Havîn Al-Sîndy

Born in the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq, the artist Havîn Al-Sîndy works in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Kurdistan. Al-Sîndy studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she completed her studies in 2018. At the same time, she studied biology and chemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2021 she received the scholarship of the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation. In 2022 Al-Sîndy was awarded the Egmont Schaefer Award for Drawing and in 2023 the Helmut Kraft Foundation Award for the Promotion of the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig.

Havîn Al-Sîndy's works can be found in the fields of sculpture, painting and moving images. She deals with artistic and scientific processes of visualisation, finds languages for the difficult to say and the ambivalences in the production of visibility itself. Her working method is processual and mostly collaborative. Again and again, the focus is on a dialogue across generations - an interest in and engagement with one another.

Shilpa Gupta

Shilpa Gupta (born 1976 in Mumbai, India) lives and works in Mumbai. Gupta's artistic practice encompasses a wide range of media, including manipulated found objects, video art, interactive computer-based installations and performances.

Her artistic interests revolve around the perception and transmission of information in human life. In her work, she investigates how objects, places, people and experiences are defined. In doing so, she explores the various dynamics that shape these definitions – for example borders, labels, censorship and security.

Gupta has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Arnolfini in Bristol, the OK in Linz, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem, the Voorlinden Museum and Gardens in Wassenaar, the Kiosk in Ghent, the Bielefelder Kunstverein, La Synagogue de Delme Contemporary Art Centre and the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. Her works have been shown at the Venice Biennale 2019, the Berlin Biennale 2014, the Sharjah Biennale 2013, the New Museum Triennale 2009, the Yokohama Triennale 2008, the Lyon Biennale 2009 and the Liverpool Biennial 2006, among others. In 2015, she took part in the joint Indian-Pakistani exhibition My East is Your West, which was organised by the Gujral Foundation in Venice.

Ayham Majid Agha

The actor Ayham Majid Agha was born in Syria in 1980 and lives in Berlin. From 2005 to 2012, he was a member of a theatre studio that performed interactive theatre projects in Syrian villages. Between 2006 and 2012, he taught at the renowned Damascus University of Performing Arts, after which he worked at various theatres in Damascus, Manchester, Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Seoul and Hanover.

Until the end of the 2017/2018 season, Majid Agha could be seen as an actor at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin in Sebastian Nübling's production of In Our Name, Heiner Müller's Der Auftrag and The Situation by Yael Ronen & Ensemble. The Situation was invited to the 2016 Theatertreffen and was voted “Play of the Year 2016” by “Theater heute”. Together with the writer Olga Grjasnowa, he directed the multi-part interactive cookery show Conflict Food. Since 2016, he has directed the Exil Ensemble at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, where he also staged his play Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert.

Marcel Odenbach

Marcel Odenbach (born 1953 in Cologne, Germany) is a pioneer of video art and still one of its most important representatives today. He originally studied architecture and art history and researched collective mechanisms of repression. In his videos and collages, Odenbach refers to the crimes of National Socialism, the means of power of the GDR regime and the atrocities committed by Europeans in their former African colonies as a reaction to what has long been unspoken.

Odenbach lives and works in Cologne, Italy and Ghana. He uses similar approaches for his collages and videos. For both, he draws on images, texts, and illustrations from newspapers and magazines. His large-format collages initially show clearly recognisable motifs on a macro level, but on closer inspection turn out to be compositions of hundreds of individual images.

In 2021, Marcel Odenbach received the Wolfgang Hahn Award by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. His works were shown at documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987. Odenbach's solo exhibitions took place at the Kurt Tucholsky Literature Museum, Rheinsberg, the MAIIAM- Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Stichtig De Appel, Amsterdam, the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Kunsthalle Wien, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai among others.

Noara Quintana

The artist Noara Quintana (born 1986 in Florianópolis, Brazil) lives between São Paulo, Brazil and Los Angeles, USA. Her practice centers on the materiality of everyday objects and their relations as an index of the histories of the Global South.

Through installation and sculpture, Quintana's work points to traces of exchange, forms of architecture, and an ongoing reimagination that contests the legacy of the colonial imaginary. She sees traces of people, practices, and identities in the materials and forms of everyday objects, and she foregrounds the submerged gestures of a Global South shaped by the colonial process.

Quintana holds an MA in Visual Arts from São Paulo State University. Recent exhibitions include Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Pivô + KADIST, São Paulo, Frestas Triennial, Sorocaba, and SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin. Noara was a recent artist-in-residence at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, Pivô Art and Research, São Paulo, and a 2020 Institut Français Lauréate of the Cité Internationale des Arts.

Paul Sochacki

Paul Sochacki (born 1983 in Krakow, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. At first glance, his painting moves between abstraction and romanticism. Familiar motifs seduce with poetry and humour to complex readings in which mythical creatures and quotations from the world of art meet casually.

Although his pictures sometimes appear childlike and fairytale-like, they often represent a sharp reflection of social conditions, which also occupy Sochacki as co-editor of the street magazine Arts of the Working Class. The artist scrutinises social and cultural value systems as well as political and economic ones. He subtly comments on them through the seemingly innocent motifs of his paintings.

Kandis Williams

Kandis Williams (born 1985 in Baltimore, USA) is an artist, author, editor and publisher based in Berlin and Los Angeles. Her collages, performances and publications have received worldwide recognition.

Williams' works often deal with contemporary critical theories, primarily on racism, nationalism, authority and eroticism. In many of these themes, she draws on her experiences growing up in Baltimore and as a teacher, which she combines with historical references. She collages images from magazines and archival material to create highly structured visual dialogues.

Kandis Williams' work has been shown at MoMA, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, the VCU Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, the 2015 Venice Biennale and the 2022 Whitney Biennial. A solo exhibition will follow in 2025 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2023 Kandis Williams received the FOCA Fellowship Los Angeles, in 2021 she was the winner of the Mohn Award of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York.

Philip Wiegard

The artist Philip Wiegard (born 1977 in Schwetzingen, Germany) lives in Berlin and works mainly in the media of sculpture and photography. He has been working with colored paper for several years. Having visited numerous collections of colored paper throughout Germany, he is particularly interested in Herrnhut paste paper and its historical production and distribution conditions. In his practical work, he attempts to reproduce historical patterns, focussing on the performative aspects of the creation process.

Since 2013, Wiegard has been realising the ongoing performance project Kids’ Factory, in which children produce hand-patterned wallpaper using the paste paper technique for a fee. His abstract designs thus emerge from an ‘ethic of cooperation’ (Wolfgang Ullrich).