Pawel Maciejko
Pawel Maciejko is a Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of Classical Jewish Religion, Thought, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. He received a doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford (2004). Upon completion of a Whiting post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago the following year, Maciejko moved to Israel and joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught until 2016, moving to Johns Hopkins University.
His book The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) was awarded the Salo Baron Prize by the American Academy of Jewish Research, and Jordan Schnitzer Book Award by the Association of Jewish Studies. His most recent publication is Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins of Jewish Modernity(Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2017).
Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation. She often uses the format of a public film shoot, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce a script and orientate the work towards its final outcome. With these works, which look at the structures that form and hinder us, she participated in various large biennials, and in smaller dedicated shows. Recent presentations include: Cinema Olanda, solo at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017; As for the future (2017) solo At DAAD gallery, Berlin; Power and Other Things, BOZAR Brussels 2017. A monographic publication, Amateur, was published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam and The Showroom, London in 2016.
Yolande Jansen
Yolande Jansen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and Special Professor of Humanism in Relation to Religion and Secularity for the Socrates Foundation at the VU University Amsterdam. She is the author of Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of Multiculturalism; French modernist legacies (2014) and edited The Irregularization of Migration in Europe; Detention, Deportation, Drowning(2015), together with Joost de Bloois and Robin Celikates. She is the project-leader of an NWO-project about ‘Critique of Religion; Framing Jews and Muslims in public debate and political theory’. She recently contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Secularism with an article analysing the rise of the secularism/religion dyad in international public affairs and philosophy.
Amir Engel
Amir Engel is a lecturer at the German department. He studied philosophy, literature and culture-studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. at the German studies department at Stanford University. After that he taught and conducted research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His main topics of interest include German Romanticism and German postwar literature and culture, theories of myth, literature and philosophy and history of culture. He is also interested in intercultural transference, Jewish German culture, and German 20th century intellectual history. He has written a book about Gershom Scholem and has published articles about Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Martin Buber, Jacob Taubes, Salomon Maimon and others.
Marc David Baer
Marc David Baer is a historian who specialises in the connected histories of Jews and Muslims in Turkey, Greece, and Germany, in the past and present. Representative publications include the first academic study of the followers of Shabbatai Tzevi, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, 2010, Turkish translation, Selânikli Dönmeler: Musevilikten Dönenler, Müslüman Devrimciler, ve Laik Türkler, Doğan, 2011; Greek translation forthcoming), Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Berlin and the Shoah (Comparative Studies in Society & History) and Mistaken for Jews: Turkish PhD Students in Nazi Germany (German Studies Review). He is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Marjolijn Dijkman
Marjolijn Dijkman’s practice is concerned with human systems and structures that aim to intervene, control, and ultimately master our surrounding environment. Interested in integrating concepts and methodologies specific to a broad range of disciplines, Dijkman’s work has engaged with topics including urbanism, ecology, anthropology, museology and futurology. The artist’s expansive approach attests to her ability to see the linkages between seemingly unrelated subjects. This view is articulated in the ethos behind Enough Room for Space (ERforS), an independent arts initiative founded by Dijkman and artist Maarten Vanden Eynde in 2005, which focuses on generating experimental research projects and exhibitions.
She had solo exhibitions at institutions like: West Space (Melbourne, AU); ICA (London, UK) ; IKON Gallery (Birmingham, UK); Berkely Art Museum (Berkely, US), West Space (Melbourne, AU). And participated in group exhibitions like: 21st Bienniale of Sydney (2018); 11th Shanghai Bienniale (2016), Mercosul Biennial (2009) and the 8th Sharjah Biennial (2007).
Gülsün Karamustafa
One of Turkey’s most outspoken and celebrated artists, Gülsün Karamustafa has a forty-year oeuvre distinguished by installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos that examine the complexities of gender, globalization, and migration. In the late 1980s, Karamustafa began making sculptures and installations using found objects, including Create Your Own Story with the Given Material (1997), which features child-sized white cotton shirts that have been sewn shut with black cord in a meditation on the plight of immigrant children in Turkey. She has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva (1999); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; and Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden.
Erkan Serçe
Erkan Serçe was born in Izmir in 1964. After graduating from the history department of Aegean University (1986) he completed his post-graduate studies in Dokuz Eylül University (1996). Since 1997 he has been teaching in the History Education department of the same university. Serçe has published many books on the urban history of the city of Izmir, municipalities in the Ottoman and Republican era, dynamics of urbanisation and quotidian life.
Metehan Özcan
Metehan Özcan is an artist, born in Istanbul, 1975 lives in Izmir. He received BA degree in Interior Design from Bilkent University and MFA degree in Visual Communication Design from Bilgi University. He is studying at Proficiency in Art and Design Programme of Dokuz Eylül University and working as part-time lecturer at various universities. Özcan mostly focuses on design and communication of modernist design in Turkey.
He was one of the participants of the Places of Memory, a project realized for Turkish Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), gathering visual urban fragments of Istanbul. Later, he participated in the Design Chronologies Project at the Istanbul Design Biennale (2016), which documented the last 200 years of design history in Turkey. Recently he coordinated an exhibition, Authors of The City, with Yıldız Çintay Art Group about Izmir’s modernist art and design references at public realm, taking place at Studio-X Istanbul.
Mehmet Penpecioğlu
Dr. Mehmet Penpecioglu
Independent Researcher & Academics
Mehmet Penpecioğlu is and urban planner and urban politics scholar. Graduated from the Department of City and Regional Planning at Dokuz Eylul University; received his Master and PhD degrees from Regional Planning and Urban Politics Departments at Middle East Technical University. Completed his postdoctoral research at TU Delft OTB – Research for Built Environment. Worked as Research Assistant, Lecturer and Assistant Professor at Middle East Technical University, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and Izmir Institute of Technology. Currently, as an independent researcher and academic, Dr. Penpecioglu is giving courses, leading research and publishing in various fields of urban studies and planning including urban planning theory and practice, comparative urban politics and governance, urban social movements and commons.
Raşel Meseri
Raşel Meseri is a writer based in Izmir, Turkey. She published seven children books and one novel (Köpekbalıklarının Kayıp Şarkıları, Delidolu, 2018). She is the co-editor of Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (Iletisim, 2017). Some of her theater plays are put on stage in Izmir and Istanbul. She also makes documentaries and short films, including Izmir Sea Children (2007) and Jewish Family Houses: Kortejos (2010).
Aylin Kuryel
Aylin Kuryel completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam and is currently teaching at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is the co-editor of Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010) and Aesthetics and Resistance in the Age of Global Uprisings (Iletisim, 2015) and Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (Iletisim, 2017). She has been involved in art projects/exhibitions and has completed documentaries and short movies.
Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences, ed. Raşel Meseri & Aylin Kuryel
Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences is published in November 2017 from Iletisim Press, Turkey, edited by Raşel Meseri and Aylin Kuryel. It is a collection of short accounts of experiences related to being Jewish in Turkey, written by Jewish and non-Jewish people, including family histories, historical traumas, discrimination stories, the use of Ladino language, stories of immigration to Israel and back to Turkey, Jewish and non-Jewish encounters, the relationship between different Jewish populations such as Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Romaniote Jews, almost forgotten songs, food and everyday traditions, daily life in different cities, stereotypes about Jews, among others. There are more than 300 short entries, put together in the form of a dictionary, written by 71 people. It provides an overview of being Jewish in Turkey through emotional, playful and strong stories, revealing how personal stories are intertwined with history and politics. The book is appealing to the general reader who is interested in Jewish and minority cultures in the world, with its accessible and fluent style based on story-telling. Putting forward a novel genre, “experience dictionary”, and shedding light on historical and cultural codes, it can also be a source for academic and non-academic researches on the subject.
Zeyno Pekünlü
Zeyno Pekünlü is an artist born in Izmir, 1980 and lives in Istanbul. She has graduated from the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul and continued her education with master and PhD in the same university. She has also completed a second Master in Artistic Production and Research in University of Barcelona. Possibilities of collectivity, and especially of collective knowledge production, occupy a crucial space in her artistic and activist engagements. She is also part of several collectives such as A Place on Earth, a self-organized solidarity space for white-collar and freelance workers and Istanbul Solidarity Academy and part of the editorial collectives of the culture and politics journals Express and RedThread.
C.M Kosemen
C. M. Kosemen is an artist and independent researcher born in Ankara, Turkey. He studied at Cornell University, Istanbul’s Sabancı University and holds a Masters’ degree from London’s Goldsmiths College in Documentary Film and Media Studies.
Kosemen’s areas of interest include surreal art, Mediterranean history, palaeontology, evolution, zoology and visual culture. As an artist, Kosemen is affiliated with the Empire Project Gallery of Istanbul. His art has been displayed in exhibits in Catania, Vienna, Ulcinj, Istanbul, Ankara, London and Tel Aviv.
As a researcher, Kosemen’s book credits include Osman Hasan and the Tombstone Photographs of the Dönmes, from Libra Books of Istanbul. Copies of this book have been purchased by leading universities and research institutes of the world. It has won the 2016 Eduard-Duckesz History Prize.
Kosemen’s other book credits include All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, and the Cryptozoologion, the Biology, Evolution and Mythology of Hidden Animals from Irregular Books of London.
Kosemen was also an editor for Benetton’s Colors magazine and worked in various advertising agencies.
www.cmkosemen.com
instagram.com/cmkosemen
Iosif Vaena
Iosif Vaena is a pharmacist,and in his free time he collects Jewish tombstones from the gulf of Thermaikos. He hopes that one day he will find out who threw them out there.
Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory and gender, Hebrew Literature, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema, Mediterraneanism, Trauma and Narrative. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives and the production of historical knowledge.
Savas Michael-Matsas
Born in Athens in 1947. He studied and took his degree in Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Athens (1965-1971). Post-graduate studies in Radiology and Oncology in Paris, where he made also studies in Philosophy, History and Political Economy (1971-1974).He published the last 30 years in Greek and international theoretical journals many articles and essays on philosophy, political economy, Jewish studies, history and literary theory based on a non dogmatic Marxism. Active in the international Marxist movement from 1970.
He is teaching post-graduate courses of philosophy and cultural studies in the Communication and Mass Media Department of the National University of Athens. Member of the Editorial Board of the theoretical journals Critique (Editor Pr. Hillel Ticktin, University of Glasgow), and Alternativi (Editor Pr. Alexander Buzghalin, Moscow State University)
Author of books of essays (in Greek):The Greek poet Solomos and Hegel (Leon, 1990), The “Great Eastern” of Andreas Embiricos (Agra 1995), Forms of the Messianic (Agra 1999), Forms of Wandering (Agra, 2004), Homo Poeticus( Agra 2006), Golem or on the Subject and other Ghosts (Agra, 2010), The Horror of a Parody — Three Lectures on the Nazi ‘Golden Dawn’ (Agra 2013), Musica ex nihilo( Agra 2013), Homo Liber (Agra 2016).Essays translated into English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish.
Ayse Cavdar
Ayse Cavdar graduated from Ankara University, Journalism Dept. Received a Masters’ degree in history, from Bogazici University. Completed her Ph.D. thesis entitled “the Loss of Modesty: The Adventure of Muslim Family from Neighborhood to Gated Community” at the European University of Viadrina, in 2014 (supported by Global Prayers Project initiated by MetroZones). Worked for Helsinki Citizens Assembly’s project entitled Citizens Network for Peace, Reconciliation and Human Security in Western Balkans and Turkey. She served as a visiting scholar at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Philipps Universiy, Marburg, in 2016. She is recently a postdoc fellow in Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Center for Global Cooperation Research, in Duisburg. She co-edited (with Volkan Aytar) Media and Security Sector Oversight, Limits, and Possibilities, TESEV, 2009; (with Pelin Tan), The State of Exception in an Exceptional City, Sel Yayinlari, 2013.
Julian Reid
Julian Reid is Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, the northernmost university in the European Union, on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where he has lived since 2007. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Reid taught previously at the Universities of London (SOAS and King’s College) and Sussex. He was Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol in 2014. This autumn he is Visiting Research Fellow at Virginia Tech. His most recent book is The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptivity and Vulnerability (co-authored with David Chandler).
Romm Lewkowicz
Romm Lewkowicz is a New York based anthropologist, migrant rights’ activist and a dramaturg. He is doctoral candidate at the Anthropology Department of CUNY’s Graduate Center, and a teaching fellow at Hunter College. In 2018, he will serve as a Max Planck fellow at the University of Leipzig. At present, he is in Chios (Greece), conducting fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation titled Documenting the undocumented: Experimenting the Future of Europe at the EU’s Biometric Refugee Archive. The research is an anthropological study of EURODAC (the EU’s biometric database for asylum seekers and “irregular migrants”), looking at how the refugee body has been serving as a laboratory for experimentation in biometric surveillance.
Lewkowicz has held various research positions in migrant rights NGO’s around the world, including the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants and the African Refugee Development Center (Tel Aviv), Detention Action (London) and Asylos – Research for Asylum (Brussels). Since 2013, Lewkowicz has been collaborating with the Berlin based director Ariel Efraim Ashbel, supervising the research and concept conception for the shows ALL WHITE PEOPLE LOOK THE SAME TO ME (2013) and The Empire Strikes Back (2015). Their next show Do the Right Thing, which explores the legacy of Bauhaus and its bearing on the entanglement of action ethics and materiality, is funded by Kulturstiftung Des Bundes as part of its Bauhaus Today series marking the Bauhaus school’s 100th anniversary. Like their previous collaborations, the show would premiere at the Hebbel Am Ufer theater (HAU) in Berlin.
Yiannis Epaminondas
Yiannis Epaminondas born 1960 is settled in Thessaloniki since 1970. He studied architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and worked for 25 years as a free lance architect and exhibition curator. Since 2010 he runs the Thessaloniki Centre of the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece where he has curated significant exhibitions: The Westering Orient (about Ottoman postcards of Thessaloniki), Thessaloniki 1863-1873 (about the oldest Thessaloniki photos and maps of the Oriental Railroads company) and The Dusk of Our Old City, Thessaloniki 1870-1917 (about the evolution of the city prior to the great fire). He is currently studying on a master’s on History at the Aristotle University.
Dimitris Stamatopoulos
Dimitris Stamatopoulos is Professor in Balkan and Late Ottoman History at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki. Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Princeton University, and the Institute of European History in Mainz, Stamatopoulos is the author of many books and articles on the history of the Orthodox Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire. A revised version of his book Byzantium after the Nation: the problem of the national continuity in the Balkan historiographies (Athens: Alexandreia Publications, 2009) will be published in English by Central European University Press. He has also edited the following collective volumes: Balkan nationalism(s) and Ottoman Empire, vol.3, Istanbul: Isis Press, 2015. European Revolutions and the Ottoman Balkans: War, Nationalism and Empire from Napoleon to the Bolsheviks, London: I.B. Tauris, 2018, Balkan Empires: imperial imagined communities in Southeastern Europe (18th-20th c.), Central European University Press (forthcoming).
Alexander van der Haven
Alexander van der Haven (Ph.D. History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2009) is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Israeli Centers for Research Excellent (I-CORE), Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-religious Encounters at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Open University of Israel, Adjunct Lecturer of General Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, and Full Adjunct Professor at Webster University St. Louis. Of relevance to the themes of this project, he has written the book From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh: Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement (2012), and an article on the Jerusalem Syndrome (2008). His recent publications are about madness, religion, and modernity in relation to the religious experiences of psychiatric patient Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), and about conversion to Judaism in the early modern Dutch Republic in the context of early modern inter-religious relations.
Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa
Lives and works between París and San Sebastian. His work is concerned with the ability of visual and written language to challenge those who come into contact with it, questioning what types of subject we are, or allow ourselves to be.
His drawings, publications, banners and films have been shown in exhibitions such as 2017 “treinta y ocho de Julio treinta y siete de Octubre ”(38th July, 37th October), Museo Artium. Gazteiz. “there is an enemy” for the friends of Guggenheim museum. Museo Guggenheim Bilbao. 2016 Punk: sus rastros en el arte contemporáneo, MACBA, Barcelona. Saturday. Sunday, Saturday. Carreras Mugica, Bilbao. 2015 Jakarta Biennale 2015, Jakarta. 2014 Culture is what is done to us, Clages, Koln (Germany). How to (…) things that don’t exist, 31st Bienal de Sao Paulo. 2012 Do you want a master? You will have it!, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. 2008 Klankeffecten # 5: Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, MUHKA, Anterwp 2007 Chacun à son goût, Museo Guggenheim de Bilbao, Bilbao. Bienal de Lyon, Lyon, Francia. 2005 Populism, Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lituania Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt.
Köken Ergun
Köken Ergun is a Turkish artist working in film and installation. His films often deal with communities that are not known to a greater public and the importance of ritual in such groups. Ergun usually spends long time with his subjects before starting to shoot and engages in a long research period for his projects. He also collaborates with ethnographers, historians and sociologists for publications and lecture series as extensions to his artistic practice.
Having studied acting at the İstanbul University, Ergun completed his postgraduate diploma degree in Ancient Greek Literature at King’s College London, followed by an MA degree on Art History at the Bilgi University. After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became involved with video and film. His multi-channel video installations have been exhibited internationally at institutions including Documenta 14, Palais de Tokyo, SALT, Garage MCA, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Protocinema, KIASMA, Digital ArtLab Tel Aviv, Casino Luxembourg, Para-Site and Kunsthalle Winterthur. His films received several awards at film festivals including the “Tiger Award for Short Film” at the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival and the “Special Mention Prize” at the 2013 Berlinale. Ergun’s works are included in public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, EMST, Stadtmuseum Berlin and Kadist Foundation.
Website | Index of Works
Webesite | After the Archive
Photo by A. Donnikov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow
Danielle Riou
Danielle Riou is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Project, where she co-curates the HRP’s public programs, organizes special projects and partnerships, and oversees the student internship program. She is co-creator of the Milosevic Trial Public Archive, the complete on-demand video archive of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague, Netherlands. She has presented at conferences and panels on new media, the archive and memory. She has also translated edited volumes for L’Institut du Proche Orient (Beirut/Brussels.) Her current project is centered around explorations of sound and human rights, and she is currently producing a human rights radio show for broadcast on Bard’s regional NPR affiliate. Broader research interests include humor and trauma, theorizing gender within global development movements, and media theory and human rights.
Yael Bartana
Yael Bartana’s films, installations and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country, Israel. Central to the work are meanings implied by terms like “homeland”, “return” and “belonging”. Bartana investigates these through the ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of the nation state.
In her Israeli projects, Bartana dealt with the impact of war, military rituals and a sense of threat on every-day life. Between 2006 and 2011, she has been working in Poland, creating the trilogy ‘And Europe Will Be Stunned’, a project on the history of Polish-Jewish relations and its influence on the contemporary Polish identity. The trilogy represented Poland in the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice (2011).
In recent years Bartana has been experimenting and expanding her work within the cinematic world, presenting projects such as ‘Inferno’ (2013), a “pre-enactment” of the destruction of the Third Temple, ‘True Finn’ (2014), that came into being within the framework of the IHME Festival in Finland, and ‘Pardes’ (2015) which was shot during a spiritual journey in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Her latest work, ‘Tashlikh’ (cast-off), is a visual performance that gathers personal objects linked to horrors of the past and the present.
Nataša Ilić
Nataša Ilić (b.in Zagreb) is a free-lance curator, a member of the curators collective What,How&for Whom (WHW), a non-profit organization for visual culture, formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin. Other members of WHW are curators Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW activities explore the potentials of critical curatorial practice capable of generating innovative models of representation and self-organization within the realm of contemporary art.
Since 2003 WHW has been directing the program of city-owned Gallery Novain Zagreb. WHW is the first recipient of Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory, awarded by the Arts and Civil Society Program of Erste Bank Group in Central Europe, in recognition of cultural activities related to the Central and South Eastern European region.
Galit Eilat
Galit Eilat is an independent researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Her current research brings together artists and experts from different geographies and knowledge disciplines looking at the relations between the essence of sovereignty and the boundaries of the political act. Eilat is the founding director of The Israeli Center for Digital Art (2001 – 2010). Eilat has been a leading member of curatorial teams involved in large-scale events, such as the São Paulo Bienal of 2014, the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 2011, and the October Salon 2011. In addition, she was a guest curator in several contemporary and modern art museums. Eilat is the current recipient of the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College, 2017-2018.
Erden Kosova
Erden Kosova is an art critic who lives and works in Istanbul. He is in the editorial team of the e-journal Red-Thread. He has been contributing to the organisation of a series of visual art events recently held at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.
www.berliner-herbstsalon.de
www.red-thread.org
Melis Birder
Melis Birder graduated from St. Michel French High School and from Istanbul University with a BA degree. She worked as a junior copywriter in Istanbul for a while and then left Turkey for New York. From limousine dispatcher to waitress, from bike messenger to part-time teacher she worked in many different jobs while studying at the New School where she became interested in documentary filmmaking. Together with Berke Bas they founded inHouse projects at their Brooklyn kitchen table and directed and produced documentaries for NGO’s and libraries in NY.
She shot her first independent documentary TENTH PLANET: A Single Life in Baghdad in 2004 in Iraq. Among other festivals, the film was screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and received the Jury Special Award at Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival in 2005. Her Sundance Documentary Film Program Fund supported and award winning film THE VISITORS was screened in many festivals but most importantly in various prisons in NY. She co-directed BAGLAR (again funded by Sundance Documentary Film Program) with her partner Berke Bas and received the Jury Special Awards at !F Istanbul Independent and Sarajevo Film Festivals as well as the Best Documentary of the Year Award by the Association of Turkish Film Critics SIYAD in 2016.
She lives with her daughter, cats and dog in the coastal town of Bodrum, Turkey.
Roee Rosen
Roee Rosen is an artist, a filmmaker and writer. His work often provocatively juxtaposes politics and erotics, facts and fiction. One of his fictive personae, the Jewish Belgian surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank was, according to some theorists, a practitioner of Frankism, an extreme offshoot of Sabbatean mysticism. Working as Frank for a decade Rosen’s projects entailed her entire oeuvre, a film, and a book, Sweet Sweat (Sternberg Press, 2009). Rosen’s latest book is Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories (Sternberg Press, 2017). His most recent film, The Dust Channel (2016), was shown in Documenta 14. A cinematic retrospective of Rosen is forthcoming in Jeu de paume, Paris, in November, 2018. Rosen is a professor a tHa’Midrasha Art College, and at the Bezalel Art Academy, both in Israel.
Bik van der Pol
Through their practice as a duo Bik Van der Pol aims to articulate and understand how art can produce a public sphere and space for speculation and imagination. This includes forms of mediation through which publicness is not only defined but also created. Their work follows from research of how to activate situations as to create a platform for various kinds of communicative activities. Bik Van der Pol’s mode of working consists of setting up the conditions for encounter, where they develop a process of working that allows for continuous reconfigurations of places, histories, and publics. Their practice is site-specific and collaborative, with dialogue as a mode of transfer; a “passing through”, understood in its etymological meaning of “a speech across or between two or more people, out of which may emerge new understandings”. In fact, they consider the element of “passing through” as vital. It is temporal, and implies action and the development of new forms of discourse. Their practice is both instigator and result of this method.
Artur Żmijewski
Artur Żmijewski is a visual artist, filmmaker and photographer. Since 2006 he is the artistic editor of Krytyka Polityczna. His solo show If It Happened Only Once It’s As If It Never Happened was presented at Kunsthalle Basel in 2005, the same year in which he represented Poland at the 51st Venice Biennale. He has shown in Documenta 12 (2007), Manifesta 4 (2002), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2012, 2005), National Gallery of Art Zacheta, Warsaw (2005), Kunstwerke, Berlin (2004), CAC, Vilnius (2004) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999). He was the curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012 , of which he opened the curatorial process as a collaboration.
Meriç Öner
Meriç Öner is the director of research and programs at the Istanbul institution SALT. Before taking up her post at SALT, Öner edited the interactive database for the 2008 exhibition “Becoming Istanbul” at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main, which comprised over 400 media, including documentary films, artists’ films, and images. She also programmed an exhibition based on the database, with accompanying talks, presentations, and performances, at SALT in 2011. Öner curated the exhibitions “Modern Essays 4: SALON” for SALT Galata in 2012, “SUMMER HOMES: Claiming the Coast” at SALT Beyoğlu in 2014, and “One and the Many” at SALT Galata in 2016.
Syndrome of the Present 