Participants

Janna Graham, Marianne Heier, Dan Mihaltianu, Sabine Popp, Ben Seymour, Nicolas Vass, Veronica Diesen and Arne Rygg

Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield is an artist-philosopher. Books include Materiality of Theory (2011). Has published extensively on the use and abuse of philosophy by art, theory’s relation to practice and the order of dependency between them, and ethics and responsibility and what it is to live with them. Current projects include The Swerve of Freedom after Spinoza and The Idea of Europe: Redeeming the Promise of Democracy. Has collaborated with artists Francesca Banchelli, Phil Coy, Mischa Kuball, Benoit Maire, Ciprian Muresan, Ian Kiaer, John Lalor, Gregory Maass, and Trine Marie Riel. Has taught at the universities of DePaul, London, Reading, Southampton, and the Royal College of Art; and is on the Executive of the Forum for European Philosophy at the LSE

Janna Graham is a member of the international sound and political art collective Ultra-Red. She also works for precarious workers brigade and is engaged as a project curator at The Serpentine Art gallery where she have co-initiated The Centre for Possible Studies, an off-site popular research centre and artist residency programme. She is a Phd -candidate in Curatorial Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths University, working on a project titled: Thinking with Conditions, which investigates the cross sections between contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis.

Marianne Heier is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo. In her projects, Heier often explores specific institutions ’from the inside’. Her projects can be seen as situated within an institutional-critical artistic praxis where she amongst others explores the idea of artistic labour in relation to a gift economy. Heier has been invited to do a presentation of her own work.

Frans Jacobi is a visual artist (b. 1960). Lives and works in Copenhagen and Bergen. Jacobi works with performance, text and images. His performances and installations are often large scale scenarios with multiple participants adressing a range of political and societal issues. Using a kind of urgent aesthetics the temporality and presence becomes a point in itself. Jacobi is professor in timebased media and performance at KHiB, Bergen Academy of Art & Design since 2012. He completed his phd 'Aesthetics of Resitance' at Malmö Art Academy/Lunds University in 2012.  Jacobi has exhibited internationally since 1990, i.e. Louisiana Museum Copenhagen, Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, de Appel Amsterdam and Museum Fridericianum Kassel. He is currently working on a new large scale artistic research-project – SYNSMASKINEN – adressing various kinds of contemporary political crises.

Dan Mihaltianu is a Romanian artist who lives and works in Bergen, Berlin and Bucharest. Mihaltianu has long been interested in art and liquidity. In market terms, liquidity is related to how easy it is for an asset to be sold or converted to cash in the market. In contrast to this, Mihaltianu has explored the notion of liquidity in relation to art in something he defines as ‘liquid matter’. For Mihaltianu, ‘liquid matter’ can be anything from the global, floating sensation of ‘alcohology’ to the fluctuations of the money markets.

Sabine Popp is Assistant Professor at KHiB. She gained a MA degree from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in 2001, with guest studies at the University of Barcelona (Sculpture) and at the Glasgow School of Arts (Environmental Art). Her practice has been mainly based on site-specific, temporary projects, following her interests for life in the High North, with residencies at Svalbard and in Iceland, Greenland and Finland. She has been involved in cross-disciplinary projects and shown work in Scandinavia, Slovakia and the UK.

Benedict Seymour is a writer, film maker, and musician. He is Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an editor of Mute Magazine (http://metamute.org). He is currently exploring the way film registers and responds to the crisis of social reproduction, both in content and structure, by making a ‘non-reproduction’ of Chris Marker’s film ‘La Jetée’ using animated gifs (La Re- , 2015). Other recent projects include composing the soundtrack for Melanie Gilligan’s film ‘The Common Sense’ (2015), and co-directing ‘Can Gravity Break Dialectics’ (2014) with Matthew Noel-Tod. It will be screened at the ICA London this July. He has written and made films about urban regeneration and gentrification as The London Particular (2000-), and explored the links between finance-dominated capitalism and social reproductive crisis in articles and essays, including ‘Fear Death by Water: The Regeneration Siege in Central Hackney’ (2003), ‘Drowning by Numbers: The Non-Reproduction of New Orleans’ (2006), and the cultural logic of the crisis in texts like ‘Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback and Culture’ (2011) and ‘Notes on Normcore’ (2014). His music has appeared on albums through Difficult Fun records, and includes Petit Mal (‘Crisis in the Credit System’, 2008) and Antifamily (‘Antifamily’, 2006). Some projects: https://www.facebook.com/events/1446067695691338/

Nicolas Vass is an Argentinian artist that currently resides in London. He is a contributing member of the precarious workers brigade.Vass is also a Phd-candidate at the University of Leicester and his research revolves around issues of unfair work practice, the corruption in art and culture as well as participatory action research in migration and labour. Most recently, he has done research and performed as a tribute to one-man band Hasil Adkins where he is interested in reenacting the performances of the US-depression- era artist Hasil Adkins. Nicolas Vass has written the following about the re-enactment of Hasil Adkins: “The Hasil Adkins Traditional Ensemble’s re-enactment of Adkins’ one man band began in 2007, and has continued through a recession that repeatedly references the stock market crash of 1929. Where Adkins may be seen as the quintessential example of the self-made man that is at the heart of the American Dream, the Ensemble’s performance is not intended as fuel for the myth we currently hear from governments trying to flog austerity programs and so-called ‘creative economies’: that in times of hardship superior forms of individual creativity emerge. Rather, Re-constructing Hasil is performed as a tribute to the pains and the actions of the hyper, multi-tasking, infinitely flexible, auto-didact and excessively self-reliant individual touted as the ideal type of the contemporary worker and survivor of a dismantled welfare state. Furthermore, the Ensemble performing within the realm of contemporary art highlights the relationship between this virtuosic, self-propelling and self-organising worker and the contemporary artist who is in many ways its prototype.”

Veronica Diesen is an arts organiser, writer and lecturer in philosophy and art theory based in London and Bergen. From 1997-2004, she curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions events and joint seminars conferences like Rhizome (rhizome Mount Fløyen (1998), Map/Nomadic machines (1999) and Surface (2000) Gallery Døgnfluen (2000), Lovesick (2001), Kunstig Liv (Artifical Life) (2003) and Monday all year (2004). She has been a Lecturer at London Metropolitan University, the National Art Academy in Bergen and at the University of Bergen, Norway. From 2009 until 2012, she worked as a union representative at London Metropolitan University and during the same period, she functioned as an elected delegate for UCU national Anti-Casualisation Committee. After 2012, she has focused on research into political aesthetics, the philosophy of labour, education and institutional analysis.

Arne Rygg is a graduate of the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Dept. of Fine Arts, and from the University of Bergen, with a master in philosophy. He works situation- and context-specific and often with everyday objects. Thematically, his focus has often been on questions about national identity. He has also served on the editorial board for Kunstjournalen B-post. Rygg’s works have been exhibited amongst others at Performa, New York, and Bergen Art Hall, and he has received numerous scholarships. Rygg has until 2015 funcitoned as a board member for the Norwegian Artist Association.