Olga Morano (FR/IT)
Paris 1935 – Brussels, 1999
Painter, designer, visual and conceptual artist, author of object-poems, Olga Morano was born in Paris in 1935 to French parents of Italian origin. She trained at the Ecole de Dessin du Grand Art in Paris and in the workshop of a sculptor; she then studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts in Paris. In 1955-56 she attended the Accademia di Brera in Milan and continued at the Accademia di Roma where she obtained her degree in painting.
When in 1963 she marries the physicist Alessandro Pozzo, also an art and poetry amateur, she saw in his books many of the mathematical graphics that would serve as the basis for her "improved graphics". In them, she does not see algorithms or algebraic functions, but new worlds ready to become the lively images she created within them. In 1967, Galerie Contraste in Brussels presents her large works decorated with these graphics, photographically printed on canvas. By enlarging them on big surfaces, by adding bright colours, plastic letters and darts and by giving them titles evocative of mythological, topographical or erotic scenes Olga Morano distorts their original identity. Defined as “Poetic Mathematics” by art critic Pierre Restany, these graphics, symbols of science and of a masculine world, become playful, animated and feminized works of art. An unprecedented “big bang” that challenges and amuses and above all disorients the observer.
Lynn Hershman Leeson (USA)
Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues including: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression.
Arvida Byström (SE)
Arvida Byström (b. 1991 Sweden, Stockholm) is a digital native with an intrinsic relationship to pink. Her work is rooted in ideas that deal with the internet and its social, aesthetic and commercial implications. She is known for employing a hyper-feminine aesthetic to explore themes concerning femininity, body image, social dynamics, emerging technologies and economic principles through primarily a lens based practice including, performance and sculpture work.
Previously living in London and Los Angeles she is now living in Paris where she travels in an aesthetic universe of disobedient bodies, fruits in lingerie, tulips and AI sex dolls. Her photography, performances and sculptures have been in art shows all over the world like V&A London, TATE, as she starred both behind and in front of the camera of numerous influential brands and magazines.
Vytas Jankauskas (CH)
Vytas is a media artist, designer, and educator specializing in connected objects and artificial intelligence. His practice critically examines how technology shapes mundane spaces and rituals. Currently, he is the Head of Digital Pool at HEAD–Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design) and leads interdisciplinary programs at the Innovation Lab of La Plateforme in Marseille.
From 2019 to 2021, Vytas was the Head of Research and Creation at the Chronus Art Center Lab in Shanghai. In 2021, he also served as an Adjunct Faculty member at NYU ITP, Tisch School of the Arts. Prior to these roles, he worked as a designer at the critically acclaimed speculative futures design practice Superflux in London, from 2015 to 2018.
Ariane Loze (BE)
Since 2008 Ariane Loze researches the coming to life of a story out of seemingly unrelated images with her camera. In these series of videos she takes on all the parts: she is at the same time the actress, the camerawoman and the director. Through the editing of the images she develops a relation between two (or more) characters and the architecture. The videos of Ariane Loze put the spectator in the active role of creating his/her own story out of the basic principles of film editing: shot and counter-shot, the presumed continuity of movement, and the psychological suggestion of a narrative. The filming of these videos has been made public as an ongoing performance.
Lawrence Lek (DE)
Lawrence Lek is an artist, filmmaker and musician who unifies diverse practices — architecture, gaming, video, music and fiction — into a continuously expanding cinematic universe. Over the last decade, Lek has incorporated vernacular media of his generation, such as video games and computer-generated animation, into site-specific installations and digital environments, which he describes as "three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations." Often featuring interlocking narratives and the recurring figure of the wanderer, his work explores the myth of technological progress in an age of social change.
!Mediengruppe Bitnik
!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read – the not mediengruppe bitnik) live and work in Berlin. They are contemporary artists who work on and with the Internet. Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally employing loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. The works of !Mediengruppe Bitnik formulate fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues. !Mediengruppe Bitnik are the artists Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo.
Marie Munk (DK)
Born in Denmark in 1988 and currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). She received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2016.
Marie Munk is an interdisciplinary artist, working with sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She is concerned with how technological innovation, where info-tech, biotech, and the commercial world interfere, both characterize and dominate our environment, our behavior, and our bodies. Munk is driven by creating alternative realities that balance the playful, imaginative, and adorable with the eerie, disgusting, and horrifying. With equal parts of sci-fi and humor, Munk comments on a familiar present and uncertain future. She diagnoses, with an uncanny visual language, our society through our relationship to our body. Using silicone as a metaphor for the bodily, Munk creates bizarre hypothetical scenarios, which questions current tendencies in society.
Paul Van Hoeydonck (BE)
Between 1955 and 1965, Paul van Hoeydonck was at the epicenter of artistic developments in Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Venice, Milan, Dusseldorf and New York. He used techniques such as firing synthetic paint onto a panel and letting the paint create its own spontaneous chemical reactions, in order to imitate the effect of a meteor crashing into planet. Van Hoeydonck was also commissioned to produce the only sculpture ever to be placed on the moon. In 1971 the crew of Apollo 15 placed his Fallen Astronaut on the moon’s surface, as a memorial to all the astronauts and cosmonauts that died in the advancement of space exploration.
Inès Sieulle (FR)
Inès Sieulle is a French artist and filmmaker based in Paris. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris before joining Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains and l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her work aims to shed light on the contemporary social dynamics that surround her. In a cross-disciplinary approach, she links her different artistic experiences in theater, sculpture, video, digital arts and installation to create sensitive forms of narrative in a documentary and fictional approach.
Her new short documentary "The Oasis I Deserve", premiered & won the EMEL Short Film Grand Prize at IndieLisboa in May 2024, as well as the Video & Art Essay Grand Prize and the Est Ensemble Jury Prize at Côté Court festival in Pantin (France), pursues its journey in film festivals.