Artists

Florian Aschka studierte Freie Kunst bei Heike Baranowsky (Meisterschüler) an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg (DE) und Bildende Kunst bei Hans Scheirl an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (A). Er zeigte seine Arbeiten bei zahlreichen Ausstellungen im In- und Ausland u.a. in London, Berlin, Bogota, Riga und Wien. Er würde jedoch auch gerne in Reykjavík ausstellen. Florian lebt und arbeitet in Wien und Schönsee.

Florian Aschka (DE) studied Fine Art at Nürenberg, Germany and Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts (courses run by Heike Baranowsky and Hans Scheirl) He has shown works internationally, including exhibitions in London, Bogota, Riga and Vienna. Florian lives and works in Vienna and Schönsee and would love to exhibit in Reykjavik sometime.

Stephanie Ballantine uses photography, performance, installation and text to expose research on the psychological effects of aspects of Capitalism and Neo Liberalism focusing on areas such as: the commercial gaze, commoditized sexuality, political identity, and political agency. She aims to illustrate alienating boundaries and find therapeutic remedies that can run ‘alongside’ these structures. Stephanie Ballantine resided in Berlin for the last five years where she has entered various fields of work outside of her conceptual art practice: as a dancer in bars and starring in various music videos as a performer including work for Sony music, EMI, and Ninja Tune she uses these experiences with mainstream pop and 'nightlife' culture to inform her artistic reflections. 

Amber Bemak  is currently based in Guadalajara, Mexico. She is an artist who works primarily in video, performance, installation, and documentary film. Much of her work locates itself within the complexities of travel, movement, desire, embodiment, and notions of home. She often utilizes her body in a performative and relational context within her work, and seeks to transmit a basic experience of the world as texture, rhythm, and vibration. Amber’s work has been shown at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, dOCUMENTA 13, and SculptureCenter. She holds a BA from Antioch College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States. 

Pedro Costa, anthropologist and artist, defines his work: ‘19 years ago I started to have direct contact with the performing and visual arts. For lack of interesting things, I began to make my own way. Since childhood, my desires and my blurred identity have been subjected to violence, and that became the basis of my creation: work with memory and identity. For me, body and criticism are not disconnected. What inspires me is failure and insecurity.

Image, Jan Weber

Black Cracker, stoic as fuck, with a baby face and a set of blue-collar shoulders, Ellison Renee Glenn aka Black Cracker (formerly Celena Glenn) rocks a swag aesthetic that lies somewhere between Dipset and Blackbox. Currently living between Berlin and Lausanne, but based professionally out of NYC, he works as a producer/MC/writer and has collaborated with the likes of Cocorosie, Creep, Bunny Rabbit and Grand Pianoramax, among others. Black Cracker is known as an unconventional yet highly appreciated artist who knows how to translate studio time into energetic stage performances - one of the reasons why artists like Slick Rick, Grimes, Trust and many enjoyed sharing the stage with him.

Denial Cremer is a self-proclaimed performance artist without an academic background. Born 1983 in West Germany and thanks to the privilege of being perceived as a white male, Denial has had the chance to be working as a director, author and dramaturg, practicing theatre, opera and social sculpture at various renowned theaters, most recently at HAU Eins and Junges Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf. Denial is extremely fascinated by rituals of social exchange and their immanent power structures and exclusion tactics. Denial seeks to 'queer' and alienate seemingly familiar, normative situations until they fall apart, using means like simulation, reenactment and the distortion of language. Under the label Talking Straight, Denial has been disassembling coachings, seminars, religious rituals, school books and guided tours in broken English, misspelled German and Fremdsprache, an invented foreign language. Venues include Dockville Kunstcamp Hamburg, Berlinische Galerie, Basso, HAU in Berlin, Theater Bremen and universities like TU Berlin and Viadrina University Frankfurt (Oder). Since 2014, Talking Straight also serves as a label for a collective of beloved artists to be established. The collective's initial collaborations has been Talking Straight Festival, a three day theatre festival simulation at Studio R / Maxim-Gorki-Theater presenting the exotic theatre art of white people in Middle Europe.

Morty Diamond. I am a transgender artist, activist and writer from Oakland, California. My work includes the year long performance art piece, My Year In Pink, and two books about the transgender experience: From the Inside Out and Trans Love. I am currently finishing my Masters in Social Work at San Francisco State University. I strive to blend art and artistic practice to my therapy work.

Alex Giegold & Tomka Weiß are an artistic duo in the field of installation art and have been collaborating for three years. In their work, Giegold and Weiß explore body politics, non-normative corporeality and sexuality, the analysis of forms of discrimination, social normalization and visual culture. They pursue an artistic strategy which offers installa- tions as a mouthpiece for text fragments coming from differ- ent perspectives.

Giegold and Weiß have both been working artistically about, with and against queer and transgender politics since 1999.
Alex Giegold und Tomka Weiß arbeiten seit drei Jahren als künstlerisches Duo im Bereich der Installationskunst. In ihren Arbeiten beleuchten Giegold und Weiß Körperpolitik, nicht- normative Körperrealitäten und Sexualität, die Analyse von Diskriminierungsformen, sozialer Normalisierung und visu- eller Kultur. Sie verfolgen eine künstlerische Strategie, die Installationen als Sprachrohr für Textfragmente benutzt, die unterschiedliche Perspektiven repräsentieren. Giegold und Weiß arbeiten seit 1999 künstlerisch über, mit und gegen queere und Transgender-Politiken. 

Martin Hansen is a 2014 graduate from the Hochschuleübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT). Martin undertook his initial training at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary and Tertiary institutions. After which Martin performed nationally and internationally with Chunky Move, Not Yet Its Difficult and Hydra Poesis.  Martin moved to Berlin in the late 2000’s and has performed with Christoph Winkler, Tino Sehgal, Sebastian Matthias, Jeremy Wade and others. For Baader - Choreografie Eine Radikalisierung Martin was named ‘Dancer of the Year’ 2012 by Tanz Magazine and the Süd Deutsche Zeitung named him the highlight of Tanzplattform 2012. Martins own work has been presented by the SemperOper Dresden, Ballhaus Ost, Ufer Studios, Tanznacht, Tanzhaus NRW and Einstein Kultur München. Martin was a danceweb scholar in 2013 and in 2014 was the recipient of a scholarship from the Origin Foundation for excellence in his studies. 

Emma Haugh, (Dublin, Ireland, 1974) lives and works in Dublin and Berlin. In her work she applies a combination of visual arts and theater practices, employing a questioning approach towards photographic documentation and representation. Performativity is explored as a technique of critical embodiment and activation based on engagement in specific social situations and communities where work becomes co-authored. Emma has been working with theatre and photography for fifteen years. Her specialisation in Augusto Boals Theatre of the Oppressed has become central to her current working methodologies. Emma is presently working with Achim Lengerer in the collaborative production of a SCRIPTINGS edition incorporating workshops, performance and the publication of printed materials in Berlin. In 2015 Emma will develop her on-going work 'The Re-appropriation of Sensuality - after which we enter into light' in partnership with curators RGKS KSRG (Kate Strain + Rachael Gilbourne), NCAD (the National College of Art and Design) and Studio 468 Artist Residency in Dublin.

Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary Performance and New Media Artist, exploring the politicisation of culture, society and aesthetics. Sometimes an educator, always researching.

Appropriated material from historical archives and contemporary society make up the work. By ‘queerying’ popular imagery and utilizing the props of everyday life, the aim is to destroy the aura of preciousness surrounding art. Central to this practice is an exploration into the ways that collaboration might take place.

Evan works collaboratively as part of Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice.

Ins A Kromminga. Redefining Difference. The topics in my work stem from my personal experiences as an intersex person. Both the history of otherness and political activism inform my practice. Mutants, Monsters, Freaks and Misfits are incorporating the fears of a norm-constrained culture and represent the boundaries of the acceptable – reflecting the face of the regulators who made them. The expansive visual and conceptual material of transgression becomes part of my vocabulary and meets the agendas and ideas of social and queer politics and human rights issues. The interconnection of scale variations of the small sized works and their clustering within the wall filling drawing respond to my expectation of reading apparently personal or private issues within a social context and thus to always understand them as politically relevant.

Cláudio Manoel Duarte de Souza é jornalista e produtor cultural; mestre em comunicacao e cultura contemporânea pela Ufba e professor de Cinema na UFRB. Foi professor no Centro Universitário Jorge Amado; é sub-editor da publicação 404nOtF0und (UFBA), em conjunto com o prof. Dr André Lemos; fundador, produtor cultural e dj (Dj Angelis Sanctus) do grupo de música eletrônica Pragatecno (pragatecno.com.br); ex-integrante do Centro de Excelência de Informação (CEI) do grupo A Tarde; ex-Assessor de Cultura Digital da Secretaria de Cultura do Governo do Estado da Bahia; Professor da Pós-Graduação em Jornalismo e Convergência Midiática da Faculdade Social da Bahia.

Ligia Manuela Lewis. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the US, Ligia Manuela Lewis lives and works in Berlin. Lewis draws upon theatre, dance, and text constructing choreographic works that engage pop culture, affect and empathy. To this end she crafts nuanced embodiments giving form to enigmatic performances.

Ligia has presented her work in multiple contexts across Europe and abroad. Her choreographies include Sensation 1 (Tanz im August, Basel Liste, MU Theater-Budapest, Museu de Arte do Rio ), Sensation 2(Sophiensaele Theater) and $$(X-Appartments Berlin/ HAU), and THE SHOW SHOW (Sophiensaele). Her latest work, Solo For Peter was presented alongside her residency at Pieter Space (LA) with upcoming shows in Berlin.

Shaka McGlotten is an artist and anthropologist preoccupied with sites of cultural emergence (and decay), especially as they articulate with media, technology, sex, race, and the body. He has written and spoken about gaming, virtual worlds, porn, shit, hook up apps, and zombies (among other things). You can find some of these preoccupations reflected in his book Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY

Press, 2013). He teaches courses on ethnography, digital culture, and queer media at Purchase College-SUNY. He is currently a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and lives in Berlin.

Özgür Erkök Moroder, born 1981, Lives and works in Berlin.

Multidisciplinary artist works on Everydaylife and gender politics and produces mainly performance, costume, drawing and video. Realized many performances and displayed his costume designes abroad and participated to international exhibitions. Performing as Sesperisi and organizing costumed music shows. Member of the art collective Ha Za Vu Zu in Istanbul. Works at Apartment Project-Berlin as free lance Performance events coordinator.

Image, Goodyn Green

Marit Östberg is a filmmaker and visual artist from Stockholm, Sweden. She makes music videos and VJ-works and is a part of a queer feminist porn scene, directing and participating in work that pushes ideas of what and who porn might be for. Her films have been featured and discussed at festivals in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Sydney, Berlin, Mexico City, Sarajevo, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Vienna and many other places. Östberg has a background as queer feminist activist, journalist and writer. She sees porn as a visionary way of working with sexual politics: “When women, trans and queers take their sexuality into their own hands patriarchy is lost.”

Eshan Rafi is a Pakistani artist situated in between Beirut, Lahore, and the territories of the Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas of New Credit (also known as Toronto). They work with their body, analogue cameras, moving images, text, and other people. Currently they are a student in the Home Workspace program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon with support from the Ontario Arts Council. They have a BFA and BEd from York University.

Raju Rage aka Lola Love is a multi disciplinary artist, writer and community organiser who is proactive about carving space, self representation and self empowerment using art and activism to forge creative survival. They are currently concerned with the dilemma of the diaspora to define, focusing on de-con-struction of identity and using interruption, confusion and disturbance as techniques of resistance. They are also currently interested in exploring anti-performance. Raju/Lola is the co organiser of Collective Creativity: critical reflections of qtipoc creative practice which is a regular event in London and will be exhibiting as part of QTIPOC Arts Group Residency at Guest Projects London in Sept 2014. Previously Raju co-organised the London Transgender Film Festival in 2008, facilitated ‘Body Image and Identity Photography Workshops as Self-Empowerment for Non-Conforming Bodies’ at various festivals and was a member of the political cabaret performance troupe 'D’Artagnan and the Three Muscle Queers' who toured queer festivals around Europe exploring issues around race, gender, sexuality and the body.

Tucké Royale Performer. Author. Stylist. Studied "Contemporary Puppetry" at "Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch" in Berlin. The solo performance TUCKÉ ROYALE was shown in St. Petersburg, Zagreb, Split, Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin and get nominated in Amsterdam for the Guest Award/Best International Act. Royale is playing in several bands - watch out. The second solo performance Ich beiße mir auf die Zunge und frühstücke den Belag, den meine Rabeneltern mir hinterließen was shown in Hamburg and Berlin and can be seen in Studio Я in Octobre 2014. Royale is working within the group and label Talking Straight that p.e. simulates festivals. Since February 2014 the artist is a scholar of "Elsa-Neumann-Stiftung des Landes Berlin" for the upcoming social plastik/pre-enactment Inauguration des Zentralrats der Asozialen in Deutschland.

Aykan Safoğlu, visual artist and filmmaker, born in 1984 in Istanbul. Lives and works in Berlin. Safoğlu’s works have been shown at the Istanbul International Film Festival (2014), uqbar, Berlin (2013), the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012) and Konsthall C, Stockholm (2011) among others. In 2013, he won the Grand Prize of the City Oberhausen at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany.

Llaima Suwani Sanfiorenzo is a Berlin based visual artist and filmmaker from Puerto Rico. She is founder and director of “The Self-Portrait Factory “. She studied film in Cuba and Germany until 2012 and is working on international productions.

Daniel Santiago I recently finished a MA named alive arts (something like performing arts) at the Nacional University in Bogotá. Last year participated on the 9^th Biennial of Mercosur with a work named treasure, dialogue between times. Before that studied Audiovisual media and became specialized on photography. Also made a couple of semesters on arts in Sao Paulo as an exchange student. On the last 5 years, me, my couple and a few friends run an art residence named Residencia en la Tierra located on rural area of Quindío, Colombia, several people came to attend the residency periods or multidisciplinary workshops. With some friends we have published a magazine named invisible. I am a father of two five years old twin kids. I try to take care of my home artistically (poetically political).

FranzKa Schuster & Jannik Franzen 
FranzKa ist in Berlin Zuhause, hat hier Bühnenbild studiert, Filme gedreht, Opern ausgestattet, arbeitet freischaffend, genießt das Leben, in der Natur mit Hund, reist gerne und tanzt Tango. 
Jannik Franzen bewegt sich zwischen Kunst, Sozialwissenschaft und Aktivismus; hat an der FU Berlin Psychologie studiert und lässt sich gern von Produkten aus Medizin und Psychologie zu Installationen und Collagen inspirieren; hat am Ausstellungsprojekt trans*_homo (Berlin 2012 – www.transhomo.de) mit gearbeitet und dort gemeinsam mit Ins A Kromminga eine medizinkritische Installation in Form eines Labors (mit Einwegspiegel und Meerschwein) realisiert; schreibt und gibt Seminare zu Trans*_Inter*Antidiskriminierung; lebt in Berlin.

Michael V Smith is a Canadian writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist and occasional clown teaching creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Smith has won Vancouver's queer Community Hero of the Year award and been named one of the city's Most Dangerous People. His performances are intimate one-on-one experiences between performer and an audience member, in a private tent. Drawing broadly on his experiences as a filmmaker, improvisational performance artist, poet and body artist, his two performance pieces for Heidy use handheld technology to shorten the gap between random strangers in public/private space."

Vassiliea Stylianidou (* 1967, Thessaloniki, GR) lives and works in Berlin and Athens. She studied Literature and Linguistics at the University of Ioannina (GR) and Visual Arts (B.F.A., M.F.A.) at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK Berlin). She received the NaFöG-postgraduate and DAAD (NYC) scholarships. She participated in the Goldrausch Artists programme Berlin (1999-2000). Her work has been exhibited at Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, quartier21/MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Fotohof, Salzburg; VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne; C.R.A.C, Sète (F); KUNSTHALLE ATHENA, Athens; Onassis Cultural Center, Athens; Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; KW, Berlin; The National Museum for Contemporary Art, Athens; State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Art in General, NYC. She has also participated in the Prague Biennale and in the parallel programme of the Athens and Thessaloniki Biennials.

Juan Soto & Chiara Marañon 

The Made in Taiwan (M.I.T; 台灣 製造; sometimes Made in Taiwan, R.O.C) is the country of origin label affixed to products to indicate that the said product is made in Taiwan. As Taiwanese exports increased in the 1990s, the Made in Taiwan label has become well known for the wide variety of products, ranging from textiles, plastic toys, and bikes from the 1980s to laptops and computer chips in the 1990s.

Image, Benjamin A. Huseby

Rein Vollenga is a Dutch sculptor living and working in Berlin within the parallel universes of fashion and art. The artist is known for his highly visceral sculptures that show a fascination for the human body merged with a synthetic aesthetic. These opposites are reflected in his technique of combining found generic objects with traditionally hand-sculpted material, the craftsmanship being in stark contradiction to the sleek high gloss surfaces of the finished work. His work has been shown in, among other places, Le Louvre, Paris, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Kunsthall Oslo, Museums Quartier, Vienna as well as various galleries. His wearable sculptures have appeared on catwalks in London and Paris, in the collections of designers KTZ and Mugler as well as the Arnhem Fashion Biannual and as special commissions for music, drag and dance performers Lady Gaga, Hercules & Love Affair, K-pop group 2NE1, choreographer Damien Jalet and many more. The pieces have also been featured in magazines Vogue Italia, Dazed, i-D, Interview and Purple. Frieze magazine (d/e edition).

ZANA. I was a professional actress since I was 17 years old, mostly in theater but also in cinema. After some time I decided to study theater, first at the Conservatoire Royal de Mons in Belgium (1996/97) and later at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art Dramatique du Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes, France (1997/2000). During my studies I understood that this job was not for me and that I was in the wrong place. I finished my education and had a lot of engagements but little by little it got difficult for me to play stage roles. Finally I stopped to act and decided to begin my transition. Since then I found my own artistic expression in painting, drawing and engraving.