EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME PARTICIPANTS

Claudia Bühler (1991), born in Switzerland, gave up a career in Swiss banking to study photography. After a propaedeutic period at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Gallen, she began her studies at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, concentrating in particular on socio-critical and political themes such as food waste, as well as critiques of capitalism in various forms. Her work also deals with the personal and autobiographical, including confrontations with mourning and her own cultural and spiritual origins.

Pauline Doutreluingne (1982) is an independent curator based in Berlin. Through her work she seeks to question normative power structures, stimulate cultural and ecological differentiation, and deconstruct societal ideas that originate from colonial thinking. Doutreluingne was trained in Sinology at Ghent University, Belgium, where she completed a master’s thesis on experimental Chinese art and post-Orientalism. She then followed a master’s programme in art management at CAFA in Beijing, where she founded the Borderline Moving Images Festival and was assistant director at the Platform China Contemporary Art Institute. Doutreluingne also co-founded the mindpirates art collective in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include The Conundrum of Imagination at Wiener Festwochen 2017, Vienna; Agency of Living Organisms at San Sebastian’s Tabakalera in 2016 and others. In 2018, she curated a year-long program called Karma Ltd Extended at ACUD Gallery in Berlin and was a jury member of the Berlin Art Prize 2018.

Yulia Krivich (1988) was born in Dnepr, Ukraine. After graduating in 2010 from the Department of Architecture at the State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture in her home town, she moved to Poland to study photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her experience of being an immigrant in another country is one of the reasons why identity has become one of the main themes she explores in her practice. Starting with her graduation project My World Is Not Where I Am (2013), which focused on young Ukrainians, she has continued to explore issues related to younger generations living in the post-Soviet countries. In 2016 she was a resident in the scholarship programme of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and in 2018 was a participant in the Pla(t)form portfolio review at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2018 she was also nominated for the PinchukArtCenter Prize for Young Artists in Kyiv, Ukraine, for her project Daring&Youth. Her photography combines a documentary approach with creativity, and the personal with the political.

Jana Kukaine (1983) is an art critic, culture theoretician, researcher of feminist theory, and women’s rights activist. She earned her BA in Philosophy at the University of Latvia and her MA in Arts at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Since 2015, she has worked as an independent curator, developing feminist art in Latvia. She is author of the monograph Lovely Mothers. Woman. Body. Subjectivity (Riga, “Neputns”, 2016), which reflects on the intersections of motherhood, contemporary art and feminist theory. In 2019, she began lecturing on feminism at the Art Academy of Latvia.

Šarūnas Kvietkus (1996) is currently studying at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, having previously studied at the photography department of the Justinas Vienožinskis Faculty of Arts in Kaunas. Kvietkus is interested in the relationship between different social groups and the individual, the balance of power in historical and cultural contexts, and the influence of these contexts on contemporary everyday life. In his work, he deals with human behaviour, technological perceptions of the world, and the effect of social factors on individuals. He experiments with various traditional and alternative photographic techniques in his creative practice. Kvietkus fields of research include psychoanalysis, philosophy and sociology.

Adam Mazur (1977) is a freelance curator, the editor-in-chief of BLOK magazine and an assistant professor at the University of the Arts in Poznan. He has published several books: Histories of Photography in Poland 1839-2009 (2010), New Phenomena in Polish Photography After 2000 (2012), Depth of Field. Essays on Polish Photography After 1945 (2014) and After the End of Photography (2018) and has curated a number of group and solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including, more recently, shows for Martha Rosler (2014), Pawel Althamer (2015), Artur Zmijewski (2016) and Aneta Grzeszykowska (2017), Piotr Uklanski (2018). He is currently working on a book about Central European photography.

Kaisa Maasik (1994) is an artist and curator based in Helsinki and Tallinn. She is studying on the Contemporary Art master’s programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts (where she also obtained a BA in 2017) and is currently an exchange student on the Praxis master’s programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts. Maasik works mainly with installation and photography and focuses on human relationships with strangers. Recent exhibition and curatorial projects include Your love hurts, Draakoni Gallery (2019); Trial and Error, Tramway (2018); Unintentional and very particular by Evita Vasiljeva and Monument valley (may contain artefacts) by Anna Mari Liivrand, Showcase Gallery (2018); and Your love hurts, Tartu Art House Monumental Gallery (2018). She has been a member of Umbrella Group since 2016 and a member of the team for Tallinn Photomonth since 2017.

Dalia Mikonytė (1986) is a photographer and researcher, and a member of the artist groups Coolturistes, The Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LeTMeKoo) and the Lithuanian Photographers Association. Her work addresses various questions and variations of perception and recognition, with a thematic focus on the relationships between materiality, technology and identity. Her subjects range from intimate space and time and personal experiences to identity and its representation, signs, and virtual and actual reality. She draws interest and inspiration from history, contemporary art, and future scenarios, as well as theory, practice and sentiment. In her work with the artist group Coolturistes – the title of which refers to “cool”, culture, tourism, and also the figure of the female body builder (kultūristė in Lithuanian) – she is mostly involved in political, performative activist art. The group won the District-Berlin Studio grant in 2015.

Rafał Milach (1978) is an artist, photographer, and author of photobooks. For over ten years, Milach has been working on transition issues in Russian-speaking countries and the CEE region. He has earned worldwide recognition for his books 7 Rooms (2011) and The Winners (2014). He has won several prizes, including as part of the World Press Photo contest (2008) and Pictures of the Year International (2009/2012). In 2017, he was nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018. He is a co-founder of the Sputnik Photos collective, and has participated in a numerous group and solo shows, including at C/O Berlin and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. His works can be found in the collections of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan; Brandts in Odense, Denmark; CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw; the ING Polish Art Foundation; and the Museum in Gliwice.

Mētra Saberova (1991) is a Latvian moving image and performance artist, living and working in London. After BA studies at the Art Academy of Latvia, in 2017 she received an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. She is currently doing a practice-based PhD at London South Bank University, exploring the use of radical body art as a social platform to disrupt the patriarchal construction of intrinsic motherhood. She has used her own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism and bodily intervention—including tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia — to encourage discussions about the female body and its capabilities. Next to international exhibitions, her focus is on the scene in Riga and on forming a core of Latvian feminist artists and activists among the younger generation.

Katarzyna Sagatowska (1973) is a Polish curator, photographer, lecturer and organiser of art events as well as a promoter of photography collecting in Poland. She graduated from the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic (where she is currently studying for a PhD), and Warsaw Technical University. She was the curator and coordinator of the project Collector’s Photography (2010–2017), which consisted of exhibitions and auctions of famous Polish artists’ photographs. She is one of the co-creators of the series of events We Are All Photographers and has worked on the juries of several photography competitions, including BZ WBK Press Foto, Krakow Photomonth's ShowOFF and Photographic Publication of the Year. Image: Adam Kuchna

Airi Triisberg (1982) is an independent curator, writer and educator based in Tallinn. She is interested in the overlapping fields of political activism and contemporary art practices, issues related to gender and sexualities, illness/health and dis/abilities, self-organisation and collective care practices and other. Among her ongoing research interests are those historical and contemporary moments in which experiences of living with illness or disability have been politicized in order to express social critique. In 2015 she curated Get Well Soon!, an exhibition presenting artistic re-articulations of social imaginaries rooted in the radical movements of the 1970s. Another strand of her practice has been a focus on precarious labour and the organisation of art workers. From 2010–2012 she was an active member in the art workers’ movement in Tallinn. In 2015 she co-published the book Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice, together with Minna Henriksson and Erik Krikortz.