1 # Panel
Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Khalili’s photography is detailed, reflective, and full of intent. Using photography and the written word, Khalili unpacks historically constructed landscapes. Borrowing from cinematic language, images become frames where the spectator embodies the progression of time and narratives. He weaves together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. In particular, he focuses on the effect of geographical distance on our rendering of territory, and its ability to heighten or arrest our political and sentimental attachments.
His works have been exhibited in several major exhibitions, including documenta fifteen, 2022; KW, Berlin, 2020; MoCA Toronto, 2020; New Photography, MoMA, 2018; Jerusalem Lives, Palestinian Museum, 2017; Post-Peace, Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2017; Shanghai Biennial 2016; Sharjah Biennial 2013; and others. In 2020, he co-founded Radio Alhara, and in 2019 he co-founded The Question of Funding collective. He received the Extract V young artist prize in 2015, and was the artistic director of Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in 2015–2019. Khalili was the co-chair of photography at the MFA program at Bard College, New York, until 2022, and the guest artist-in-residence at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, through 2022. More details here
Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her first book Decolonizing Memory : Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021) charts a new itinerary for literary studies and theories of testimony, cultural memory, and decolonization in the wake of French empire. It won the MLA Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and Yale’s Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research in the Humanities. Her next book, Signs in the Desert: Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara (University of Chicago Press), builds a case for how contemporary writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the colonial ideology of desert emptiness. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective. Her other writing appears in New Literary History, Representations, PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, Yale French Studies, Expressions maghrébines, Public Books, and elsewhere. More details here
Odessa Warren is a Lebanese-British curator and cultural organiser. She has organised exhibitions, public programmes and artist commissions in the UK and internationally. Her curatorial work is interested in socially engaged practices and critical ecologies. She was Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern (2020-2025), and has previously worked with Beirut Art Center, Forensic Architecture and The Palestinian Museum. Recent independent projects include War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds (Beirut Art Center & The Mosaic Rooms), and Otra Orilla (Abu Dhabi Art).
Chair: David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at NCAD. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there. After studying as a design historian at the University of Brighton, the Royal College of Art and the Kraków Academy of Fine Art in the 1980s, David Crowley worked as a writer, critic and curator, as well as an academic. He has a long-standing interest in visual culture and particularly graphic design writing a book on the subject with Paul Jobling entitled Graphic Design. Representation and Reproduction since 1800 (1996). He is on the editorial board of Eye magazine and in summer 2016 he was invited to curate of the Warsaw International Poster Biennale exhibition, The Poster Remediated. More details here
2 # Panel
Zdenka Badovinac was director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana from 1993 to 2020 and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 2022 to 2023. She currently works as an independent curator and writer. Her work is concerned with the historicisation of Eastern European art and the situated voices in contemporary art and its institutions. Her first exhibition dealing with these issues was Body and the East – From the 1960s to the Present (1998). She also initiated the first collection of Eastern European art, Arteast 2000+, at the Moderna galerija. Her most recent exhibitions are Sanja Iveković, Works of Heart, Kunsthalle, Vienna, (2022) and MSU in Zagreb (2023) and Freeing the Voices in Kunshaus Graz. Her latest books are Comradeship: Curating, Art and Politics in Post-Socialist, 2019 and Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions, 2022. Founding member of L’Internationale.
Amanda Dunsmore works in art processes that explore representations of societal transformation, utilizing durational artist engagement with individuals, groups, and associated social and political structures. The resultant artworks are undertaken after in-depth research, using video, sound, text, photography, installation, and drawing to create contextual portraits. These include a series of extensive social-political-historical art projects, archives, and exhibition series. Dunsmore’s socio-political art making and her artworks act as a mechanism of awareness, visibility, and societal reflection, working extensively around representation of equality, of peace-making and peace-makers, of the sites of social change, and the local/international implications and perceptions of these changes. Amanda Dunsmore has exhibited extensively, and her artworks are held in national and international collections. Winner of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) 2024, AIB Portrait Prize for the moving image portrait of Dr Lydia Foy, Irish transgender activist. Significant projects include the KEEPER archive (1997–ongoing), initiated while she was Artist-in-Residence at The Maze/Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland, and the Ireland/UK LGBTQI+ project BECOMING CHRISTINE. Invited by the Fingal County Council Arts Office, Dunsmore is currently researching for the Democracy and Politics commission, exploring the history and legacy of local government. Her research includes conversations with local archivists, historians, and councillors. She lives in Ireland, is a Lecturer in Fine Art at the Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD) and is currently part of the IMMA Dwell Here: One-Year Studio Residency 2025 based at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). More details here
Slinko (Ukraine / USA) Born in Ukraine, Slinko is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in the US. While her practice is informed by scholarship on labor, ideology, and politics, her inspiration comes from interactions with ordinary people, localized contexts, and material culture. With a sharp eye for the personal and the anecdotal, Slinko often zooms in on the micro within larger historical and political narratives, offering specific insights into the workings of power and its effects. Slinko’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including political satire, drawing, moving image, performance, printmaking, and graphic design. Slinko often blends fieldwork research with dark humour. More details here