Biographies of all Lecturers and Artists

Olaf Breuning (born in 1970 in Switzerland) lives in New York. His photography, video, sculpture and installations often make reference to familiar myths, stereotypes and cultural fantasies common to mass media. His works are elaborately staged to create visually fascinating and compelling narrative scenes. They feed off clichés from the media and popular culture, as well as various forms of the leisure industry, creating a universe of artificial realities and cited artificialities. Rather than denaturing a 'real' image by making it seamless, Breuning takes on real places with the most primitive means possible. Critical of what he regards as the overcodification of much recent art, Breuning immerses himself in pop culture to ensure that his own work remains accessible.

The artist emphasizes a continuity between daily life and the artificial worlds of fashion, film, TV and leisure, and thus opens up a variety of individual readings that refuse one single, coherent truth. Breuning often travels to sites around the world to find his scenes and stage his motifs for his large photographic works, from Spain and Switzerland to Peru.

He has exhibited widely in Europe, Japan and the USA - with recent solo exhibitions at Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico; Musée de Strasbourg, France (all 2003); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2004); Chapter Visual Arts, Cardiff, UK; and Chisenhale, London, UK (both 2005). Breuning has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, USA (2004); the Prague Biennale of Contemporary Art, Czech Republic; and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (both 2005).

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Bojana Cvejić (born 1975 in Belgrade) practices critical theory in writing, teaching and dramaturgy and performance in theatre, choreography and contemporary music. Her work fluctuates between the genres of lecture, biography, theory, and performance. From 1995 to 2000 she staged various music theatre performances in Belgrade (Mozart, Gluck, de Falla, Stravinsky), and since 1999, together with Jan Ritsema, she has been developing a theatre performance practice which explores textuality in the theatre and performance dispositifs beyond traditional dramatic models. In Pipelines, a construction (2004) Cvejić and Ritsema examine how the underground pipeline structure indicates geopolitical and economic relations and power struggles in Central Asia; in knowH2Ow (2005) they take the future of hydrogen energy as a means of discussing the notion of independence within a society of borders and thresholds, promises and cynical self-reflections.

Bojana Cvejić has been active in teaching in a number of European educational programmes (P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, among others), as well as in organizing independent platforms for theory and practice in performance: TkH Centar (Walking Theory Center) in Belgrade, and PAF (PerformingArtsForum) in St. Erme, France. She publishes essays in performing arts magazines such as Etcetera, Teorija koja Hoda, Maska, Frakcija, etc., and has also written several books, such as her most recent Open Work in Music (SKC, Belgrade, 2004). Her main interest lies in exploring theory's changing role in 'potentialising' the field of performance.

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Anselm Franke, independent curator and critic, lives in Berlin. He was the curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (until the end of 2006) and works for institutions such as the Hebbel am Ufer (Center for Performing Arts); the Muhka, Antwerp; CCCB, Barcelona; and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, among others.

He has contributed to magazines such as Parkett, Cabinet, and ARCHIS. He curated numerous exhibitions and edited their accompanying publications, such as Image Archives (KW, Berlin, 2001, with Harun Farocki, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Christoph Keller, and others), the exhibition series Productions 1- 8, and Territories: Islands, Camps, and Other States of Utopia (2003, KW, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Malmo Konsthall, Index, Stockholm; Bezalel, Tel Aviv, which was accompanied by two publications published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König) and The Imaginary Number (KW, Berlin, 2005, together with Hila Peleg). Recent exhibitions include 'B-Zone Ð Becoming Europe and Beyond' (with Ursula Biemann and Angela Melitopoulos, among others) and 'Forum Expanded', a new section on cinematographic installations within the Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin. Anselm Franke is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures/Centre for Architectural Research at Goldsmiths College, London.

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Dorothea von Hantelmann is an art historian, writer, and freelance curator based in Berlin. After her university studies in Berlin and a job as a researcher at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1999 she became a member of the collaborative research project 'Cultures of the Performative' which is based at Berlin's Free University. As part of this project, von Hantelmann has worked intensively on the meaning of 'performativity' for visual art and, consequently, also on concepts of participation, critique, and politics. She has published multiple articles on individual artists such as Daniel Buren, James Coleman, Jeff Koons, and Pierre Huyghe and completed a PhD dissertation with the title: How to Do Things with Art: On the Meaning of Performativity for Visual Art.

Besides her theoretical work, Dorothea von Hantelmann has curated and co-curated several projects and exhibitions, such as 'Elective Affinities', an interdisciplinary art/theatre project for the Vienna Festival in 1999 (together with Hortensia Všlckers and others), 'I like theatre & theatre likes me' for the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in 2001, and 'I promise it's political' for the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2002.

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Stefan Kaegi (born in 1972 in Switzerland) is a theatre director who, instead of staging dramas, discovers theatricality in everyday life. The approach to his subjects is documentary: what one finally sees on stage are living ready-mades or transplanted experts in the grey zone between reality and fiction, montages of documentary material, theatrical interventions, and real people as experts in special situations.

Stefan Kaegi studied visual arts in Zurich and performance studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. In Argentina, Brazil, Austria, and Poland he worked with local performers in urban contexts, producing motorcycle tours, audio walks, chasing channels, pet ceremonies, or bus trips. His Argentinean piece Torero Portero toured Munich (SpielArt Festival), Frankfurt (Mousonturm), and Berlin (HAU) as well as Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. For his paperchase Skrot: The Krakow Files, the cities of Frankfurt, Gie§en, Munich, and Krakow all became stage sets. In 2005, Stefan Kaegi's mini-train world Mnemopark was awarded the jury prize at the Festival Politik im freien Theater, Berlin - and has been invited to the Avignon Festival in 2006.

In 2000, Stefan Kaegi joined forces with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel in founding the theatre label Rimini-Protokoll. Since then they have directed documentary pieces such as Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp - in which 80-year-old ladies are confronted with Formula 1. For the Schauspielhaus Hamburg they had a crew of funeral masters, graveyard musicians, surgery students and gravestone manufacturers perform Deadline. This piece secured an invitation to the Theatertreffen (Berlin) in 2004. In Sonde Hannover, the audience could watch the city as a theatre piece through binoculars. Political furore ensued when they doubled a whole 18-hour-session of 'Bundestag' live with 200 citizens of the ex-capital Bonn in the piece Deutschland 2 at the Theater der Welt Festival (2002). In 2004, Rimini Protokoll created Sabenation for the Kunsten Festival in Brussels and Schwarzenbergplatz for the Burgtheater Vienna (nominated for the Nestroy prize, 2005). For Call Cutta they founded a call centre in Calcutta, India that remote-controlled audiences in Berlin via mobile phone. Kaegi's latest works include: Cameriga at the Homo Novus Festival Riga (2005) as well as Blaiberg und sweetheart19 for the Schauspielhaus Zürich.

Throughout 2006, Kaegi will be working on projects in Berlin, Zurich, Sofia, Düsseldorf, and São Paulo.

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Lois Keidan is the co-founder and Director of the Live Art Development Agency, London. Established in 1999, the Live Art Development Agency works in partnership with practitioners and organisations on curatorial initiatives; offers opportunities for research, training, dialogue, and debate; provides practical information and advice; and develops new ways of increasing popular and critical awareness of Live Art. From 1992 to 1998, she was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Prior to that, she was responsible for national policy and provision for performance art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of England.
www.thisisliveart.co.uk

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Xavier Le Roy (born 1963 in Juvisy sur Orge) is a dancer, choreographer, and director. The paradigm of his performances indicates how society and social relations are continuously produced and reproduced through actions performed by each and every individual. Le Roy is often called an atypical dancer because of his past as a molecular biologist.

His career as a dancer started in 1991, and he began to develop his own work and research reflecting the social and cultural conditions of his autobiography in 1993. Bodies are the starting point for infinite possibilities of (self-)images and (self-)constructions and Ðdeconstructions, but, on the other hand, are involved in and limited by social practice, its conveniences and contingencies. 'Le Roy taps into a field where scientific and social data is transferred and imprinted in imaginary representations of the body'. (Francois Piron, Journal des arts of Connivence, 6th Biennale de Lyon).

In 1999, he formed the group in situ productions together with Petra Roggel, and invited choreographers, dancers, theorists, and video-artists to work on the experimental project E.X.T.E.N.S.I.O.N.S. The year 2003 marked the debut of the Project: 'I'm interested in the similarities and the differences between some games or sports and art performances (like dance, for example), given that both are spectacles. [...] So play is accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as opposed to real life, but the most interesting thing to me is that it indicates the passage from "unreal" to "real" or from an "unreal fiction" to a "real fiction", which is also a characteristic of choreography and dance in its present(ce)'.

Recently, he began collaborating with the composer Bernhard Lang and staged Das Theater der Wiederholungen (The theatre of repetition) at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz (2003), as well as the opera scenario imposters at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin (2005). Last year he experimented with compositional approaches and the hidden theatricality of concerts to create Mouvements für Lachenmann: Staging of a Concert Evening, with music by Helmut Lachenmann, in Vienna (2005).

Since 2004 Xavier Le Roy has been involved in various educational programs, and will be associate artist at the Centre National ChorŽgraphique de Montpellier in 2007 and 2008.

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Jorge Leon, photographer, film maker, Brussels. He worked as director of photography in various feature films and documentaries. His photographic work has been published in newspapers and magazines (Times, Liberation, Vogue etc.) He's been collaborating over the years with artists in various projects as video artists, photographers, film makers or set designers : Olga de Soto, Xavier Lukomski, Benoît Lachambre and Meg Stuart whom he joined for Highway 101. Currently he is working on a documentary you are here which is based on testimonies of homeless people, refugees, prisoners and dancers.

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Rabih Mroué (born 1967 in Beirut) is an actor, director, and playwright. In 1990 he began putting on his own plays, performances, and videos. Continuously searching for new and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of the theatre art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theatre and the relationship between space and form of the performance and, consequently, questions how the performer relates with the audience. His works deal with the issues that have been swept under the table in the current political climate of Lebanon. He draws much-needed attention to the broader political and economic contexts by means of a semi-documentary theatre....

From theatre practice to politics, and from the problem of representations to his private life, his search for 'truth' begins via documents, photos, and found objects, fabricating other documents, other 'truths': it is as if the work becomes a dissection table for the dubious processes of Lebanon's war society. With the accumulation of materials, a surrealistic saga unfolds, teasing out the proposition that 'between the truth and a lie, there is but a hair'. His piece Looking for a Missing Employee is an investigative performance in which the artist becomes a 'detective' interested in using actual documents to understand how rumours, public accusations, national political conflicts, and scandals act on the public sphere as shaped by print media. MrouŽ incorporates radical criticism, particularly in his video imagery.

Without losing his peculiar sense of humour, Mroué's Biokhraphia (in collaboration with Lina Saneh) shrewdly provides a space to consider the invention of biography, with all its dreams, failings, and idiosyncrasies, within the frame of the beginning of a history. In 2004 Mroué wrote Who's Afraid of Representation, a merging of parallel histories of Western performance art and contemporary socio-political events in Beirut.

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Joanna Mytkowska (born 1970 in Poznan, Poland) graduated from the Art History faculty of Warsaw University and is a curator, art critic and art-book editor as well as the co-founder and co-director of the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. In 2005 she was curator of the Polish Pavilion at the LI Venice Biennale; from September 2006 onward she will be a curator of the Centre Georges Pompidou.

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Andrzej Przywara (born 1968 in Zebrzydowice, Poland) is a curator, art critic and editor of a monograph on Tadeusz Kantor. He worked as a Curator at Foksal Gallery from 1988 to 2001, where he curated many international individual exhibitions featuring the work of artists such as Luc Tuymans, Franz West, Mirosław Bałka, Gregor Schneider and Douglas Gordon. In 1995 he realized a Hans Bellmer exhibition at the Museum in Katowice, and organized a series of 7 exhibitions at the Place Gallery in Cieszyn entitled In the South. He was the second co-founder of Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw in 1997 and became its President from 2001 onwards.
www.fgf.com.pl

Together they worked on exhibitions and publications with contemporary artists including Mirosław Bałka, Piotr Uklanski, Paweł Althamer, Oskar Hansen, Edward Krasnski, Wilhelm Sasnal, Monika Sosnowska, Artur Zmijewski, David Lamelas, Douglas Gordon, Gregor Schneider, Toby Paterson and Martin Boyce.
They curated the group exhibitions So gennante Wellen... at Kunstverein Duesseldorf (2003) and Prym at BWA Zielona G-ra (2004), and also realized public projects with Paulina Olowska and Lucy McKenzie (2003) as well as with Thomas Hirschhorn (2004). Next to that they did a series of projects in Cieszyn, a small town in Southern Poland, during an annual film festival: Hidden in Daylight (2003), Parallel Action (2004) as well as Loophole- a bridge project with Francois Roche (2005).
Currently they are working on establishing the Edward Krasinski estate and preserving his studio in Warsaw.

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Jan Ritsema (born in the Netherlands in 1945) has directed performances for a wide variety of Dutch and Belgian theatre companies - such as Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Het Werkteater, Het Nationale Toneel, Mug met de gouden Tand, tBarre Land, Maatschappij Discordia, Het Kaaitheater, and Dito Dito - ranging from the established repertory (Marlowe, Mishima, Koltes, Shakespeare, Heiner Mzller, Elfriede Jelinek, Rene Pollesch) to staged stories (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Rainer Maria Rilke) as well as performances devised in collaboration with composers, dancers, and artists. With the International Theatre Bookshop, which he founded in 1978, he has published over 300 books about theatre, dance and film.

Since 1995 he has also been working as a dancer, and performed a solo Pour la fin du temps for the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels. He danced in several of Meg Stuart's improvisational projects called Crash Landing; he has also performed dance-actions with Boris Charmatz, the duets Weak Dance Strong Questions (with Jonathan Burrows) and Blindspot (with Sandy Williams).

Ritsema has a predilection for bulky, complex, intellectual material. His theatre productions follow the traces of thinking itself, which in all of its openness, uncertainty and infiniteness demands a consistent ongoing process. Rather than the illusion-producing machine of the theatre, it is the incarnate presentation of differentiated coherences and ideas that intrigues him. His experimental approach is similar to that of the French filmmaker Godard, a director to whom he feels strongly connected. In collaboration with the performer and music-theorist Bojana Cvejic, he weaves his way between the borders of representation and 'non-performance' in productions like TODAYulysses, Pipelines, a construction, and knowH2Ow.

Since 2004 Ritsema has had a research and development grant from the Siemens Arts Program, investigating the possibilities and limitations of theatre/performance by interviewing thinkers who have strong reflections on the dispositive 'theatre' in today's society. These talks are due to be published.

Ritsema teaches at different theatre schools for acting and directing in the Netherlands and Belgium, and at various summer academies throughout Europe. From 1990-1995 he was a professor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He has been a teacher at P.A.R.T.S., the contemporary dance school of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, since its foundation.

In 2006, Ritsema will begin work on PerformingArtsForum (PAF), a residency program in an old convent near the French city of Reims: a place for experimenting with other ways of producing and developing performing-arts pieces, and for rethinking formation in the performing arts.
www.kein.org/node/19

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Lina Saneh (born in Beirut in 1966) is a theatre maker. She studied at the Lebanese University in Beirut and at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She has acted in and has written and directed several plays, among them: Les Chaises, 1996; Ovrira, 1997; Extrait d'Etat Civil, 2000; and Biokhraphia, 2002.

In her earlier works, Saneh focused on physical theatre in an attempt to produce a body imprinted by the war. She questioned the socio-political conflicts and contradictions in the Middle East and the traces that they left on our bodies. Today, she spotlights the nature and function of acts on stage, questioning the role that might be carried out by body language in a virtual world marked by the idealization of the physical body. Hence, she re-questions the definition of 'theatre' itself. She has also delved into the wider spectrum of multimedia and video works that interrogate our status as citizens and our position in public spaces - which, incidentally, might create a new political parole. Currently, she is an assistant professor at the Institut d'Etudes Scéniques et Audio-Visuelles at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut and at Saint-Esprit University in Kaslic.

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Ines Schaber is an artist and lives in Berlin. She studied art with Katharina Sieverding at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and architecture theory with Beatriz Colomina at Princeton University. At present she is working on ghostly matters and the question of 'making things visible' in photography, a body of work she is exhibiting in the KW Berlin in September 2006.

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Georg Schöllhammer, born in 1958, is an editor, author, and curator who lives and works in Vienna. He was the co-founder of springerin - Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, a quarterly magazine dedicated to the theory and critique of contemporary art and culture, and since 1995 has been its editor-in-chief. From 1988-1994 he was the editor for visual arts at the daily Der Standard. From 1992-1998 he was a visiting professor for theory of contemporary art at the University of Art and Industrial Design, Linz. Outside of his numerous publications, exhibitions, and projects on contemporary art and architecture, he directs tranzit.at, an initiative to support contemporary art projects in Central Europe.
Recently, he curated the exhibition 'Play Sofia' (Kunsthalle Wien, 2005) as well as the projects 'Inventur: zeitgenössischer Tanz und Performance' (Inventory: Contemporary Dance and Performance, Tanzquartier Wien, 2005) and 'Lokale Modernen: Architektur an den Rändern der Sowjetunion' (Local Modernities: Architecture at the Margins of the Soviet Union; Frankfurt am Main and Berlin). Currently, he is also the head of publications for the documenta 12.
www.springerin.at

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Tino Sehgal (born in 1976 in London) makes immaterial art, independent of classic production processes, nevertheless existent and visible. His art takes shape only in the moment that it meets its spectator. For his work, he uses people who come into contact with the visitors of the respective exhibition via movement, spoken word or song. Sehgal transforms actions, not materials, without any filmic or photographic documentation. His work can be acquired when collector, artist, and gallery-owner agree to an oral contract with witnesses. Together with the painter Thomas Scheibitz, Sehgal represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His exhibitions include, among others, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2004; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2005 and 2006; Galerie Johnen, Berlin, 2005; and in 2006, he will take part in the Tate Triennial, London, and the Berlin Biennale, and will also have a solo show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Tino Sehgal studied choreography and political economy in Berlin and Essen. He lives in Berlin.

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Marc Siegel is a film scholar and programmer, and a member of the Berlin-based, artist group CHEAP. He has written and lectured on experimental film and queer studies and is currently teaching film history and theory at the Free University in Berlin. With CHEAP, he has organized and performed in a number of erotically-charged experimental performance and video events. CHEAPs most recent project, in collaboration with the American outsider artist, Vaginal Davis, and the Albanian supermodels, Ibadet Ramadani and Michael Haves, is a proto-Marxist, post-political rock band called Ruth Fischer. Their first CD, Sexualethik des Kommunismus, will be out in stores soon.

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Olga Stanisławska, writer and freelance journalist, has studied American literature in Warsaw and Aix-en-Provence. She lives in Paris since 2001.

She has been a long-time collaborator of the papers „Gazeta Wyborcza” and „Tygodnik Powszechny”. Her two solitary travels to Africa in 1994-1996 resulted in two series of reportages and a book, „De Gaulle Roundabout” (2001), awarded the literary award of the Fundacja Koscielskich.

The book, born from a year-long trip between Casablanca and Kinshasa, attempted to capture local voices, combining political reportage, travel writing and essay. It questioned itself progressively and addressed the heavy burden of clichés present in Western literature, philosophy and art history (Conrad, Jung, Greene, Gide, Céline, Blixen, Malraux...), where Africa is nowhere to be seen, replaced with the Western projections of the childhood of humanity and the repressed, dark part of the human psyche.

In 1996-97, after the Bosnian war, she lived for a year in Sarajevo, writing about Bosnian Jews and the resurgence of religions.

Since 1999 she has been travelling to the Middle East, following the routes of the Crusades, but investigating mainly present-day collective identities – national, ethnic, religious – from Clermont to Cairo and back to the suburbs of Paris. She concentrates on minority issues and various strategies of dealing with the Other both within a society and outside it.

Her interest in multiethnic environments springs from the feeling of an amputated memory and aims ultimately at a more intimate understanding of mechanisms at work in the heterogenous society of the pre-war Poland.

She has also organised a series of events devoted to Polish visions of Africa and the African as the symbolic Other, curated an exhibition illustrating the evolution of European images of Africa over the last century through the work of five Polish photographers, and co-curated another exhibition analysing the ideas underlying the powerful nostalgic vision of Kazimierz Zagorski’s series Vanishing Africa (1924-44). She has recently authored a documentary film about Muslims in France for the Polish Television.

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Meg Stuart (born in 1965 in New Orleans) finished her dance education with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in New York. From 1986 to 1992 she was part of the Randy Warshaw Dance Company; her first choreographic piece Disfigure Study was realized in 1991 for the Klapstuk Festival, Leuven, and was followed by No Longer Readymade (1993) and No One is Watching (1995). In 1994, she founded the company Damaged Goods in Brussels.

Ever present in the work of Meg Stuart is the search for new artistic constellations and contexts in the crossbreeding of dance, theatre, architecture, and visual arts; she brought this approach to realisation in her dance installation projects Show is Many Things (Museum for Contemporary Art Gent, 1994) and Insert Skin (in cooperation with Ann Hamilton, Gary Hill, Bruce Mau and Lawrence Malstaf, among others). From 1996 to 1999, she was involved in Crash Landing, an improvisation project that included dancers, musicians, video and sound artists as well as designers.

In collaboration with director Stefan Pucher and video artist Jorge Leon, she realised Highway 101, a performance that evolved into an ongoing process of commemoration and reminiscence focussing on memory, the artist's relationship with the audience, and the use of space.

Her numerous film and theatre projects include Comeback (1999), Snapshots (1999), and Henry IV (2002) by Stefan Pucher; she collaborated with Christoph Marthaler and Anna Viebrock in Das goldene Zeitalter (2003) at the Schauspielhaus Zürich and with Frank Castorf in Der Marterpfahl (2005) at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg Platz, Berlin. From 2001 to 2004, Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods were artists-in-residence at the Schauspielhaus Zzrich, where they premiered productions of Alibi, Visitors Only, Forgeries, and Love and Other Matters.

In January 2006, Meg Stuart premiered Replacement at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg Platz, Berlin; there she discovered the 'monster' as a cipher in which theatre can experience something about itself: the monstrosity of theatre and the theatricality of the monstrous, and the (human) attempts at representation and phantom pain incurred when the lively and its embodiment cease to exist, and are replaced by something else.

Meg Stuart gives numerous workshops, e.g., at the Forum Danca (Lisbon), European Dance Development Centre (Arnhem), Movement Research (New York), Pro-Series (Vienna), Tanzhaus Wasserwerk (Zurich), Parts (Brussels), and elsewhere.

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Catherine Sullivan has worked in a variety of media, but she is best known for her theatre and video work exploring the conventions of performance and role-playing. Sullivan uses a wide range of historical and cultural references - including film noir, avant-garde cinema, classical drama, romantic adventure stories, musical scores, literature, contemporary art, and the history of theatre. Through fragmentation, dislocation, and repeated appearances in varying guises, she investigates the tensions and arrangements between performers, their roles, their corporeality and their audience: 'The actor's task is to be transformed by the affectations that have currency within a given stylistic economy'. With the grammar of the theatre, she succeeds in freeing culturally anchored codes of gestures and certain definitive patterns of behaviour. She was born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works. Initially trained as an actress, Sullivan received a BFA in 1992 from the California Institute of the Arts and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in 1997.

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Jalal Toufic is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You (Post-Apollo, 2005), and 'Âshûrâ': This Blood Spilled in My Veins (Forthcoming Books, 2005).

His videos and mixed-media works have been presented internationally, in such venues as Artists Space in New York; Witte de With in Rotterdam; Fundaci- Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona; and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a "Focus Jalal Toufic" program. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie. www.jalaltoufic.com

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Hans Weigand works in various media including painting, photography, film, video, guitar rock, sculpture, architecture, 'Kunst am Bau', printed matter, typography, design, book production, and the technical and aesthetic application of the computer. Breaking through the boundaries between technique and media, his parallel engagement in all of these various realms creates a kind of networking structure, which unceasingly produces new perspectives through non-linear crossover and interpolation of the High and Low, and sharpens the blurriness of these parallel existing worlds. He surfs between psychedelia, pop culture, the afterworld, circular, transcendental, and fictional universes, putting them into perspective so that what is described as the 'real world', in various contexts, is recognized for its absurdity.

His strategies of questioning reality take place in an area of conflict marked by banality and subtlety. His interest in a conceptual 'will-to-order' stands in opposition to the principles of fluidity, fleetingness, an acceptance of chaos, and hybridization. A reflection of myths, dogmas, ideologies or messages are included in his work, whereby those scientific statements and scraps of 'official' information are put into question, making apparent the manipulation of information and the power of suggestion as a market strategy. He also makes music: in the 1980s, he played in the art-rock band Pas Paravent;in the 1990s he formed a 'noise dilettante' duo with Heimo Zobernig; and in 2002 he founded the band Crinkum Crankum with the American underground/punk legend Raymond Pettibon. (From the catalogue WEIGAND, HANS. SAT., published by Peter Noever, 1998)

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Akram Zaatari (born 1966 in Saida, Lebanon) lives in Beirut. He is the author of more than 30 video and photo/video installations and has been exploring issues pertinent to the postwar condition, particularly the inscription of sexual, social, and national identities, and the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television. Increasingly, Zaatari's work concerns itself with the escalation, evolution, and mediation of myths. He has worked on the logic of religious and national resistance in his documentary All is Well on the Border (1997), and on the circulation and production of images in the context of a geographical division of the Middle East in his feature length This Day (2003) and In This House (2005).

In 1997 in Beirut Akram Zaatari co-founded the Arab Image Foundation and basedhis work on collecting, studying and archiving the photographic history of the Middle East. Notably, he dedicated much study to the archive of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani (born in 1928) as a register of social relationships and photographic practices. His ongoing research, based on the photographic history of the Middle East, resulted in a series of exhibitions and publications such as Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, together with Lisa Lefeuvre, or Mapping Sitting in collaboration with Walid Raad. 'The photographs and videos of Akram Zaatari make us mistrust the information conveyed to us through politically commissioned sources. [...] His work makes it evident that the Lebanon of the past 30 years, and in particular the Lebanon of war, still produces documents that demonstrate what it means to be confronted with the physical, social, and political dimension of war. The continued manifestation of these documents brings forth questions, both seen and heard, of how meaning is deciphered'. (Walid Raad)

Zaatari has published work for critical and scholarly journals such as Third Text, Parachute, Framework, Transition, Bomb, Al-Adaab and Al-Nahar, and is a regular contributor, writing on video, to Zawaya. He has taught at the American University of Beirut, IESAV, and at St. Esprit University in Kaslik, Lebanon.

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