Cem A.

Cem A. is an artist with a background in anthropology. He is known for running the art meme page @freeze_magazine and for his site-specific installations. His work explores themes such as virality and performativity, often through collaborative projects.

Cem A.’s solo exhibitions, performances, and interventions include presentations at Kunstsammlung NRW – K21, Barbican Centre, ZKM Karlsruhe, Berlinische Galerie, Louisiana Museum, and Museum Wiesbaden. His work has also been featured in Documenta Fifteen, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Vienna Climate Biennale, Freiburg Biennale, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, and the 14th Biennial of Young Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. He has lectured at the Royal College of Art in London, HEAD Geneva, KASK Ghent, Pratt Institute New York, Universität der Künste Berlin, and HDK Valand Gothenburg.

Nadira Aklouche-Laggoune

Nadira Aklouche-Laggoune (Algiers) is an exhibition curator, art critic, and researcher. She holds a degree in Dramatic Arts from the Conservatoire Supérieur of Algiers and a master’s in audiovisual criticism and art theory from the Kiev Institute of Visual Arts. She taught at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Alger (1986–2020), where she lectured in aesthetics, contemporary image history, and directed seminars on art and audiovisual media.

She has served on international juries such as AFAC, FDATIC, the Foreignen Prize, and the Pictet Prize. Author of numerous studies on Algerian art and women artists, she has curated exhibitions in Algeria, Dakar, and France. Between 2016 and 2022, she directed the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Algiers, energizing its programming and boosting its international visibility.

Mercè Alsina

Mercè Alsina (Barcelona, 1966) holds a PhD cum laude in Art History. She is an independent curator and journalist. Her research has addressed issues such as the impact of globality on artistic productions and their circulation; questions of identity and historical representation; speculative materialism and the nature of objects; the video essay as a practice of resistance; critical photography and the representation of violence; and the relationship between writing and art, among others.

Since 2020, she has been part of the curatorial team of the Panoràmic Festival. She is the author of the essay Massacre (2025). In 2024, she received the ACCA Award for Best Contemporary Art Exhibition Programme in Catalonia, granted by the Catalan Association of Art Critics, for the programming of the cycle santcorneliarts(2) in Cardedeu, which she has directed together with the artist Enric Maurí since 2017.

Andrea Badia

The work of Andrea Badia (nddr3) is framed within the concept of post-nature, where technology and organic processes become tools for contemporary creation. Her practice explores tensions and meeting points between the natural and the digital within a context of increasing hybridization. She integrates creative programming, 3D printing, and generative design to reinterpret phenomena of natural ecosystems. This approach addresses issues such as ecological crisis, the impact of emerging technologies, and new forms of interspecies interaction. Her projects generate immersive experiences that blur the boundaries between physical and virtual, questioning traditional notions of the “natural” and the “artificial.”

Tewa Barnosa

Tewa Barnosa (1998) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer working between Tripoli and Amsterdam. Her practice spans visual arts, time-based media, performance, pedagogical research, and curatorial collaboration. Based on critical observation and research-driven interpretation, she explores historical and political narratives with a particular interest in language and anticolonial modes of communication and existence.

In her work, she contextualizes images, sounds, and objects while investigating war archives, Libyan and Amazigh oral literature, fiction, and mythologies. Her practice highlights human alienation and socio-ecological turbulence, in dialogue with notions of contemporary warfare and with the violations of cognitive and cultural modes of resistance. In doing so, her work not only belongs to the artistic sphere but also opens a critical space for reflection on memory, identity, and power structures in contemporary societies.

Ghyzlène Boukaïla

Born in Algiers in 1993, Ghyzlène lives and works in Algiers. Her visual and film practice explores porous boundaries between reality and fiction. Positioned between speculative fiction and immersive devices, her work investigates liminal territories—spaces of waiting, transit, and anonymity—as active sites of memory and resistance. Through documentary research rooted in postcolonial and anthropocentric narratives, Ghyzlène develops fragmented forms that allow new readings of reality to emerge. Her work has been presented at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Tampere Film Festival (Finland), Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, JAOU Contemporary Art Biennale (Tunisia), and 100% Villette, among others.

İrem Günaydın

İrem Günaydın is an artist based in Istanbul. Her practice unfolds through writing as a speculative and parafictional tool, exploring the conditions of artistic creation when interacting with the boundaries of narrative, form, and institutional memory. Oscillating between textual and spatial gestures, she works across various media to build aesthetic infrastructures that examine the discarded, the supplementary, the misfiled, and the misinterpreted.

Her work often exists in states of adjacency: writing and sculpture, archive and excavation, mold and monument, figure and shadow. She engages with and through the gaps of knowledge systems, offering not closure but a carefully constructed disorientation. What remains after history, after art, after authorship, is where her work begins.

Elia Kalogianni

Elia Kalogianni (Athens, 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker living between Amsterdam and Athens. Her practice explores topics ranging from tradition and its mnemonic representations to power dynamics and surveillance within contemporary psychosocial frameworks. Working with film, spatial installations, audiovisual and sculptural gestures, moving-image essays, and photography, Kalogianni investigates the fluid boundaries between reality and imagination.

Her work has been shown in institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, Venice Biennale (2024), Art Rotterdam, Galleria17, Muziekgebouw, and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA). Her films have been screened and awarded at numerous international festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Netherlands Film Festival (NFF), and Melbourne SSFF. She was nominated for the Hellenic Film Academy Awards (2021) and received a Special Mention at the Eye on Art Research Lab organized by the Eye Filmmuseum (2019).

Ayça Okay

Ayça Okay is a curator and cultural manager, member of AICA Turkey, CIMAM, and ICOM. Her research in contemporary art builds on a methodology that combines a holistic curatorial approach with intellectual exchange, fostering sustainable collaborations across SWANA and European regions.

Since 2018, she has curated exhibitions and collection projects for institutions such as the BAKSI Museum, Loop Barcelona, Borusan Contemporary, Contemporary Istanbul Foundation, Zico House Beirut, Performistanbul, Scope Berlin, and Vorfluter Projektraum. She has also led cultural commissions for Turkish Airlines, SANKO, and QNB Finansbank. Internationally, she has participated in the Oslo Open International Curators Visit Program, EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens), and was a finalist at the Crack International Art Camp in Bangladesh.

Douraïd Souissi

Tunisian photographer and visual artist Douraïd Souissi creates large-format portraits of marginalized youth, adrift in a vast, dark silence, turning their backs on the camera, the world, and its false promises. With subtlety, he explores the hopes and frustrations of the revolution, the fragility of the individual in rapidly transforming societies, and universal themes such as injustice, alienation, exile, freedom, identity, masculinity, and the role of images. In a world governed by individualism, greed, technology, and conflict, his works seek to restore faith in the humility and love necessary for human beings to understand one another. They invite us to look with the spiritual urgency of recognizing and safeguarding the dignity of the Other.

Merve Ünsal

Merve Ünsal is an artist based in Istanbul. Her practice revolves around methods of attention and listening, working with photography, video, radio, sound, performance, and site-specific installations. She has exhibited internationally, often within artist-led initiatives in cities such as Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, New Delhi, and Toronto.

She has taken part in residency programs supported by institutions including Delfina Foundation (London), Praksis (Oslo), Fogo Island Arts, Art Metropole (Toronto), and the University of Delaware (Lewes). Additionally, she is the founding editor of m-est.org, a platform focused on artists.

Claudio Zulián

Claudio Zulián is a visual and sound artist, filmmaker, musician, and writer. Born in Italy, he currently lives in Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics, Science, and Technology of the Arts from Université Paris-Saint Denis and has taught at various universities. He has developed an extensive international career in both visual arts and cinema.

Recent exhibitions include Vidas at the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Compostela (2022), Historias del porvenir at Jeu de Paume in Paris (2013), Piel de serpiente at Estrany – de la Mota Art Advisors (2023), and Hard Time & Animals at Galería Freijo in Madrid (2024). His latest documentary, Constelación Portabella, was selected for the Venice Film Festival (2024) and the Valladolid Seminci.