Art historian, curator, and lecturer Jana J. Haeckel examines image and body politics in contemporary art, specifically in the new ethics of photography in the digital age. Art practices that subvert historical and colonial narratives through archival research are also part of her work. She holds a PhD in art history and currently serves as director of Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland. Haeckel recently edited the book, ‘Everything Passes Except the Past’ (Sternberg Press, 2021), a result of a two-year-long project on colonial heritage with the Goethe-Institut and curated the exhibition ‘Resistant Faces’ at Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, 2021), a critical inquiry of the portrait in our digital present. Other curated exhibitions include ‘Everything Passes Except the Past’ (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Turin, 2020), ‘Julien Creuzet: Knows how to feel, The smell of rain’ (Drodva Gallery Prague, 2018), ‘Performing the Border’ (Kunstraum Niederoesterreich Vienna, 2017).

Jana Haeckel and Wolfgang Ullrich are the authors of a series of letters about the face values and the control exercised over the face from the power and from oneself.

Wolfgang Ullrich is a cultural scientist and author; he was professor of art history and media theory at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe. He currently lives in Leipzig. His research, published in numerous books and essays, is devoted to the history and critique of the concept of art, sociological issues of images, and consumer theory. He is also co-editor of the book series “Digitale Bildkulturen“ („Digital image cultures“) published by Klaus Wagenbach (Berlin). – More at www.ideenfreiheit.de

Rosa Olivares (1955) is a writer, editor, art critic, and exhibition curator. Founder of the magazine Lápiz (1982), and later of EXIT Imagen y Cultura (1999), Exit Book (2002), Exit-Express (2004) and Fluor (2012) and of UTOPIA, a cultural critic magazine in 2019 in Mexico. She has curated, among other exhibitions: “Einsamkeit. Un sentimiento alemán”, 1992/93 at the “la Caixa” Foundation; “Entre la pasión y el silencio. Otra visión de la fotografía española”, at the XXV International Photography Meetings in Arles, France; “Los Géneros de la Pintura: una visión actual”, 1994, at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; “Angela Grauerholz / Astrid Klein“, 1995 at the Sala Parpalló, Valencia; “La imagen del poder“, 1998 at the Fundación Arte y Tecnología, Fund. Telefónica, Madrid; “Miradas Impúdicas“, 2000, Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona; “Axel Hütte. Terra Incognita“. 2004 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), Madrid. “Documentos. Memoria del futuro “, 2007, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastián; “Periferias“, II Biennial of Architecture, Art and Canary Landscape, ” Contexto Crítico. Fotografía española siglo XXI “, 2014, at the Tabacalera in Madrid.

In 2005 she published “100 Fotógrafos Españoles ”

She currently directs the Photography room of the Niemeyer Foundation in Avilés. She lives between Mexico City and Madrid.

Sema D’Acosta (Seville, 1975) is an art critic, independent curator, teacher and researcher. Interested in the syntax and ontology of any current expressive language, especially photography.

He has been curator of the TALENT LATENT in SCAN, Tarragona International Photography Festival (2018) and of the IX edition of the Pilar Citoler Photography Award (2017-18), as well as responsible for more than fifty exhibition projects in the last ten years, among other monographic exhibitions by Joan Fontcuberta, Luis Gordillo, Bleda y Rosa, Gonzalo Puch, Miguel Ángel Tornero, Ángel Marcos, Dionisio González and Juan del Junco. He has also organized several thesis projects, most of them focused on the limits and drifts of the image today.

He has published several books on contemporary art, the latest MEMORÁNDUM. LUIS GORDILLO (2021) TRÍPLEX (2020), THINKING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY (2018), IMAGO, ERGO SUM. JOAN FONTCUBERTA (2015), in addition to having written monographic essays on multiple authors, among others Pieter Hugo, Robert Motherwell, Per Barclay, Martin Kippenberger, Jack Pierson, Kimsooja, Carlos Pérez Siquier, Luis Gordillo, Carlos Aires or Miguel Ángel Tornero.

As an art critic, he has collaborated for more than a decade with ‘EL CULTURAL’, a weekly supplement of ‘EL MUNDO’.

Carles Guerra (1965) is an art critic, teacher, and researcher. He has been director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies (2015-2020), chief curator of the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona MACBA (2011-2013), director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (2009-2011) and director of the Primavera Fotogràfica de Catalunya (2004). Among the exhibitions he has curated, stands out Después de la noticia. Prácticas documentales postmedia (CCCB, 2003), Antifotoperiodismo (La Virreina, 2010), 1979. Un monumento a instantes radicales (La Virreina, 2011), Ahlam Shibli. Dead (MACBA, Jeu de Paume y Serralves 2012), Xavier Ribas. Nitrato (MACBA, 2013), Harun Farocki. Empatía (FAT, 2016), Oriol Vilanova. Domingo (2017), Allan Sekula. Sísifo colectivo (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2016), Susan Meiselas. Mediaciones (FAT, 2017) y Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Errata (FAT, 2019).

Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press 2011). Among her films: Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019), Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012). Among her exhibitions Errata (Tàpies Foundation, 2019), and Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order, (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016).

http://cargocollective.com/ariellaazoulay

Borja Casani has worked since the early 1980s on cultural projects in various disciplines. As a cultural journalist he founded and / or continued the magazines La Luna de Madrid, Sur Exprés, Arena Internacional del Arte, El Europeo, and in recent years the multi-platform publishing project El Estado Mental. He is co-founder in 1981 of the Moriarty Gallery in Madrid and curator of contemporary art exhibitions, as well as editor and music producer in the 52PM label and the Lcd El Europeo Collection.

(Barcelona, 1979)

Bachelor of Political Science (UPF), writer, journalist and ex-bookseller. She is co-author of a play (Astronaut, Theater O) and has been collaborating for years with curators and artists such as Jordi Colomer, Dora García, Xavier Ribas or David Bestué, with whom she published La línea sin fin. His articles and interviews have appeared in several media, including the Babelia supplement of El País, the Cultura/s of La Vanguardia and the Les Inrockuptibles, Contexto (CTXT) and El Estado Mental. His latest work, Distraídos venceremos, is an essay on uses and drifts in autobiographical writing, the result of an investigation funded by La Virreina Center de L’Imatge and recently published by Jekyll & Jill.

www.andreavaldes.com

Remedios Zafra (Zuheros, 1973)

Writer and theorist specialized in the critical study of contemporary culture, visual studies and the politics on identity in networks. Professor of art, gender studies and digital culture at the University of Seville and professor of anthropology at Uned. Her extensive essay work has won numerous awards such as the Anagrama Essay Award and the Critical State Prize for El Entusiasmo. Precariedad y trabajo creativo en la era digital (2017, 2018), Málaga Prize for Essay and Public of the Arts for (h)adas. Mujeres que crean, programan, prosumen, teclean, (2013), Caja Madrid 2004 Essay Award for the work Netianas. N(h)acer mujer en internet, Research Award of the Leonor de Guzmán 2001 and Carmen de Burgos 2000 National Essay Prize. Among her most recent work, the books Ojos y capital (Consonni, 2015, 2018) Los que miran (Fórcola, 2016) Un cuarto propio conectado (2010, 2019). Zafra has a degree in Political Philosophy, a PhD in Art, a degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Fine Arts and a master’s degree in Creativity. She is a member of the Etopia Patronages and of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome.

www.remedioszafra.net

María Ruido is a filmmaker, visual artist, researcher and teacher. She lives in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​where she works as a professor in the Department of Visual Arts and Design of the University of Barcelona and is a member of several research groups around representation and their contextual relationships.

Since 1998, María Ruido has been developing interdisciplinary projects on the social construction of the body and identity, the imaginaries of work in post-Fordist capitalism, and on the construction of memory and its relationships with the narrative forms of history, and more recently she works around the new forms of decolonial imaginaries and their emancipatory possibilities.

Her productions include the documentary essays La memoria interior (2002), Tiempo real (2003), Ficciones anfibias (2005), Plan Rosebud (2008), ElectroClass (2011), Le rêve est fini (2014), L’oeil impératif ( 2015), Mater Amatísima (2017). She has received, among others, the Generation Award 2003 (Audiovisual Category) or the Best International Feature Documentary Award at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival 2009, and her visual essays are in the Permanent Collections of MNCARS, MACBA, CA2M, CGAC , the Archi OVNI or the CajaMadrid Foundation.

Since the beginning of 2000, she has participated in many state and international exhibition projects, as well as in vine and video festivals, circulating his works between both institutions, the artistic and the cinematographic.

http://www.workandwords.net/es

David Campany is a writer, curator and artist. His many books include Jeff Wall: Picture for Women 2011, Photography and Cinema 2008 and Art and Photography 2003. He has written over two hundred essays for museums and monographic books, and contributes to Frieze, Aperture, Source and Tate magazine. Recent curatorial projects include The Still Point of the Turning World: Between Film and Photography, FoMu Antwerp, 2017; The Open Road: photography and the American road trip various venues, USA, 2015-2018; and A Handful Dust, shown in Paris, London, New York and California. For his writing, he has received the ICP Infinity Award. He teaches at the University of Westminster.

Anastasia Samoylova is an artist and writer based in Miami, United States. Samoylova has exhibited internationally, including Aperture Foundation in New York, Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston, State University of New York Geneseo, Vanderbilt University, Purdue University and in festivals in Netherlands, Belgium, Brazil, South Korea and China. Her work is in the collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Stanford University, Yale University, and Art Slant Paris. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Foam, Wired, ArtPress, Unseen, Der Grief and other publications. Samoylova is represented by Julie Saul Gallery in New York.

Valentín Roma is a PhD in philosophy and art from Southampton University and professor of art history at the UAB. He was chief curator of MACBA and is currently director of La Virreina Centro de la Imagen (Barcelona). He has curated exhibitions by Alexander Kluge, Paula Rego, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Antoni Tàpies, Muntadas, Manolo Laguillo, etc. He is the author of the essay book Rostros and the novel El enfermero de Lenin, both in the Periférica publishing house.

Mercedes Cebrián. Her latest book of essays and fictions is Burp: Gastronomical Writings (Chatos inhumanos, 2017). She is also the author of the essay Verano azul: unas vacaciones en el corazón de la transición (Alpha Decay, 2016), the poetry collection Malgastar(La Bella Varsovia, 2016) and the novel El genuino sabor (Literatura Random House, 2014). Her texts on art and literature have appeared in Cultura/s (La Vanguardia), Babelia (El País), Letras Libres, Gatopardo and Indian Quarterly. She collaborates with the supplement El Viajero de El País. She has translated to Spanish Alan Sillitoe and Georges Perec, and has been a resident writer at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, at the Civitella Ranieri Center and at the Fondazione Santa Maddalena. She holds a Master’s Degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of London (Birkbeck) and the University of Pennsylvania. During 2018 she is the guest editor of the Caballo de Troya (Penguin Random House).

Photo by © Sheila Melhem

Marta Gili is a curator and art critic. Since 2006 she is the Director of the National Gallery of the Jeu de Paume in Paris. From 1991 to 2006 she directed the Department of Photography and Visual Arts at the “La Caixa” Foundation in Barcelona. Marta Gili has curated numerous monographic and thematic exhibitions, both in the field of photography and in the field of moving image, and has published texts for books and catalogs.

Philosopher and art historian, he teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He has published about fifty books on the history and theory of images, the most recent developing a series of six books under the title « The Eye of History ». Curator of exhibitions in Paris (Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume), Madrid (Museo Reina Sofía), Karlsruhe (ZKM), Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing.

He has been awarded by the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris), the Aby Warburg-Stiftung (Hamburg), the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), the College of Art Association (USA), the Max Weber-Stiftung (Münich), the Adorno-Prize (Frankfurt).

Nathan Jurgenson is social media theorist. Nathan is co-founder and co-chair of the annual Theorizing the Web conference, founder and editor in chief of Real Life magazine, and also works as a sociologist at Snap, Inc. Much of his work centers on a critique of “digital dualism”, a phrase he coined to describe the false belief that the internet is a separate virtual sphere or cyber space. Instead, Nathan approaches digitality as embodied, material, and real. Nathan is completing a book about photography and social media, to be published by Verso Books in 2018.

Fred Ritchin is Dean of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School. Immediately prior to joining ICP, Fred Ritchin was professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1991–2014, where he co-directed the NYU/Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights educational program. Ritchin has been picture editor of the New York Times Magazine and executive editor of Camera Arts magazine. In 1999 he co-founded and directed PixelPress, an online publication and a collaborator on human rights initiatives with organizations such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization, among others.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau is Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara and now lives and works in Paris. She is the author of Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic Histories, Institutions and Practices (1992); Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (1997) monographs on the Australian artist Rosemary Laing (2011) and the Austrian artist Birgit Jurgenssen (co-authored with Gabriele Schor, 2013). An anthology of her essays translated into French, Chair à Canon ed., Laure Poupard is forthcoming from Art Textual. Her most recent book, Disciplining Photography: Gender, Genre, Discourse is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2017). Her current book project is Art Photography in the Age of Catastrophe. Her essays on photography, 18th and 19th century visual art, feminism and contemporary art have been widely anthologized and translated.

Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir is Associate Professor at the University of Iceland. She is curator of numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and photography. She is the author of photographic texts such as: Photographes français en Islande 1845-1900 (2000); “French Photography in Nineteenth-century Iceland.” History of Photography (1999); “Sigríður Zoëga: Icelandic Studio Photographer.” History of Photography, (1999). She has contributed to Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010), European History of Photography (2010/2014/2016). She co-authored Icelandic Art Today Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz (2009) and History of Art in Iceland (2011). Her most recent publication is: “New Maps for Networks: Reykjavik FLUXUS– A Case of Connections.” In Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016 (in print).

As a co-founder of the Winterthur Fotomuseum (Wintertur Photo Museum), Urs Stahel created one of the most important places for photography in the world. He has been managing the museum for the past 20 years. Since 2013, he has been the curator, amongst other things, for the platform Paris Photo (2014), the new Institute for Industrial Culture (MAST) in Bologna, and the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg Photo Festival (2015). He also works as an author, a consultant and a lecturer (at the Zurich University of the Arts, the University of Zurich, the Sammlung Bank Vontobel). He is the writer and editor of numerous books, for example, books about Paul Graham, Roni Horn, Rineke Dijkstra, Anders Petersen, Amar Kanwar, Ai Weiwei, Shirana Shahbazi, Boris Mikhailov as well as books on themes such as “Industriebild” (‘Pictures of Industry’), “Trade”, “Im Rausch der Dinge” (‘The Ecstasy of Things’) and “Darkside I + II”.

Based in The Hague, Hester Keijser is an independent curator and author specialized in contemporary photography. She frequently collaborates with international organizations in the field of photography. From 2009-2013, she developed exhibitions for The Empty Quarter gallery in Dubai, and was creative director of East Wing, a platform for photography based in Qatar. Stead Bureau maintains a strong commitment to emerging photographic practices from the MENASA region. Since 2006, she has kept an online journal on photography, publishing as Mrs. Deane, and manages The Independent Photo Book blog, a self-publishing free zone. In partnership with LhGWR, she organizes and leads the Book Case Study, a lecture and workshop program on the making and publishing of photo books.

Joan Fontcuberta is a renowned conceptual photographer as well as being a writer, editor, curator and teacher, who has played a significant role in the task of achieving international recognition in the favour of the history of Spanish photography. Fontcuberta graduated in Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1977. After working in advertising, he taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona from 1979-1986. He was one of the founders of Photovision magazine, originally launched in 1980, becoming a major publication in the field of European photography. Since 1993 he is professor of Communication Studies at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Among the most representative institutions where his work has been exhibited we find: MACBA (Barcelona), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona), MNAC (Barcelona), Zabriskie Gallery (New York), the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), Harvard University (USA), MOMA (New York), the Maison Européene de la Photographie (Paris) etc. In 1994 he was ordained Knight of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2011 he won the National Essay Prize Essay in Spain and in 2013 he obtained the prestigious Hasselblad Photography Award.

Geoffrey Batchen’s work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on the history of photography. He is particularly interested in the way that photography mediates every other aspect of modern life, whether we’re talking about sex or war, atoms or planets, commerce or art. Besides being an expert in the general theory and historiography of photography, Geoff has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular photography. Batchen has published extensively, in eighteen languages to date. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997, with subsequent translations into Spanish, Korean and Japanese, and a forthcoming one in Slovenian), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance(2004), William Henry Fox Talbot (2008), What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History(2009, in German and English), and Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010, in Japanese and English). He has also edited an anthology of essays titled Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited another titled Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012).