Keyna Eleison is a curator, writer, researcher, heiress Griot and shaman, narrator, singer and ancient chronicler. Eleison received a Master in Art History, specializing in Art History and Architecture, from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and a Bachelor of Philosophy from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is a member of the African Heritage Commission for laureation of the Valongo Wharf region as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO). Curator of the 10th SIART International Biennial, Bolivia. Currently, Eleison is the chronicler of Contemporary And (C&) magazine, Professor of the Free Learning Program at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, Rio de Janeiro and Artistic Director of MAM-Rio with Pablo Lafuente.
Guests
For the exhibition Radio Brown Atlantis, Ayesha Hameed has collaborated with guests from the first season to recompose each episode as a score, which together combine to fill the space of Bonniers Konsthall, knowing that a Brown Atlantis is cartographically unmappable and that the sonics of a radio show cannot be fully made visible. Read more about the guests below.
Christopher Cozier was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago. He is a visual artist whose mediums range from notebook drawings to video installations. He is the Co-director of Alice Yard and a Prince Claus Award laureate, he lives and works in Trinidad. A selection of his exhibitions include The Brooklyn Museum (2007); Tate Liverpool (2010); Broad Museum, Michigan (2015); MOLAA, LA (2017); Historisk museum, Oslo (2019) and Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, Switzerland. Cozier participated in the public program of the 10th Berlin Biennial and has exhibited in the 5th and 7th Havana Biennials; the 14th Sharjah Biennial (UAE) and the 11th Liverpool Biennial. Most recently he participated with Alice Yard at the documenta 15.
Manuela Moscoso (Ecuador) is a curator and critical producer. Moscoso is the inaugural Executive Director of Center for Art Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York City, on unceded Lenape land. Inspired by non-western form of thinking Manuela is researching different understanding of embodiment, porosity, kinship and digestion as a way to challenge western conception of the body and its relationships.
Moscoso is part of the advisory committee of the Helsinki Biennial 2022-2023, and she is the curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2021 The Stomach and The Port and associate curator of the Bienal de Cuenca 12, in Ecuador. Until 2018, she is the former Senior Curator at Tamayo Museo in Mexico City and co-director of Capacete, a residency programme based in Brazil, where she also co-ran the curatorial programme, Typewriter.
Khal Torabully was born in Mauritius. He moved to Lyon in 1976 where he obtained a PhD in the Semiology of Poetics at the University of Lyon II. In 1995, he took an internship at the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) of Paris. He is the author of 26 books of poetry and history, among others. He has directed several of documentaries and won various awards. Torabully is the founder of the House of Wisdom of Fez-Granada, which has the recognition of UNESCO. Torabully also contributes to site policies of UNESCO, namely through the Aapravasi Ghat, in Mauritius, and has participated in conferences in many countries. He is a UNESCO expert for the Silk Routes and represented UNESCO in Guadeloupe in 2017, for the centenary commemoration of the official abolition of indenture.
Torabully is a pioneer in indentured studies and theory. He is the designer of the coral imaginary of coolitude, a poetics through which indenture developed into a paradigm of anthropological, cultural and memorial articulations open to otherness. In 2014, with the collaboration of Doudou Diene and the Aapravasi Ghat, he initiated the inscription of the International Indentured Labour Route on the UNESCO agenda, articulating slavery and indenture in its philosophical premises. Coolitude poetics, based on the centrality of the ocean, developed the first inter memorial dialogue with slavery, leading to the creation of the International Indenture Labour Route set up by UNESCO. His book, Cargo Hold of Stars, translated by Nancy Carlson won the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld award 2022.
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s art practice primarily comprises a lens directed at the urban context of cities. His city-specific projects map vulnerability within redevelopment strategies of urbanisation, combative histories of reclamation/speculation or record timelines and blindspots -alternate markers of a city that’s unraveling.
His works respond to research conducted on modes of philanthropy practiced within community-based trusts; a subaltern imagination of the Bombay plague of 1896; subsequent loss of flora/fauna in colonial Bombay; and a long-term project on latter day 20th century ship-breaking and invisible shipping infrastructures. They attempt to unlock trapped data through placing the work in the context of an unseen social history.
Awards & fellowships include; Majlis Visual Arts fellowship, UDRI Architectural fellowship, The Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence, The Wellcome Trust Seed award, SAI Harvard University Artist Residency and the Gasworks Artist residency. His work has been exhibited at UCL-Cities Methodologies, Bergen Assembly Art & Research Triennale, Melahuset/OCA Norway, Colomboscope, Warehouse421, the Wellcome Collection and other galleries locally and internationally. He lives and works in Mumbai, India.
Sancintya Mohini Simpson is an artist and researcher based in Brisbane, Australia. Her work navigates the complexities of migration, memory and trauma through addressing gaps and silences within the colonial archive. Her practice moves between painting, video, poetry and performance to develop narratives and rituals. As a descendent of indentured labourers sent from India to South Africa to work on colonial sugar plantations, she grounds her work in collaboration, connecting wider narratives surrounding descendants of indenture and their diaspora communities.
Recent solo exhibitions include Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2020); Institute of Modern Art Belltower, Brisbane (2020); Firstdraft, Sydney (2020); Hobiennale, Hobart (2019); 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery, Bangalore (2019); Metro Arts, Brisbane (2018) and Next Wave Festival, Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne (2018).
Shuddhabrata Sengupta is a artist and writer, and curator who has been working with the Raqs Media Collective since it was founded (1992), in New Delhi, India (by Sengupta, Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi). In their words, they create installations, make videos, photographs, print and online works, play with archival traces, make exhibitions and art interventions in public spaces, write essays, enact lecture-performances, engage with pedagogical procedures, edit books, design events, and foster collaborations. Raqs has exhibited widely, including at documenta, and the Venice-, Shanghai-, and Sao Paulo Biennales. Works by Raqs are part of several contemporary art collections and museums, their essays have been published in numerous anthologies.
In 2000, Sengupta, together with Narula and Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan, co-founded the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Sengupta is also one of the founders and contributing editors of the independent radical blog kafila.org, one of the most widely read and influential platforms for new, dissident voices in South Asia. His political commentary and essays have been published in magazines, newspapers, and blogs in India and elsewhere.
Natasha Ginwala is a curator, writer and editor based in Colombo and Berlin. Ginwala is Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Artistic Director of Colomboscope Festival in Sri Lanka and the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas. She has curated numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world over the past decade. Ginwala writes regularly on contemporary art and visual culture. Recent co-edited volumes include Stronger than Bone (Archive Books and Gwangju Biennale Foundation) and Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (Columbia University Press).
Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung was born in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters, a biennale for African photography in Mali. Ndikung was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017); a guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal (2018); as well as artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters (2019). Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019). He was a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship, Toronto (2020) and is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.
Pablo José Ramírez is a curator and art writer living and working in Berlin. He is the Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Ramírez was the recipient of the 2019 Independent Curators International/CPPC Award for Central America and the Caribbean and is currently the Editor in Chief and co-founder of Infrasonica, a curatorial platform dedicated to the research around non-western sonic cultures. He has lectured and published extensively including pieces for Artforum, Art-Agenda, Miami Rail, Artishock and a number of artist catalogues and books. Ramírez is co-curator of the Hammer Museum Biennale, Made in LA 2023 and part of the curatorial council of the Carnegie International 58th.
