Lydia Bell is a performance curator. As Program Director & Associate Curator at Danspace Project, she works on programming, publications, and research initiatives. Recently, she has collaborated with artists such as Jasmine Hearn, Eiko Otake, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Reggie Wilson, and Sacha Yanow.

Lydia conducted site visits to organizations engaged in curating performance. Her research focused on how St. Petersburg-based organizers think about the relationship between performance and socially engaged practices. She interviewed curators, administrators, and artists, focusing on the following questions: How do you define socially engaged practice for you and your communities? What are the ethical considerations of a performance practice? How do cultural institutions support or discourage socially engaged perspectives? 

Lydia also compiled research into an article for publication in a U.S. based publication.

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Peter Brock is an artist and curator. He received his MFA in painting from Bard College in 2014, and has exhibited at 83 Pitt Street, NYC, Calle Cedro 328, Mexico City, Plan 5, Stockholm, and Federico Vavassori, Milan. His work explores an expanded notion of landscape by conflating technological and biological modes of perception and representation. Brock is also the founder / director of The Fort, an independent exhibition space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn that produced ten exhibitions with underrepresented artists between 2015 and 2018. He has been working on developing a collaborative exhibition, residency, and publishing platform committed to inclusivity, transparency, collective ownership and profit-sharing. 

Peter explored self-organized art spaces and interviewed the artists and curators involved in running them. He gathered experiences and perspectives from these independent spaces and sought to build connections with similar projects in NYC. 

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Luisa Caldwell is a multi-disciplinary artist whose projects range from mixed-media art pieces on paper to architecturally based installations. The work reflects her interests in patterns as cultural tropes and the upcycling of materials.

Luisa’s latest solo exhibitions appeared at Smack Mellon and Humanities Gallery at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Her recent residencies include Polenovo AIR in Tula, Russia, Guild House at Guild Hall in East Hampton NY, and Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg in 2019. During a follow up Back Apartment Residency, Luisa collaborated with the St. Petersburg-based artist Zhenya Machneva. Their shared interests in traditional arts drew attention to the disappearance of antique stained glass from residential buildings and their replacement with cheap plastic frames and glass. They collaborated on an immersive installation to inform and encourage the public to resist the destruction of the cities’ beauty and history.

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Janessa Clark is a multimedia artist whose practice blends choreography, dance, film, and video art. Born in Germany during the Cold War and educated in US and England, she has returned to her home in Brooklyn, NY after six years of working in Stockholm. Janessa’s practice explores the encounter between spectator and performer, centering around themes of privacy, memory, identity, archiving, and co-authorship. She is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies and has toured her work internationally for the past 15 years.

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Allen Frame is a photographer and writer. He creates installations combining his own photos with works from archives and found material. His photos situate portrait figures in a contemplative space, exploring questions of desire, identity, and loss. His writing in poetry and for theater draws from autobiographical experience.

Allen teaches in New York at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, and the International Center of Photography. His work has been exhibited most recently at Gitterman Gallery in New York, Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Museum of the Sonora in Mexico, and Kunzarchive in Lugano, Switzerland.

Allen took photographs of Russian artists and collected vintage images from flea markets and vintage stores to construct installations that suggested fictive narratives.

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Nicole Garneau is an interdisciplinary artist making site-specific performance and project art that is directly political, critically conscious, and community building. Her book Performing Revolutionary: Art, Action, Activism was published in 2018 by Intellect Books and was released at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago. Originally from Chicago, she has been semi-nomadic since 2012 but spends significant time living and working in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky.

Nicole collaborated with Russian artists to highlight wild places in or around St. Petersburg. They created performances, ceremonies, earth works, and installations that respond to the space. This documentation was used to make a pamphlet that was designed to be an artistic guidebook to wild places in the region. At a time when our lives are tamed, regimented and orderly, this project sought artistic experiences of mystery, disorder, and the unknown, especially in relation to the natural world. 

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Working in film, video, sound, sculpture, installation, and performance, the Hawai’i-born artist Andy Graydon narrates processes of change, from emergence to decay, focusing on moments of transition and metamorphosis. He is interested in natural and social ecologies, the role of listening and the voice, and engages structures of music such as scoring, improvisation, collective emergence, and community. Often ephemeral in nature, Andy’s work combines minimal materials with elements that are absent, fictional, or imaginary.

For his Back Apartment Residency, Andy was interested in what writer Boris Groys identified in Kazimir Malevich as “a dialetics of imperfection”: a sense of ongoing and progressive interaction as the eternal form of art. He planned to expand his work with sound, through its relational nature and its connection to ecologies, into a context that included traditions of materialism and Suprematism, in which progress and discovery were continually engaged, but never completed. 

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Anna Harsanyi is the Assistant Curator, Community Engagement at Creative Time. A curator, educator, and arts manager, Anna is dedicated to presenting art in a non-art context and creating sites that invite participation from audiences outside of the art community.

In 2019 she co-curated In the Historical Present, an exhibition marking The New School’s Centennial which featured commissioned projects exploring the often hidden or dormant histories within the institution. She has organized projects presenting artist engagements within the historic Essex Street Market in New York’s Lower East Side, collaborated with Sheetal Prajapati on a series of events centered around play, and was part of the team of curators who organized No Longer Empty’s exhibition Through the Parlor in a former beauty salon in the Lower East Side. In 2014, she co-curated Hot & Cold: Revolution in the Present Tense, a public art project in Timișoara and Cluj, Romania which presented three artist projects responding to the 25th anniversary of the Revolution that ended Communism. 

Anna has worked in education and public programming roles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York Arts Practicum, and A Blade of Grass, most recently at the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She teaches at The New School.

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Rado Ištok is a curator, researcher and editor. He is a curator of art residencies and an exhibition at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts (2018-2020) in the framework of 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture. Ištok leads Spaces of Care, Disobedience and Desire (2018-2020), a research project in collaboration with Marie-Louise Richards and Natália Rebelo supported by the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Exhibitions include Liquid Horizons (2019) at tranzit.sk in Bratislava, Slovakia, Other Visions within PAF – Festival of Film Animation in Olomouc, the Czech Republic (2018), I’m Fine, on My Way Home Now at Allkonstrummet, Stockholm (2017) and Galleri Gerlesborg (2018), In the Sky When On the Floor (2016) at Galleri Mejan, Stockholm.

His publications include Crating the World (2019) with Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn and Decolonising Archives (2016) for L’Internationale.

Departing from the iconic project of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, as well as the Siege of Leningrad, Rado continued to explore the historical as well as contemporary links between modernism and anti-modernism as manifested in art, architecture and ideology, and not least their role in occupation of various territories.

Fabian Knecht, born in Magdeburg, completed his master’s degree with Olafur Eliasson, at whose Institut für Raumexperimente he studied from 2009 to 2014. In 2012, he assisted in the studio of Matthew Barney in New York. His works often appear unexpectedly in public spaces, breaking out of the exhibition context and into everyday life.

Fabian changes patterns of perception and action, transgresses art concepts and power structures, and questions social relations and norms by countering them with strong and provocative images. His works have been shown in international institutions and exhibitions includingthe MSU Museum for Contemporary Art (Zagreb), the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), the Imperial War Museum (London), and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. 

At the time of his Back Apartment Residency, Fabian was working on an exhibition at Alexander Levy Gallery as part of the Gallery Weekend in Berlin. He developed a project, which imbued the themes of Breaks, Fracture, Crack, Breakover and Change with political, social and anthroposophical aspects. In St. Petersburg, he planned to produce one of the projects for that exhibition.

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La Follette is a director, curator and professor. As founder/director of ArtUp, she runs Sites of Passage (SOP), a space for the migration of ideas across political/cultural borders. Previous SOP projects include Egypt & US (Egyptian Revolution to the Occupy Movement); Israel, Palestine & US (Borders, Walls & Citizenship); and South Africa & US (Civil Rights & Civil Wrongs). Following these, she worked on SOP Russia. Like the earlier exchanges, this dialogue included a variety of voices/practices. It was produced at the Mattress Factory, a site-specific installation art museum, where La Follette was a guest curator.

Tavia researched a SOP project by interacting with artists to get a cultural aesthetic temperature. Russia and the U.S. have a rich and tumultuous history of chewing on the commodity of ideas in contrasting continental climates. She continued her study of symbols and philosophies presented through Art as a Social Practice.

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Clarinda Mac Low began in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience. She is Director of Culture Push, an experimental organization linking artistic practice and civic engagement, and co-founder of Works on Water, an organization that supports art that works on, in, and with the water. She has created performance interventions in urban space with TRYST, and since 2010, she and Carolyn Hall (dancer and marine ecologist) have collaborated on Sunk Shore, speculative tours of the future on real shorelines. TRYST has staged interventions in New York, Finland, Siberia, and Portugal.

Clarinda’s recent work includes: “Incredible Witness,” game-based events on the sensory origins of empathy; “Free the Orphans,” investigating spiritual and intellectual implications of intellectual property in a digital age; and “The Year of Dance”, a self-ethnography of how unconventional kinship structures form in the NYC dance world. Clarinda’s residencies include the CEC Back Apartment Residency, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Mount Tremper Arts. Also BAX Award (2004), Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant (2007) and Franklin Furnace grant (2010). BA in Dance and Molecular Biology (Wesleyan University) and MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice (City College of New York-CUNY).

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Will Owen an artist, composer, and curator currently based in Queens, NY and Philadelphia, PA. He deals mainly with interactivity through many mediums but returns most often to sound, installation design, and food.  Will has performed and exhibited internationally in Denmark, France, Iceland, China, Wales, and is excited to return to Russia for a second project with CEC Artslink, and his work was shown nationally at such institutions as The Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), Philadelphia Water Works Museum, Black Mountain College Museum, and Flux Factory (NYC).

Will worked on two projects during his residency, the first of which was designed to investigate the possibility of coerced synesthesia through a series of dinner parties using Pavlovian techniques, for which he collaborated with local artists to create a dinner party series which included projection, sound installation, and interactive objects during the meal. His second project was to continue his research on sports injuries as a vessel for larger social and emotional concepts, and he collaborated with the wrestling communities in Saint Petersburg to make casts of their injured “cauliflower ears.” These casts were used in a larger sculptural and sound installation.

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Sara Reisman is Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation which is focused on supporting art and social justice through grants to NYC-based non-profit organizations, and organizing exhibitions and public programs at The 8th Floor. She was also the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program where she commissioned permanent artworks by artists including Xu Bing, Karyn Olivier, Ester Partegas, and Mary Mattingly, among others.

Sara curated a two-year series of exhibitions on revolutionary practices in contemporary art. The inaugural exhibition in 2019, Revolution from Without…, featured artists whose works examine human rights through the lens of migration, freedom of expression, and race. Subsequent exhibitions within the Revolutionary Cycles series took up themes like surveillance and the media, family, and labor, among others. Her research in St. Petersburg focused on artists, collectives, and historical references that express different approaches to social transformation and the conditions of post-revolutionary political landscapes.

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Carol Stakenas is a curator and educator. Her practice is deliberately varied in scope, content, and context. She recognizes a multicentric increasingly transnational contemporary art world where curators, artists, and communities engage in projects that extend across national boundaries, tracing patterns of migration and cultural exchange.  Even hyper-local projects quickly connect to global conditions and urgencies. Carol is currently a curator-at-large for (SPAN) Social Practices Art Network. Previously, she served as executive director of No Longer Empty (NYC) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) as well as deputy director/curator of Creative Time (NYC).

During her residency, Carol explored socially engaged public art projects in St. Petersburg. Through observation, conversation, and participation, she sought to address critical questions including how does a transnational perspective inform legibility of an artwork and its impact in global culture?

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Charlotte Diana Thrane is a sculptor who orchestrates meetings between materials, objects and spaces, exploring the tension between opposing forces such as density & lightness, softness & hardness. Since 2011, she has created a number of large-scale, site-specific art works in cities and landscapes. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Denmark, UK, France, Austria, Russia, USA, Italy and Sweden and has received numerous awards and grants.

For her Back Apartment Residency, Charlotte planned to create a color palette of walls in the city that had been painted over in order to cover former tagging and graffiti. The walls would not be brought back to their previous condition; instead, new abstract wall paintings would appear. The project represented a new way for Thrane to think about site-specificity and the mobility of art works.

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