CONTEXT
Anuradha Vikram // writer, curator, educator, LA, CA
EXPERIMENTAL STATION
Corey Chatman // Deputy Director, Chicago, IL
Lia Dostlieva is an artist, cultural anthropologist, and essayist who works across a range of media, including photography, installation, and textile sculptures. Lia’s artistic and research practice engages with the issues of collective trauma, Anthropocene, decoloniality, and the agency of vulnerable groups. She has exhibited work at the Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum (Tbilisi, Sakartvelo), National Museum of Fine Arts (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia). Her curatorial projects include the 10th Triennale of Young Polish Art (Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Poland, 2023) and ‘Reconstruction of Memory’ (DOX, Prague, Czech Republic, 2017; IZOLYATSIA, Kyiv, Ukraine 2016). In 2022-23, she was a participant of the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, Netherlands) and a 2019 Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria). Lia also writes for publications, including e-flux Journal, Eurozine magazine, Kajet Journal, and Blok Magazine. Originally from Donetsk, Ukraine, Lia is currently in Poznan, Poland.
Karolina Grzywnowicz is a visual artist whose work bridges contemporary art, research, and activism. Her works deal with plants in social and political context, often of a violent nature. Karolina perceives landscape as a living archive in which traces of past events are recorded. Her practice explores the power of seemingly unnoticed gestures to resist oppression, and she is currently exploring scent as a tool of micro resistance and healing. Through a variety of media, including installation, sculpture, and public interventions, she creates spaces and situations that encourage viewers to engage with these issues in new and thought-provoking ways. Karolina currently resides in Berlin, Germany.
Tamar Janashia is the founder and director of Culture and Management Lab (CML), a not-for-profit organization in Tbilisi, Georgia, active in the arts, cultural exchange, issues of cultural policy and strategic development of creative industries. She currently serves as a coordinator of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial and is a consultant of the professional development program for cultural managers in Kyrgyzstan. In 2018-2019, Tamar coordinated capacity building program for the cultural managers from Central Asian countries. In 2012-2017, she served as a General Administrator of the Regional Art and Culture Program for the South Caucasus.
Tamar’s ArtsLink International Fellowship 2024 is co-hosted by Hyde Park Art Center and Leah Feldman (Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago).
Yulia Krivich is a visual artist, activist, and curator. Her practice is based on a post-artistic approach and community-building. She explores issues related to language, migration, and postcolonial theory. Yulia is co-founder of the Solidarity Community Center Słonecznik (Sunflower) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw as well as a member of the Soniakh Digest, a digital platform that researches contemporary info-war and geopolitics from the perspective of Eastern Europe.
She has participated in numerous international exhibitions in Ukraine, Poland, and internationally. In 2023-24, Yulia co-curated with the Polish curator Anita Nemet two installments of the exhibition Dear Future in Warsaw and Bielsko-Biała. The project is a ‘letter to the future’ in which artists, architects and volunteers from Ukraine and Poland consider the tools in the artistic arsenal to create new futures in the context of the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine.
Yulia graduated from the Department of Architecture at the State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture in Dnipro, Ukraine, and from the Faculty of Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Originally from Dnipro, she currently lives in Warsaw.
Yuliya Makliuk is an artist-activist fascinated by the connections between nature, people, and pottery. Her ceramic practice focuses on fieldwork and experimentation to find environmentally sustainable solutions for studio ceramic production and use. Yuliya empowers other ceramicists through communal initiatives to lead critical societal transformation. Her studio is a place of ceramic education and eco-art-therapy for war-affected students, certified to the Clean Green Ceramics standard and included in the Homo Faber crafts catalog. Yuliya is also an author, speaker, and volunteer for the NCECA Green Task Force, working to help people adequately respond to societal challenges.
Daria Pugachova is an artist, performer and art activist born in Rivne, Ukraine. Daria uses participatory practices to unite communities and integrate art into daily life. She explores the themes of the transformation of place and society through the direct presence of the artist.
In 2021, Daria received a grant for a project “Microcosmos” in Poltava, Ukraine. On February 11, 2022 the solo exhibition of the artist opened in Jump Contemporary Art Centre. Two weeks later, Russia started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In March 2022, Daria was invited for an artist residency at Radar Sofia in Bulgaria. In Sofia, she created the performance “I Will Close The Sky So You Could Breathe” about the war in Ukraine. She presented the “Microcosmos” in front of the abandoned cinema “Cosmos” in Plovdiv (Context AiR residency) and opened two solo exhibitions MICROCOSMOS / SKY OF WAR connecting the projects she made before and after the invasion started. In 2023, Daria created a performance “CITIES OF WAR” in front of The UN International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands. She currently lives in Sofia, Bulgaria and participates in international residencies and art programs to bring visibility to Ukraine through her projects.
Daria studied architecture at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture. In 2013-2019, she played drums in the band Panivalkova.
The Shelter for Freedom (I Follow the Fire) exhibition/performance during the Art Prospect Residency at Salaam Cinema Baku, 2023 (video in Azerbaijani)
Profile photo by Julia Weber
Yama Rahimi is a contemporary artist and activist from Afghanistan. His work is informed by a deep involvement in migrant and women’s rights issues and encompasses video, conceptual photography, and experimental short film.
Since 2023, Yama has been co-curating a series of digital exhibitions for the Hidden Statement initiative featuring the work of artists in Afghanistan. The Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden provides a platform and support for this endeavor. Despite Taliban’s ban on all forms of free artistic expression, this project gives an opportunity to the artists in Afghanistan to participate in the international art discourse. For security reasons, all artists are exhibited anonymously.
Yama’s work has been featured in over 25 solo and group exhibitions in Afghanistan and internationally, including Whitechapel Gallery (London), Venice Biennial, University of California, and Hattenheim, Frauen Museum – Wiesbaden. He has been living in Germany since 2015.
Shuhrat Saidov is a human rights defender, photographer, curator, with a background in legal education. Working in the fields of Public Health and Human Rights, Shuhrat engages in the advocacy and promotion of human rights across Tajikistan through his socially-conscious projects. His Under the Cover photo project reflects on the queer experiences in Tajikistan where the LGBTQ people face homophobia and transphobia, discrimination and stigmatization both in society at large and within the Muslim community. Shuhrat’s curatorial work takes place in art schools, in collaboration with artists and activists working toward advancing human rights, gender equality, tolerance, feminism, and gender diversity.
Ioana Țurcan is a farmer, interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer with a formal education in Cinematography, Documentary Filmmaking and Film/Video Production. Ioana’s medium-length documentary The Other Life of Charon (2015) was nominated for Best Short Film at the Romanian Gopo Awards and in 2021 and her fictional short film Empiric about a young textile worker during the communist period in Romania was presented at festivals widely. Ioana has also worked with experimental formats and performative media, creating exhibitions for galleries and public spaces on different ecosystem-related topics, such as landscape-based identity, family constellations and the process of adapting to ambiguous loss. In the past years, she has co-developed local initiatives to foster access to art education and cultural production, facilitating workshops on analog photography, creative writing, contact sports and filmmaking. Since 2021 she has been part of a duo called Uncertain Space, dealing with topics of caregiving, ambiguous loss, rituals and physical dependence. In 2022 with the transnational artist collective, an office, she developed site-specific activations presented at Documenta 15 (Germany), Fotograf Festival (Czech Republic) and Centrul de Proiecte (Romania).
Hnat Zabrodskyy is a senior-level manager in the field of culture, a legal expert with more than ten years of expertise, and an organizational transformation and development specialist. Hnat leads legal operations at the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA NGO and the Pavilion of Culture CF. He also leads the UALR project focused on developing new regulations and institutions for a sustainable framework for the emergent Ukrainian cultural ecosystem. Hnat is continuously engaged in the development of common memory practices and dialogue-related projects as an independent expert and as a senior scholar for the Kyiv School of Economics.
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