently working on two publications on curatorial issues and has just written a series of articles in Art Monthly (issues 272, 275) exploring contemporary curatorial practice and writes regularly for many journals and magazines including CIRCA, Everything, Art Monthly, the Future and Space & Culture Journal.on.

Thom O'Nions graduated from the MFA Curating programme at Goldsmiths College. He was founding curator of Supplement Gallery and is currently one of the curators at The Woodmill.

Ladies of the Press* are Ana Čavić and Renée O'Drobniak, an artist collective working with the live press performance.

Alistair Owen is a London-based artist whose practice includes a variety of media such as installation, drawing, photography, film, and sculpture. In his works, Owen questions our relationship with space and objects.

Jocelyn Page is a poet from rural Connecticut who currently lives in South East London. Her debut pamphlet, smithereens, was published in 2010 by tall-lighthouse press. She completed the MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths in 2009 and is currently a PhD candidate working toward a first collection and researching the topic of inspiration and collaboration in poetic practice. 
http://www.tall-lighthouse.co.uk/jocelynpage.html

Jane Pavitt is the Head of the History of Design Department at the Royal College of Art, London. She is a specialist in 20th century and contemporary design, with a particular area of expertise and interest in design curation. She worked as a research fellow and exhibition curator at the V&A museum for over ten years, curating a series of exhibitions which broadened the framework of understanding for design practice and history in the museum context. These included Brand.New (2000), an exploration of branding from a historical and contemporary perspective; and Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70 (2008). She is currently preparing a V&A exhibition for 2011 entitled Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990.

Eddie Peake (born 1981) lives and works in Rome and London. His work encompasses many different media, and often, though not always, investigates the space between verbal language and non-verbal language, and the discrepancy that occurrs when one is translated into the other. Solo exhibitions include 'History', Lorcan O'Neill project space, Rome (2010); 'Ladies', Parade, London (2008); 'The Caspar Erasmus School of Art', The Hex, London (2007).

Lucy Pedlar is curious about the dialogue between activity and the built environment and how each shapes the other. She draws on her own personal encounters with architectural mechanisms that enable and prohibit activity (such as steps, ramps, barriers, and reservations). She is fascinated by the way in which we continuously modify our surroundings and the subsequent social implications, and responds to architectural space in a variety of ways. She also works in partnership with galleries, schools and universities to develop innovative ways of approaching curriculum subjects.

Gill Perry

Professor of Art History, Open University

Gill Perry joined the Open University in 1977, and was Head of Department from 2005-08, and Head of Research from 2005-2009. Currently she is Head of External Collaborations and chair of the Open Arts Archive, a major website and archive which stores collaborative events and art projects organized by the Open University and fifteen collaborating museums and galleries across the UK. She has chaired several Art History courses, including Modern Art: Practices and Debates (code A316) at third level, Art and its Histories (code A216) at second level. She has published books, articles and catalogue introductions on modern and contemporary European art, and eighteenth century British art, and has a particular research interest in issues of gender difference within art history and visual culture. Her recent book, Spectacular Flirtations (shortlisted for the 2007 Theatre Book Prize) explores issues of gender, spectatorship and femininity in eighteenth century theatrical portraits, while her edited collection, Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art looks at the role of gender difference and ideas of ‘feminine excess’ in the work of some contemporary women artists (see below). She is currently completing research for her forthcoming book Playing at Home which explores the theme of the house in recent and contemporary art. She has recently curated a show at the Royal Society, Crystal World, which explores the use of crystals in contemporary art. She is also curating an exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons at the National Portrait Gallery, London, opening in October 2011. She is editing and co-writing a catalogue The First Actresses which will accompany the show, and which explores the roles of feminine portraiture in the construction of eighteenth century celebrity culture. Download the exhibition flyer to find out more [PDF 177 KB].

She is co-chair of the Gender in the Humanities Research Group in the Arts Faculty, and was the Reviews Editor of the journal Art History from 1995 – 2001. She was also a panel member (Panel 2) of the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2006-2010. She is currently supervising five PhD students who are researching topics in modern and contemporary art.

Paul Pieroni is an artist and the Exhibitions Programme Manager at Space Studios. He is also one of the curators at Seventeen gallery.

Tobias Putrih (born 1972) is a Slovenian artist who lives and works in New York. Putrih’s practice involves the production of models, prototypes, experiments and cinematic apparatuses. Putrih is interested in the areas of possibility that lie where science, art and narrative meet; his works emerge from the crossover between the imagination of the artist and the precise rigor of science. Exploring the point where thought becomes physical reality, Putrih’s architectural objects meditations on the potential of art and science.

Pavel Pyś is an Australian-Polish curator and writer. He is the winner of the first annual Curatorial Open at the Zabludowicz Collection.

Jonathan Rée (born 1948) is a British writer, historian and philosopher. Born in Bradford, Rée was educated at Oxford University, and was a Professor of Philosophy at Middlesex University. He later gave up teaching in order to "have more time to think". He is a member of the British Humanist Association.

His interests and writings range from continental philosophy to African philosophy, and from literature to science. He spends much of his time working on various ways of reconnecting philosophical debate with historical inquiry, and seeking new audiences for it. He is a prolific writer and his books include Descartes, Philosophy and its Past, Proletarian Philosophers, A Kierkegaard Reader,The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and I See a Voice. He has written for the New Humanist, Evening Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Lingua Franca, London Review of Books, Prospect, The Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, and Rising East. He is also known as a broadcaster, both on radio and television, and is a frequent guest in programmes such as Journeys In Thought and In Our Time.

Tom Richards' work often brings together pastiche and homage. By using old or outmoded technology to new and nonsensical effect, his work pokes fun at our innate (programmed?) trust in technological advancement and those who hold sway over it.

Richards graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea in 2004. Since then his work has been seen and heard at: Stanley Picker Gallery, Zabludowicz Collection, E:vent, The Pigeon Wing, Meals and SUVs, A Thing About Machines, Sightsonic, Goldsmiths, UEL and Working Rooms.

www.tomrichards.info

James Richards (born Cardiff, 1983; lives and works in London) works with archives of videos, including home movies and mass media footage, which he remixes - chopping, editing and distorting the visuals and the soundtrack and creating a mixtape which inverts the generic into the personal. Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011), Art Now (with Clunie Reid), Tate Britain (2010), Tramway, Glasgow (2009) and Swallow Street, London (2009). Recent group exhibitions include Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, NY (2009) and Naught to Sixty at ICA London (2009). Richards has curated film programs and screenings at Serpentine Gallery, London (2010), BFI, London (2010), X-Initiative, NY (2009) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2007).

Poet and philosopher based in London.

Karin Ruggaber is a London-based artist. She was born in 1969 in Stuttgart, Germany. Ruggaber makes sculptural objects that convey a physical sense of something seen or experienced, rather than representing it. She graduated from Chelsea College and Slade School of Art, London. Her solo exhibitions include greengrassi, London (2003 and 2005) and Rene Daniels and Karin Ruggaber, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2002).

Neuroscientist at University of Amsterdam.

Scanner is musician, sound artist, writer and media critic.

Dawn Scarfe is an artist whose work investigates details in the process of listening and the relationship between sound, matter and location. Her works explore the possibility of heightening or extending the range of the senses with simple tools and techniques. She works with the natural resonances of objects and environments, and the mysterious way in which sound manages to convey a sense of 'aura'. Through her work she hopes to reveal how the act of perception involves a creative, reciprocal engagement with the environment.

Bob Sheil is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Bartlett with a particular interest in design through making.

Richard Sides is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London. Recent projects include 'Reading a Wave' at The Woodmill, 'Relatively Prime', Galerie Stadtpark, Austria, 'A partially joyless carousel of quantics', Supplement Gallery and 'There is no solution because there is no problem', Sheffield.

Zoë Simon is an actress, live model, performance artist and playwright. Zoë was attached as a performer and playwright to The White Bear Theatre, where she made waves with her raw performances and drew on her own experiences to create gritty character-driven narratives and angry, sawn off dialogue. Her plays include Saturday Night (2008), which was nominated for Off West End’s 2009 Adopt a Playwright Award and for a 2007 Pearson Award, Scratch (2006), and Head (2004), which went to The Underbelly, Edinburgh 2004 and was Fringe First nominated.

Zoë is the muse and leading lady of Czech artist Tereza Bušková and has appeared in Bušková ’s films Masopust (2010), Spring Equinox (2009), Forgotten Marriage (2008), Wedding Rituals and Touch (2007), as well as live performances: The Rituals of the Spring Equinox (2009), Festive Garment (2008) and Beauty for One Day (2007). 

Dan Smith is a writer and critic and is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, and editor of the online publication Altertopian. He is currently working on a book on the presence of nineteenth century forms of material culture as active forces in the fabric of the present, to be called Traces of Modernity. He is also working on a book exploring relationships between contemporary art and utopia.

John Stezaker (born 1949) is an English photographer and artist. Using postcards, film posters or pictures found in books and magazines as his materials, John Stezaker questions the certainty of images by deconstructing their original form. Taking various unrelated images, then fragmenting and merging them to make a new hybrid, he removes the intelligible meaning of the originals and replaces it with a surreal and mysterious aesthetic that alters them from typical mass-reproductions into unique and mystifying artworks.

Euan Taylor is a Dundee-born artist who works as a Chief Director of imagined construction company Inefficient Solutions and contractually responds to requests to create, solve problems, and to realise futile endeavours. Taylor is currently working as a subcontractor for artists collective Ganghut.

Jan Verwoert is an art historian and critic based in Berlin and is a contributing editor of frieze. He writes, among others, for Afterall and Metropolis M. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and at the Royal College of Art in London.

Julia Vogl's is an artist working with a variety of media including sculpture, furniture, intsallation, participatory engagement, collage, and drawings. Her work  interrogates the processes of decision-making and self-imposed limits through games and playing.

Sophie von Olfers is an independent curator.

Dr Caroline Vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow at Christ's College. She is the author of two books, Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (2007) published by Cambridge University Press as well as Antinous: the Face of the Antique, a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of ancient sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 2006. She has also published numerous articles, most recently 'Hadrian, Hellenism and the Social History of Art', in Arion, 2010 and 'Laocoon's Children and the Limits of Representation', in Art History, 2010.

Virtuoso vocalist, composer and educator Cleveland Watkiss trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He won Best Vocalist 2010 in the London Jazz Awards and has previously been voted best vocalist by the Wire/Guardian Jazz Awards for three consecutive years. His diverse career has seen him perform with some of the most acclaimed musicians from around the world, from The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan to Bjork, Goldie to the London Community Gospel Choir and many, many more.

As a music educator and voice instructor, Watkiss leads a variety of workshops in Venues/Schools, colleges and Universities around the UK, designing the vocal curriculum for BA students at the Weekend Arts College (WAC) in Belsize Park and as a voice coach for the Artist Development Programme at the Hackney Empire Theatre.

Ken Wilder is an artist who makes sculptural installations, having previously practiced and taught architecture. His own work references Renaissance paintings that establish concrete ties to their location, drawing their surrounding architecture into the work's content. Ken teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.

Poet in residence at Instituteof Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL.

Bedwyr Williams was born in St Asaph, Wales in 1974. He graduated from Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in 1997, and in the following year left London for Caemarfon, North Wales, where he now lives and works.  

His work encompasses stand-up comedy, sculpture and painting, posters and photography. In this broad range of media, he uses humour effortlessly to explore themes such as provinciality, stereotyping and pretentiousness of the art world. He is interested in our sense of place and belonging, but at the same time refuses to be pigeon-holed by provincial tastes or stereotypes.

Williams has been shortlisted for Becks Futures 2006 showing at the ICA, London, CCA, Glasgow and Arnolfini, Bristol. He represented Wales at the 2005 Venice Biennale with a project called ‘Basta’. 

Rachel Withers holds degrees in the History of European Art and Architecture (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Fine Art and Critical Studies (Central St. Martin's School of Art). She has taught in both critical practice and studio practice areas since 1992. She has written widely on contemporary art subjects. Her criticism comprises general coverage of contemporary art subjects. Areas of particular interest include the intersection of contemporary art with constructions of time and the experience of temporality, and artists whose work invites a reappraisal of marginal and/or discredited paradigms of knowledge.

Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US and has lived in London since 1987. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The City with Horns, published by Salt in 2011. She is also the author of Marks, a collaborative book with the artist Linda Karshan, published by Pratt Contemporary Art, and the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology. She works as a freelance tutor in creative writing. A new poem, 'Desire Paths', featuring recent woodcuts by Linda Karshan, is to be published as a limited-edition portfolio by the Galerie Hein Elferink in the Netherlands in early 2012.

S/Z are artists Sarah Elliott and Zayne Armstrong, an artist duo working between London and New York. Their collaborative practice has seen them make a series of benches as contributions to international exhibitions and events.