ABOUT

In response to the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, The New Centre for Research & Practice Parallel Academia Group is organizing HYPER ANNOTATIONS 2.0 during the exhibition's opening days, focusing on conversations with artists, curators and art professionals in town for the event. The program will focus on questions about the post-pandemic conditions for the production and circulation of global contemporary art, specifically the place of the art market, NFTS, and other communicative/financial technologies in this processes. Our program will also probe the renewed interest in feminist surrealist strategies and their place in today's contemporary art discourse while paying attention to career trajectories of artists and curates featured in the program.

HYPER ANNOTATIONS 2.0 will take place on April 20, 21 and 22 between 11:00 - 14:00 PM and is sponsored by the Lithuanian Pavillion. The interviews will be broadcasted on the New Centre’s social media channels and recorded for The New Centre Archives. Our social media channels are active during the opening days of the Biennale, providing a visual preview of the exhibition and other events in Venice. In addition, TNC RESEARCH Instagram account (@tncresearch) will provide live details of a selection of artworks in different exhibitions and pavillions which are part of or in affiliation with Venice Biennale.

The New Centre for Research & Practice, organized by Mohammad Salemy​ is an international non-profit art institute for higher education that fosters a global network of artists, curators and thinkers. The New Centre’s programming include collaborations like ​The Eighth Climate (What does art do?)​ ​Gwangju Biennale​ (2016), ​Superconverations, a series of responses to e-flux’s participation in the 2015 edition of Venice Biennale, as well as the resulting​ Machines that Matter ​conference​ ​at ​e-flux ​(2015), and regular organization and sponsoring of events at ​Spike Art Quarterly – Berlin ​(Interlocutories​, 2019;​ ANON: The AltWoke Manifesto & Other Negativities, 2018). TBA21–Academy leads artists, scientists, and thought-leaders on expeditions of collaborative discovery. Founded by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza and led by Director Markus Reymann, the Academy is dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding of the ocean through the lens of art and to engendering creative solutions to its most pressing issues.

	VIDEOS	bios
		Ingo Arend studied politics, history and journalism in Bonn and Cologne. Since 1990 he has worked as a cultural journalist and essayist on fine arts, literature and cultural politics. From 1996 to 2010 he was culture editor of the weekly newspaper Freitag - from 2007 to 2009 its editorial director. Since 2010 he has been working as a freelance critic in Berlin.
		Sam Bardaouil, together with Till Fellrath are the directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. They are co-founders of the curatorial platform 'Art Reoriented' in Munich and New York. In 2013, they curated the Lebanese pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and presented Akram Zaatari. They were co-curators of the 20th Sydney Biennial, and the curaotrs the 16th Biennale de Lyon and the French Pavilon at the 59th Venice Biennale.
		Neringa Bumblienė is a curator, critic, and art adviser. Since 2014, she works as a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is an expert on contemporary art at the Lithuanian Council for Culture, a Board Member of the IKT – International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art and the art fair ArtVilnius. Bumblienė is also a member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association.
		Lou Cantor is a Berlin-based artist collective founded in 2011 whose main scope of interest is grounded in intersubjectivity and interpersonal communication. Lou Cantor’s practice explores the polysemic minefield of contemporary communication, where medium, message, and meaning constantly fold back into each other. Samantha Ozer is a curator, producer, and writer, based between London, Mexico City, and New York. She has organized projects independently in Athens and Mexico City, and at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles as a curatorial member of The Racial Imaginary Institute.
		Barbara Casavecchia is a writer, independent curator, and educator based in Milan, where she teaches at the Department of Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices of the Brera Academy since 2011. She currently holds a course in Critical Writing at NABA, Milan. In 2020, she acted as Mentor of the Ocean Fellowship Program offered by TBA21–Academy at Ocean Space in Venice.
		Ali Cherri is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Paris. He received a Bachelor of Graphic Design at the American University of Beirut and a Master of Performing Arts from DasArts – Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Cherri is the recipient of Harvard University’s Robert E. Fulton Fellowship (2016). The Silver Lion for a young promising artist of the 59th Venice Biennale was awarded to Ali Cherri.
		Biljana Ciric is an interdependent curator. She was the co-curator of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2015), curator in residency at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, 2015), and a research fellow at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden, 2016).
		Dr. Yilmaz Dziewior has been Director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since 2015. He was Director of the Kunstverein Hamburg from 2001-2008 and Director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz from 2009-2015 and has worked as a freelance curator on a number of art projects.
		Panos Giannikopoulos is an Athens-based curator & interdisciplinary researcher. He holds an MA in Gender, Society and Politics [Panteion University, Greece] following on from studies in History, Archaeology & History of Art [National Kapodistrian University, Greece]. He is currently working for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program of ARTWORKS, while previous roles include that of the Curator & Researcher at the Contemporary Greek Art Institute [ISET] and the arts section editor for Nomas Magazine.
		Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh are brothers who collaborate with Hesam Rahmanian to construct provocative installations that challenge conventional modes of display and standards of value. Persian street theatre or Ta'ziyeh is a particularly important influence on their practice with its use of props, theatricality, cross-dressing and irony.
		María Inés Plaza Lazo is a curator, publisher, journalist and the co-founder of “Arts of the Working Class” – a street newspaper that critically reflects on the precarious nature of the art world and is distributed by homeless, unemployed or enthusiastic individuals on the streets of Berlin and around the world.
		Vladan Jeremić is an artist and editor of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe and the ArtLeaks Gazette. He is working on projects dealing with labor, migration, cultural policy and the arts. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. In his collaborative artistic practice with Rena Raedle, they explore the relation between art and politics, unveiling the contradictions of today's societies and developing transformative potentials for art.
		Assaf Kimmel is an architect based in Berlin, focusing on projects at the intersection of art, fashion and architecture. Kimmel is the designer for the Israeli Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Art Biennial - presenting a new project by Ilit Azoulay - and was recently selected for the design of the new Jewish Museum in Albania, in collaboration with Kimmel Eshkolot Architects. Kimmel was the co-curator of the 2021 Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He worked at sub studio where he was the lead designer for Anne Imhof’s Natures Mortes exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and for the reconstruction of Cristobal Balenciaga’s historical atelier on Paris’ Avenue George V.
		Vali Mahlouji is a curator, founder of the non-profit platform Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD), advisor to the British Museum, and director of Kaveh Golestan Estate. Mahlouji is a member of Art Dubai Modern Advisory Committee and a board member of Bahman Mohassess Estate.
		Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish-Romani artist and activist. She deals with antyziganist stereotypes and engages in building an affirmative and situated iconography of a Roma community from a perspective of the feminism of the minority. Joanna Warsza is an interdependent curator, editor, and program director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University. She is a co-curator of the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.
		João Mourão and Luis Silva are a curatorial duo based in Lisbon, Portugal, where they currently serve as co-directors of Kunsthalle Lissabon, a contemporary art institution they founded in 2009.
		Robertas Narkus is an interdisciplinary artist and a graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a bachelor's and master's degree in photography and media art. Narkus later continued his studies at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
		Pedro Neves Marques is an artist and writer whose films explore ecology, the earth’s natural resources, and the politics and practices that govern humans’ interactions with them. Neves Marques creates films that teeter between documentary and science fiction and that blur the lines between what in our world feels eerily futuristic and what is simply a continuing echo of the past.
		Zineb Sedira is a London-based Franco-Algerian feminist photographer and video artist, best known for her work exploring the human relationship to geography. Sedira was shortlisted for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
		Reid Shier is the Director/Curator of Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver. Shier has held previous positions as Chief Curator of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2004-06), Curator of Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery (2002-04), and Director/Curator of the artist-run Or Gallery, Vancouver, (1996-02). Since 1996, Shier has curated over eighty exhibitions and edited numerous publications and catalogs.
		Wojciech Szymański is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Modern Art and Culture at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw. He is an independent curator and art critic; member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA, and the author of Argonauci.Postminimalizm i sztuka po nowoczesności.
		Scott Watson is former Head (2012–2018) and Professor (2003–) in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and Director/Curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (1989–2021) at the University of British Columbia.
		Vadim Zakharov is an internationally exhibited Russian conceptual artist living and working in Moscow and Cologne, Germany. He created the work for the Russian pavilion at the 2013 55th edition of the Venice Biennale.

LITHUANIAN PAVILLION

On the occasion of the 59th International Venice Biennale, the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, is proud to present Robertas Narkus’ new project for the Lithuanian Pavilion: Gut Feeling. Gut Feeling is a complex and site-specific work, in which artist Robertas Narkus, manoeuvres between an honest desire to change the world, a persistent belief in the promise of collaboration, his egocentric ambitions, and a flirtation with financial structures, technological progress and humor. The term “gut feeling” describes a sense of intuition, or, a hunch, which, according to half-forgotten folklore and recent scientific discoveries, links activities of the gut with the brain. The Pavilion is divided in two. One part of the premises is dedicated to experiments and production, while the other is for representation and distribution: mimicking structures of capitalist production. The total-installation features distorted elements of laboratory, factory and shop, producing futuristic experiments made in situ with organic material and automated and programmed parts making repetitive gestures. It is intertwined and supplemented with photo collage, sculpture and video.

hyper annotations 2.0 team

Atefeh Ahmadi is a translator and researcher from Iran. In her research, she is interested in seeking the ephemeral evidence of new forms of knowledge and patterning of reality in art and literature as key sites for the emergence of further biocultural mutations. With a background in Theatre Studies, she is now finishing her M.A in Gender Studies at the University of Granada. She is also a certificate student at the New Centre for Research and Practice.

Daniel Hölzl Daniel Hölzl creates site-specific installations that contain an element of constant change. A recurring theme in his work is what he sees as the “cyclical nature” underlying everything. Carefully selected materials direct the focus to the transience of every moment which connects the installation to the space and its visitors. After having graduated at the Weißensee Academy of Art, Daniel Hölzl lives and works in Berlin. He is represented by the Berlin Gallery Dittrich&Schlechtriem.

Kasra Rahmanian is a Berlin-based artist & curator. He is currently one of the editors of &&& (Triple Ampersand) Platform and the social media coordinator at The New Centre For Research & Practice. Rahmanian is co-curating the 10th edition of Instinct, a series of contemporary art exhibitions opening at Village Berlin, on April 14, 2022.

Agata Szymanek was born in 1990, she lives and works in Mysłowice, Poland. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, where she obtained a doctorate. In her art practice, she focuses on the many phenomena and stimuli shaping human relationships with the rest of the animated world. Her broader purpose is to dissect linguistic and cultural images of nature. Recently, she looks for ways to engage the viewer into her art practices through visual riddles and conceptual games implied into painting, self-publishing zines and workshop scenarios. Agata Szymanek is also an author of the research publication "Spiritual Exercises" published in 2020 by the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. The book contains interviews with artists on magical and esoteric motifs in their artworks, shedding new light on these topics on the Polish art scene.

Mohammad Salemy is an independent Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MA in Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan's Home Works 7 (Beirut, 2015), Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2015) and Robot Love (Eindhoven, 2018). His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, Brooklyn Rail, Ocula, Arts of the Working Class and Spike. Salemy's curatorial experiment For Machine Use Only was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016). Together with a rotating host of collaborators, he forms the artist collective Alphabet Collection. Salemy is the organizer at The New Centre for Research & Practice.