CURATORS OF THE EXHIBITION

JUAN XU AND LEANDER RUBRECHT

Juan Xu, born in Chengdu/China, studied in China and Germany and is currently based in Shanghai and Germany as an independent curator and art critics. She is one of the founders of the first Chinese feminist group "Bald Girls", which has received great attention in China and abroad in recent years. She is also founder of PerformanceDay Wiesbaden /Frankfurt and Chairman of Sino-German Art and Cultural Exchange Association IO Cultural Network e V. lives and works in Germany and China.

The curator and art dealer Leander Rubrecht is the vice chairman of the I O Cultural Network e.V. Rubrecht, born in Darmstadt/Germany, has been an exhibition organizer since 1997 with a focus on contemporary art. Rubrecht is the founder of the international gallery network KAISERandCREAM and the gallery RUBRECHTCONTEMPORARY in Wiesbaden. In addition, Rubrecht and Juan Xu are the founders and organizers of the annual Performance Day.

Gao Brothers (Peking, China/USA) 

Gao Zhen, 1956 born in Jinan, China

and Gao Qiang, 1962 born in Jinan, China

The Gao Brothers are a pair of artist brothers based in Beijing.They have been collaborating on installation, performance, sculpture, photography works and writing since the mid 1980s.

Some of their works were published in “A History Of China Modern Art”,” China Avant-garde Photography”, “The Best Photography Of China”,etc,and held in private and museums collections,such like Steven Cohen, Uli Sigg, Charles Saatchi, Jin Hongwei, China National Museum,Centre Georges Pompidou,The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Princeton University Art Museum, Kemper Museum Of Contemporary Art, etc, in China and across the world.

Shen Shaomin (Australia/Peking) / Lisa Roet  (Australia)

Born in Heilongjiang province, China,now lives and works in Beijing, Guangzhou, China, and Sydney, Australia. An artist, great at many fields of artistic creation. His works are mainly composed of installations, video, documentary and conceptual painting. His works are collected by many galleries, museums, foundations and private collections, both locally and internationally. 

Shen has presented work across the US, Europe, China and Australia including the 17th Biennale of Sydney 2010; the first Kiev Biennial 2012; Liverpool Biennial 2006; Busan Biennial, Korea 2012; Guangzhou Triennial, China 2012; Shanghai Biennale 2012, etc. 

Li Yongzheng (Chengdu, China)

Born in 1971 in Bazhong,Sichuan, Li Yongzheng pursued higher education at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute’s Department of Technology and Department of Oil Painting from 1989 to 1991.

In 1994 he graduated from the Department of Fine Arts of Southwest University (formerly Southwest Normal University).From 1998 to 2000 he attended workshops at Department of Sociology of Sichuan University while living and working in Chengdu, Sichuan. His most recent exhibitions include: Hello at MOCA Chengdu in 2017, and Death, I’ve Dreamed of You Many Years at TEDA Contemporary Art Museum (Tianjin) in 2015. Confronting Anitya–Oriental Experience in Contemporary Art at the 55th Venice Art Biennale 2013 in in Venice, Italy; Voice of the Unseen at the 55th Venice Art Biennale 2013 in Venice,Italy and more.

Cao Kai (Nanjing, China)

Cao Kai is an artist, filmmaker, independent curator. 

After graduating from Nanjing Academy of the Arts in 1992，whose work includes the creation, criticism, historical research, exhibition, and education of experimental films and video art, associating with other fields, such as documentary, new media art and digital art.

As an artist, he stepped in the field of contemporary art in 1994 and used video, photography and installation as the main medium of art expression.

Now he is an important video artist and experimental filmmaker in China.

As an independent curator, he organized and curated China Independent Film Festival since 2003. He also participated in various intercontinental art projects relating to Chinese independent films, experimental films and Video Art in East Asia, North America, European.

Art is the heart and lungs that keep me breathing normally.

Li Xinmo (Peking, China)

Female, China, Artist.  Her works, based on a variety of media, including performance, painting, video, etc., have been exhibited in some important art museums in Sweden, France, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. 

Day Dream, Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Media, Video & Photos

The creation of this work consists of two steps: depicting a dream and converting it with “Deep Dream”, an algorithm that can show us what the deep neural network is seeing when it is looking in a given image. It’s the machine’s interpretation of the dream.

How does artificial intelligence interpret human’s visual language? What happened during the conversion? This work can help us to compare and contrast the vision of human and artificial intelligence. 

Art is he memory of the future.

Xiao Lu (Peking, China)

Xiao Lu was born 1962, is a Chinese artist who works with installation art and video art.

She became famous in 1989, when she participated in the 1989 China Avant-garde Exhibition with her work, Dialogue. Just two hours after the exhibition opened, she suddenly shot her own work with a gun, causing an immediate shutdown of the exhibition.

When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred four months later, her actions were heavily politicized, referred to as “the first gunshots of Tiananmen”. 

Jiny Lan (Bochum, Germany/China)

Jiny Lan was born in Liaoning province, China，now lives and works in NRW Germany. Back and forth between China and Europe and showing her artworks in the whole whorls. Her works are mainly composed of conceptual paintings, installations, video, and performances.

Her works are collected by many galleries, museums, foundations and private collections, both locally and internationally.

Duan Yingmei (Braunschweig, Germany)

Duan Yingmei was born in Daqing in China. Studied at HBK Braunschweig in Germany. She is currently based in Braunschweig, Germany.

Since 2000 she has been concentrating on creating and researching performance art. Within her performances she often incorporates sound, video and installation.

Besides her solo projects she also in collaboration with people from different cultures, ages and areas of life. 

Liu Xue (Frankfurt, Germany)

Liu Xue comes from China, male, completed in 2010 at the Städelschule Frankfurt, as a Meisterschüler of Prof. Christa Näher. He is a freelance artist, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.

The main focus of him is painting, stage and costume design. I belonged to the Theater performance group "Taheter Unkst"

Art is food

Dirk Baumanns (Frankfurt, Germany)

Dirk Baumanns was born 1980 in Offenbach, 2012 diploma, academy of art and design Offenbach. Prof. Adam Jankowski (painting) and Prof. Mariola Brillowska (performance). 2009 scholarship of the Johannes-Mosbach foundation. He works on a variety of media, including performance, painting, video, etc., have been exhibited in some important art galleries and museums in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy and China. He is one of very active artist in RheinMainRegion, and works and lives in Frankfurt .

Peter Braunholz (Frankfurt, Germany)

Peter Braunholz is a german, visual artist; Peter is interested in impressions of reality that may appear as being unreal, manipulated or staged, but are actually a part of our surroundings, and he explores the immaterial quality of objects and spaces, their very essence.

Peter Braunholz studied Music, German Philology and Film History and Theory. After various activities in the music industry, he worked as an author, graphic designer, and photographer for industrial firms and publishers, including Societäts-Verlag (F.A.Z.). Since 1999, he has concentrated on photographic art. His award-winning work has been shown worldwide including Louvre Paris and Arsenale of Venice. In 2017 Kehrer Publishing released the monograph "Photographic Realities" book about his work. Peter is represented by galleries Knoess Cologne, Philippi Heidelberg and Wesner Constance.

Nothing is more real than reality.

Stefan Stichler (Frankfurt, Germany)

Stefan Stichler is based in Frankfurt. His works are exhibited international and are represented in numerous art collections. His generally oversized oil paintings are seen as tools, some kind of pause-button makeing moments visible that flash in his mind for a fraction of a second found in the streets. 

Unspectacularly, very common on the first view.

But they open up a deeper level of philosophical questions, well known or well hidden by the modern urban being. His sculptures, where he uses mirror as a main item, complete the idea of different levels of perception and the difficulties to distinguish. 

There is no freedom.

Christine Straszewski (Mainz, Germany)

conceptual artist shows aspects of painting and sculpture in her installations. She examines artistic strategies and reference-systems. Out of an archaic as well as contemporary attitude, she plays with the sublime, the profane, the absurd, and tempts to polarize.

Designdiploma, artexhibitions and fairs in Germany and abroad, including: JEANNIE'S ERBEN ODER DAS MAGISCHE IN DER KUNST in touch with Joseph Beuys, ART ZURICH (solo show), BANANE HAT DIE FAHNE (solo show), HIGGSTEDDY (duoexhibition), PINNOCHIO IST EIN ALIEN (solo show), DRAG ON FLOW (duoexhibition).

Andreas Rohrbach (Frankfurt, Germany)

Andreas Rohrbach is a sculptor. He studied after completing a classical stone sculptor training, at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main with Ulrich Rückriem, Stephan Balkenhol, Ludger Gerdes and Georg Herold and worked as assistant of Ilja Kabakov.

He finished his studies with a master class title with Franz West.

Andreas Rohrbach brings idea and material together in a sensual way, creating free spaces in which people can unfold and find meaningful connections. Rohrbach processes different materials in sculptures partly created for certain places. In the context of his work they merge to a specific cosmos. Topic of his work is the question of the possibility and configurability of human self-expression in an organized world.

Kevin Clark (F /USA /Germany)

Kevin Clark was born in New York, NY, Studied Sculpture at Cooper Union NY with Hans Haacke. Active in Europe since 1976, China since 2012. Known for experimental portrait projects including The Red Couch, A Portrait of America (1984) and early and continuing DNA portraits since 1988. The first automated DNA Sequence was made with Clarke's blood as an art project. Museum exhibitions include Museum Wiesbaden, Städel Frankfurt, Schirn Frankfurt MOMA NY, Brooklyn Museum, CAFA Beijing, Marciana, Venice, documenta 6, Kassel.

Clarke currently lives in SW France and in Frankfurt Germany.

Witty comment: “The “Long Body” is the procession of DNA and spirit that lives through time as the product of successful ancestry. Parent to child, parent to child, spirit and DNA travel through time.  My approach allows me great freedom in how I see and portray people.

CrocodilePOWER (Moskau, Russia)

CrocodilePOWER is a group founded in 2011 by two Russian artists: Peter Goloshchapov (born in Moscow) and Oksana Simatova (born in Odincovo). Both are graduates of  Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry. In 2012, they completed an internship at the Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London.

Working in a group has become a new creative experience for both. They turned to the theme of studying today’s world and the place of man in it. CrocodilePOWER create mythologies somewhere between fantasy and reality, between technology and nature. Live and work in Moscow, Russia. 

We are interested in a process, which excites us with its unpredictability, in which a person simultaneously takes the role of the creator and the laboratory mouse. Creativity becomes a game in which each next step brings us closer to the limits of conventional everyday life.

Sándor Szász (Budapest, Hungary)

Sándor Szász was born in 1976, Transylvania, Ro. Artist. He works in different media, from painting to installations, photography and videos. He’s works been showed from in several museums of China, Germany, Hungary, Romania.

Sandor Szasz tackles social issues with his work. Recollection is decisive for him, a formative force on identity, in the development of personality that consequently shapes the world. His work is a manifestation of his individual memories, in which he incorporates images, objects from both the past as well as the present, creating a surreal vision when placed in a distinct context. His aim is to draw attention to future consequences that result from a series of decisions disregarding social reality.

Palu Abadia (Colombia) 

Palu Abadia is a Colombian-born filmmaker and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked as a cinematographer and video editor for different projects, including short and long documentaries.

In 2016 she completed her first film, “Monologues in the Artist’s Studio,” awarded as best documentary on architecture and design. She is currently working on her second film, "Nowhere to Fall", a story developed between New York and Colombia about music, tradition, displacement, and women empowerment.

She has exhibited her work in festivals, galleries and schools in the USA and South America. Her personal work ranges from experimental video to stop motion animation and photography. 

Javier Bernal  (Colombia/Poland)

Javier Bernal studied his BFA in Tadeo University in Colombia and and an MA in arts in Central Saint Martins, London. Having extensively traveled through his youth, created a feeling of rootlessness that later on would affect his life and his practice as an artist. His work twirls around the loss of cultural identity, and the impossibility to belong in a world that shrinks under the burden of technological prowess. He uses media like cinema, animation and painting, to evoke questions of nostalgia in the post-conceptual era, and to question identity in the internet realm. He has exhibited his work in Colombia, Poland, England and Switzerland amongst others. Works and lives in Gdansk Poland.  

I use art as a catalyst that rebels against the oppressive shadows of oblivion 

David Medina (Colombia/USA)

David Medina is a Colombian-Venezuelan artist, is a computer engineer with an Master in Fine and Visual Arts currently based in Bogotá, Colombia. His work dwell in the intersection of technology and aesthetics using language, sound and generative algorithms as tools of enquiry.

The politics of interface, translation as expressive medium and language as form are some of the areas of exploration using video, performance, print and other media. Works between Florence, London and Bogotá. Selected as one of the emerging artists in Colombia in the Nuevos Nombres exhibition by Banco de la República in 2018.

Sandra Miranda Pattin (Colombia/Italy)

Sandra Miranda Pattin is a Colombian artist with strong Italian origins working mainly in installation and performance with a strong interest in the body as a transformation territory. She has widely exhibited in Europe, Asia and South America in galleries, Museums, biennales and art festivals wining several awards, such as first prize of photography Collezione Camera di Commercio di Mantova, Italy and the nomination to the Sara Modiano prize among others. Her artworks are part of public and various private collections in Italy, USA and Colombia.

She is currently working in experimental sound art in Florence, Italy.

Only when a thought goes through the body, it becomes real, whereas in our mind is still at risk of manipulation. The real comprehension of something happens in the translation of a thought to the physicality of our body, it also happens involuntarily: the body does not lie.

Ben Shalom Davidi (Tel Aviv, Israel)

Ben Shalom Davidi was born in 1984 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He began his photography studies in High school, where he was exposed for the first time to the power of the medium. After his army duty he studied photography at "Tzilum BaAm", Tel Aviv and, with the encouragement of his teachers, continued his education at Hadassah College, Jerusalem, where he finished Communication and Photography studies. Since then, he has worked in several photography labs in Tel Aviv and New York City, as a photographer at the Israel National Forensic Center.

Ben Shalom currently works as an independent artist, focusing on pushing the boundaries of photography while documenting his life.

Lisa Roet (Australia)

Lisa Roet was born in June 1967, Female/Australian.  She has 30 years experience working as a professional artist exhibiting within Australia and internationally. She is committed to environmental issues, genetic discoveries and the evolving place of humanity as themes addressed in her art and design.

Through an interdisciplinary approach to her practice, Roet has worked with the arts, design and science communities including zoos, environmental groups and museum archives worldwide to develop her art using a wide range of mediums and materials. 

Jos Diegel (Netherland/Germany)

Jos Diegel was born in 1982, male, dutch/german studied at University of Art and Design Offenbach.

Presented works at festivals as European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), Binghamton University, Binghamton (Binghamton), Videonale (Bonn), Filmfestival for Human rights (Nuremberg), Arse Elektronika (San Francisco), Athens Video Art Festival (Athen), Supermarket (Stockholm), Pixxelpoint-Intern Media Art Festival (Nova Gorica), at Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt), Theater Gessnerallee (Zürich), Gallery Art von Frei (Berlin), Lodge Gallery (New York), Gallery 5020 (Salzburg), Kunstraum ProArte (Hallein) Visual Voice Gallery (Montreal), Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt), Künstlerhaus (Wien), Center For Contemporary Art (Plovdiv), Xin Dan Wei (Shanghai), Court Métrages (Clermont Ferrand), Museum of New Art (Detroit) Jos Diegel plays, entertains and concerns himself with social- political and normativ-narrative structures and understands his happy, a-disciplinary experimental science in negotiating and constructing situations by means of film, installation, painting, performance, literature and other genres.

He is alive and involved in numerous projects...

Alessandro Rolandi (Beijing, China)

Born in Pavia/Italy, April 1971, Studied Chemistry, Experimental Theatre and film-making, History of Art.

He has been living and working in Beijing since 2003, as a multimedia and performance artist, director, curator, researcher, writer and lecturer. His work focuses on social intervention and relational dynamics to expand the notion of art practice beyond existing structures, spaces and hierarchies and engage directly with reality in multiple ways.

He is the founder, in 2011, and director of the Social Sensibility Research & Development Department at Bernard Controls in Beijing and Paris and one of the founding partners of the Social Sensibility Research Institute (SoSense).

Nikolaus A. Nessler (Frankfurt, Germany)

Nikolaus A. Nessler was born 1958 in Frankfurt am Main, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. 1984 first Expanded Cinema Installation at Frankfurt Feste, Alte Oper, with scratched slides and film loops.

Since „andere Orte“ („Different Places“), with 360 projected scratchings at Oktogon II., Museum Wiesbaden 1990, Nikolaus A. Nessler is exploring the esthetic of light in space and darkness. Important works were shown at „Arte Amazonas“ (Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Berlin, Dresden, Aachen 1992/94), DEPOT 2 (Steirischer Herbst, Graz 1993), THE VICTIM IS THE SACRIFICE (Dänemark 1995), und BEBEN/TERREMOTO, Kunsthaus Wiesbaden 2012 and experimental installations for Luminale from 2004 to 2016.

Thomas Vinson (Gießen, Germany)

Thomas Vinson was born in 1970 in Paris. Since 2013 Guestlecturer for sculpture at the Justus-Liebig Universität and at the Technischen Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM), department of architecture, Giessen, Germany. 

Since 2007 Curator at Kunstturm Mücke (KTM), Mücke, Germany, 1997-1999 Sculpture studies Prof.George Smith, Rice University, Houston, USA. Lives and works in Giessen, Germany and Paris, France

Exhibitions: in Brasil, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States of America.