Annie Albagli’s work explores new ways to witness a landscape and its relationship to human and nonhuman worlds by examining the cultural contexts from which they are born and the layers of manipulation that shape them. Her work has been shown nationally at such venues including the Headlands Center for the Arts, YBCA, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Art Museum of the Americas and internationally, at Art Prospect in St. Petersburg, Russia, Trash Festival in Bishkek Kyrgyzstan, and Beita Gallery in Jerusalem. Her videos have been screened as part of the Imagined Biennials Project at the Tate Modern, the Bavarian Film Festival, ZWICKL in Schwandorf, Germany, and Artist Television Access in San Francisco, CA. She has participated in residencies throughout the U.S. and internationally including Djerassi, This Will Take Time, CEC Artslink Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, and Art East in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Annie has contributed to various artists’ land projects such as AZ West, Mildred’s Lane, and Salmon Creek Farm. Between 2017-18, Albagli was a YBCA Truth Fellow. She is a co-founder and editor of the publication, WHIZ WORLD, and former Co-Director of the Royal Nonesuch Gallery. She is currently an Affiliate Artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and a visiting Artist at the Sierra Nevada College MFA-IA program.

Website
Instagram

Francesca Altamura is a Curatorial Assistant at the New Museum in New York. She has assisted in the production of exhibitions and events for numerous institutions and galleries including Transmediale in Berlin, Arcadia Missa in New York, Studio Voltaire in London, Ballroom Marfa in Texas, and in curating the 2018 New Museum Triennial Songs for Sabotage. 

Altamura visited artist studios to learn more about the local art scene. She planned to focus on alternative and artist-run project spaces and write an article about her findings on AQNB in collaboration with curator Lizaveta Matveeva.

Website
Instagram

Daniel Djamo works with film, performance, video art, installation, and photography to evoke the past and to underline “the now.” His work examines personal and group histories, focusing in particular on themes related to national identify. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and video art/ film festivals internationally. 

Djamo created 16 Sounds of Paper, a participatory art project that questioned the success of European integration. It focused on the routes followed by 16 Russian citizens towards Romania after the dissolution of the EU in the near future (year 2028). Djamo’s project imagines a future with the struggles and tensions we experience now within our societies while also reflecting past conflicts.

Website
Facebook
Instagram

Kevin Doyle is a writer and director working between the European Union and his native New York. His work investigates the gap between what we perceive as reality – consumed on devices via compressed and consolidated formats – and what actually transpires out in the real world. Recent works include: PMURT (exploring the 2016 U.S. Election); TRIANGLE/TAZREEN (a collaboration with Bangladeshi garment factory workers); “8:46” (a deconstruction of participants in the George Floyd murder); and SVANEKE (based on interviews with Danish citizens during COVID-19). Doyle is a contributor at Diggit Magazine in The Netherlands, writing on intersections of arts funding and politics.

As part of his interdisciplinary theatre project THE ARTS (2018), exploring the history of public funding of the arts, Doyle conducted research on arts funding in Russia. Doyle also investigated “St. Petersburg The City” as an anonymous artist through his photography, short films, and original writing to reveal hidden undercurrents in the life of the city and its people.

Website

Ruth Estévez is a curator, writer, and stage designer.  As the former director and curator at REDCAT/CalArts in Los Angeles, she has worked with a wide variety of artists and curated group exhibitions and public programs. She was the Chief Curator at the Carrillo Gil museum in Mexico City, where she also founded LIGA, Space for Architecture, a non-profit platform focused on experimentation in architecture and urbanism. Estévez was born in Bilbao and currently lives in Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Estévez conducted interviews with St. Petersburg scholars and artists about performance, political activism and the understanding of the public sphere through performance. She researched the evolution of performance art in Russia, focusing on its development under socialism and how it changed after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the shift to capitalism in the 1990’s.

Instagram

Tatiana Grigorenko was born in the US to a family of Soviet political dissidents. History, especially the history of repression, is central to her practice. Using collage, photography, sculpture and video, Tatiana explores the role of the image in the construction of history and examines different strategies of revolt and resistance, turning the hegemonic manipulation of reality into a creative act of opposition. Currently based in Paris, France, Tatiana exhibits internationally. She was a finalist for the Prix BMW, Creative Capital and the Fulbright Foundation and has received grants from the Schaeffer Foundation and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation.

During her Back Apartment Residency in 2018, Tatiana worked on a video project entitled Small Acts of Sabotage (How I Proved I Was Not a Camel). In a series of short interviews, ordinary people recounted experiences of their resistance to the Soviet system, in the form of a humorous anecdote. Small Acts of Sabotage made use of the Russian tradition of “anecdotes” to obliquely poke fun at and reveal the absurdity of a given system’s rules and regulations.

Website

Elana Herzog is an installation artist and sculptor who also makes handmade paper and books. She exhibited extensively nationally and internationally in group and solo shows, including at the Sharjah Art Museum in UAE, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, at Smack Mellon in New York, Diverseworks in Houston, TX, The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City. Herzog is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007 and NYFA Fellowships in 2007 and 1999. 

Herzog examined the history of Russian/Soviet textile production as a labor movement, an economic engine, and as manifest in art and design. She was interested in answering the following questions: how did it define, and how was it defined by the women and men who worked in it as designers and producers? How has the ideology and cultural aspiration shaped textile design and production? She then documented personal accounts of people who have had experience in the textile industry and will lay the groundwork for a future collaboration with local artists and/or venues.

Website
Facebook
Instagram

Hoover works with time-based visual arts, community engagement and collective social actions. As a Chinese-Russian-American, Hoover reframes issues of displacement, language failure, and cultural disjuncture. His practice spans performance and video, sculpture, installation and public art. Hoover seeks to engage communities and develop collaborative and educational projects. Currently he splits his time between San Francisco as the founder and principal of Collective Action Studio and Los Angeles as the Curator at the Chinese-American Museum. 

Hoover explored how contemporary Russian artists integrate the body with time and social practice. As the curator of the Sculpture Quadrennial Riga, he visited artist studios and conduct research on the Russian contemporary time-based arts.

Website

Aleksandra Kubiak is a visual artist whose focuses on the social impact of art.  She works primarily in video and performance with the participation of the public and invited guests and objects. Her work has been exhibited in major institutions throughout Poland and internationally.  Kubiak currently teaches at the Institute of Visual Arts, University of Zielona Góra and collaborates with the BWA Gallery Zielona Góra and Salony Fundation.

Kubiak’s residency in St. Petersburg was the first step in creating her first feature length film, tentatively titled The Men I Meet. The film continues a biographical cycle aimed at working through the dark side of her family history. It begins with research about Kubiak’s family connection with St. Petersburg. Kubiak to traveled to the cities and places where her family members used to live to explore their relationships and how their lives might have affected her life. During her residency in St. Petersburg, Kubiak showed her films and gave a public talk hosted at the Polish Institute in St. Petersburg.

Website
Facebook
Instagram

Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr are filmmakers, educators and community cinema activists whose work is a catalyst for creative collaboration and positive social change. For the past twenty years, they have been helping to run the Echo Park Film Center, a non-profit neighborhood media arts center with a focus on analog film education and resources. As the duo The Here & Now, they travel the world, sharing handmade movies and music with local communities.

Paolo and Lisa collaborated with local artists and musicians on an experimental film The Sound We See: A St. Petersburg City Symphony. They used analog filmmaking techniques and the “City Symphony” genre practiced in the 1920s by Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov to explore communal creative process and contemporary environments. The Sound We See is an ongoing cinematic conversation on the relevance of handmade film in the 21st century.

Website
Instagram
Facebook (Lisa)

Marissa Nielsen-Pincus is a performing artist, teacher, and founding member and Associate Artistic Director of Third Rail Projects. Marissa teaches immersive and site-specific performance skills and somatic explorations as part of Third Rail Projects workshop series in NYC. She has taught nationally in Chicago, IL, California, and Oregon, as well as internationally in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Switzerland. 

Nielsen-Pincus’ residency project built on existing relationships with local artists interested in immersive experience with film and installations. In collaboration with fellow artist Tom Pearson, she focused on a project called Libraria, a modular film/installation/immersive performance collaboration with local performers that was developed through creative workshops with community members. The resulting performance was premiered during the Art Prospect Festival in Fall 2018.

Website

Tara Catherine Pandeya is a second-generation dancer, cultural activist, choreographer, scholar and bridge-building artist, dedicated to the promotion of dance from the Central Asian Silk Road region. She uses embodiment practices through dance as a healing tool to empower. Tara’s work aims to support a rebalancing of our written historical record by privileging ephemeral knowledge (dance, kinesthetic and the oral) to provide a more direct, accessible, and inclusive way of knowledge sharing inclusive of marginalized groups and matrilineal storytelling. She creates dance works which evoke beauty, magical surrealism and wonder, inviting curiosity and a questioning of social norms through art.  

Website
Instagram
Facebook

Tom Pearson works primarily in visual and written media. His work draws from psychology, archetypal studies, and deep dream practices as well as the medicinal and ceremonial traditions of his native Tsalagi (Eastern Band Cherokee) heritage. He is best known for his movement-based theater works as the co-founder/co-artistic director of Third Rail Projects and the director of the Global Performance Studio.

Pearson’s residency project built on existing relationships with local artists interested in immersive experience with film and installations. In collaboration with fellow artist Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, he focused on a project called Libraria, a modular film/installation/immersive performance collaboration with local performers that was developed through creative workshops with community members. The resulting performance was premiered during the Art Prospect Festival in Fall 2018.

Website
Facebook
Instagram

Simon Lee and Eve Sussman work on projects collaboratively and individually. They make films, videos, photography and installations. Much of their work challenges concepts of conventional cinema. They deconstruct the motion picture, examine how narrative deploys stories in unusual ways and expand the way we make and experience motion pictures. Lee and Sussman has been shown at Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Sundance Film Festival, the Next Wave Festival at BAM, NYC, IFC Center, NYC, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, MoMA, NYC, Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.

Sussman and Lee worked on a new video inspired by the 1960’s American TV show, Peyton Place. They casted Russian performers and Russian-English simultaneous translators for an improvised, cut-up version of this classic soap opera that unearthed the underbelly of a fictional town. The work reflected on the often pined for  and often fictional mid-century nostalgic ideals of bygone “greatness”.

Dr. Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva is a theatre director, teacher, and scholar, with an academic specialty in avant-garde theatre practices and the work of V.E. Meyerhold. She focuses on devised, physical, and trans-disciplinary theatre-making. She currently teaches directing, devising, drama, expressive movement, and film and theatre history at Dixie State University.

Syssoyeva pursued two related collaborations. These projects engaged Russian artists and academics and resulted in a performance, exhibition, and publication. The St. Petersburg Etudes, a collaboration with photographer and conceptual artist Farrah Karapetian, combined choreography based on Russian avant-garde aesthetics, theater performance, and camera-less photography. The second project was a collaboration with theatre historians O.M. Feldman and Sergei A. Konaev, to publish the complete writings of avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold in English. 

Facebook