Kosciuszko ArtsLink Fellow, musician, performer and folk tale narrator Yoanna Ayers collects and performs stories and songs of the peoples of Poland and the Caucasus. Her practice investigates how working with the human voice can contribute to the well-being of communities. Immersing into the connection between voice, body and emotions, Yoanna addresses post-trauma issues with an emphasis on women who have experienced war. She employs voice healing techniques, body movement and imagination as vehicles to overcome traumas in the world’s conflict zones.

For her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Yoanna explored voice-healing methodologies and their connection to body and emotions. Yoanna and her US host organization Found Sound Nation launched collaborations with a wide span of creative professionals in music, documentary, installation art, oral history, and somatic healing methodologies using Georgian and Polish songs and oral histories collected during the last decade in the Republic of Georgia. This collaboration explored ways of arranging and performing this music by incorporating visual and oral storytelling from Georgia.

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Live performance and culinary artist Mirna Bamieh is the creator and director of the Palestine Hosting Society. This live art project explores traditional food cultures in Palestine especially those on the verge of disappearing. It brings vanishing dishes back to life over dinner tables, walks, and various interventions. Food creates a significantly different atmosphere for encounters. Sharing food puts on the table aspects of hospitality, distribution, exchange, familiarity and pleasure. A shared meal can become a space of reflection on socio-political realities, attitudes, fashions, and even the suppressed elements of history.

During her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Mirna continued exploring the bacterial and fungi kingdom of fermentation. A staple link in the gastronomic traditions in the East, fermented food entered American cuisine quite recently, and with a degree of hesitation. Creating her own ceramic vessels in Deborah, Iowa as future plating for fermented foods, Mirna’s food interacts with these sculptural objects. Through performance and storytelling, in collaboration with her US host The Invisible Dog Art Center, the artist invited the audience to a dinner based on traditional food practices in Palestine and the Middle East and fermentation cultures throughout the world.

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selma banich (1979, Yugoslavia) is an artist, activist and community organizer. Her socially engaged art practice is grounded in explorative, processual, and activist work, and is politically inspired by anarchism and feminism. selma has worked independently and in collaboration with other artists, curators, groups, and initiatives in the Balkans, Europe, and the US. She has participated in numerous dance, theater, and opera productions as a choreographer, and has also performed on film. She participates in local and transnational solidarity initiatives related to the ongoing feminist, anti-fascist, migrant, and workers’ struggles. Currently, those initiatives are Zagreb Solidarity City, Transbalkan Solidarity and For BREAD.

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J.M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His writings include: The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992); Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (1995); Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002); Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006). His most recent book is Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015). He is working on a manuscript with the tentative title: Of Ecocide and Human Rights: Ethical Life in the Anthropocene.

RESPONSE ABILITY*: A MANIFESTO ON ECOCIDE
LECTURE / PERFORMANCE BY THE ARGENTINIAN COLLECTIVE ETCÉTERA, WITH JAY BERNSTEIN, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE NEW SCHOOL, AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST L.M. BOGAD (presented at the ArtsLink Assembly 2021 in partnership with Vera List Center for Art and Politics)

L.M. Bogad is a performance artist and scholar specializing in humor, imagination, and theatrics in progressive movement activism. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of political performance at U.C. Davis. Bogad has authored the books Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, and Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia, and the plays ECONOMUSIC, HAYMARKET, SANTIAGO 9/11/1973, COINTELSHOW, and TAHRIR. He is creator/host of the podcast, THE PLAGUE. Bogad’s Delivering Democracy, a troupe of dancing mailboxes and ballot boxes, entertained and informed voters in 2020, joyfully resisting authoritarian disinformation and voter repression.

Bogad has innovated playful interventions, street theatre, and mediagenic pranks with social movement organizations for 25 years, and has performed and led workshops internationally from Chile to Finland, from New Zealand to Egypt, on picket lines, in squatted buildings, and in major museums and theatres. He is a Cabinet Member and WPA Artist with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab, and cofounder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.

His award-winning screenplay, ORWELL’S WAR, explores George Orwell’s experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Photo Credit: Thatcher Hayward

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Urban environmentalist and labor rights activist Bermet Borubaeva uses trash as a medium in her work. Bermet is interested in the intersection of arts, climate science, and environmental inequality. Her practice is dedicated to the global problem of food waste and growing ecological disruptions caused by excessive urbanization. Bermet is a co-founder of Bishkek School of Contemporary Art.

Bermet draws our attention to industrial overproduction of processed food and the carelessness with which humans waste almost half of these products rather than bake their own bread or cook dinners. Global food mass production contributes to the destruction of the planet’s ecological systems, causing massive deforestation, the pollution of oceans and scarcity of freshwater. Her work on environmental inequality helps us understand that the developed world’s privileged indulgence in haute cuisine leads to the production of food waste on an enormous scale. At the same time, the food insecurity for hundreds of millions in developing countries is rapidly increasing due to the inequities brought into stark focus by the COVID-19 pandemic. The artist’s most recent intervention highlighted this issue when she lived exclusively on leftover food while working as a cook in a café.

During her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Bermet and her US host organization Hyde Park Art Center, in collaboration with Chicago-based Urban Growers Collective, present a research-focused inter-city, international platform and public program which began with activities in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in spring 2020. The overarching project titled Trash culminates in a series of workshops and open conversations among artists and practitioners, and a public program with both in-person and virtual components to open the project to as wide an audience as possible.

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Rusanda Curcă is a cultural worker, environmental and civic activist living in Hîrtop village, Republic of Moldova. She is a co-director of the Center for Cultural Projects Arta Azi, with a focus on developing the theatre sector in the country. Rusanda serves as a co-director of the Coalition of the Independent Cultural Sector of Moldova. This umbrella organization works to consolidate the independent cultural sector in the country with the goal of improve the legislation in the field of culture through advocacy activities.

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Musician, poet and performing artist Ashot Danielyan advocates art as an instrument for social change, a new and unfamiliar concept in Uzbekistan. The repressive political regime in Uzbekistan over the past three decades has resulted in isolation in artistic and social life leading to severe stasis. The dominance of the academic art school inherited from the Soviet past ensures that the local art community follows conformist self-censorship and aggressively rejects new ideas or socially engaged art practices.

During his ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Ashot met professional and civic communities and explored cross-cultural experiences and socially engaged art practices which emerge from poetry, alternative music and theater. Sharing interest and practice in Japanese history, language, culture, experimental poetry, performance, and book-making, Ashot and his US collaborator Mami Takahashi of PICA, launch a series of poetry readings, artist talks and conversations. The multi-city cultural exchange resulted from Ashot’s and Mami’s virtual residency in 2020 and takes place at PICA and other cultural and educational institutions in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago in 2021.

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Etcétera is the 2020-2022 Boris Lurie Fellow, whose fellowship project, NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM, is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs. Formed in 1997 in Buenos Aires, Etcétera is a multidisciplinary collective composed of visual artists, poets, and performers. Since 2007, it has been led by co-founders Loreto Garín Guzmán (Chile) and Federico Zukerfeld (Argentina). In 2005, they were part of the founding of the International Errorist movement, an international organization that proclaims error as a philosophy of life. In addition to participating in exhibitions in museums and biennials such as the biennials of Jakarta (2015), São Paulo (2014), Athens (2013), Istanbul (2009), and Taipei (2008), they often work with street-art, public interventions, actions, and performances that are necessarily contextual, ephemeral, and circumstantial. In 2015, they received the Prince Claus Award in the Netherlands. Their work has been recognized for its denouncement of human rights and environmental abuses through theatrical and poetic actions and statements often exercised at personal risk.

An experienced arts manager, curator and policy maker, Fatin Farhat is the founding director of the Palestine Observatory for Cultural Policy, where she curates and manages projects that foster community participation through the arts.

Fatin has overseen a broad spectrum of cultural initiatives and artistic programs from street festivals to municipal policy. Currently she is working on her Ph.D. from Hildesheim University (Germany) and examining the potential that grassroots initiatives and the local government can play in fostering community engagement and cultural development in Palestine. Fatin is currently developing a new art and community program – In Our Houses – in Kobar village in the West Bank, where the inhabitants become curators, organizing and presenting shows in the village’s houses and gardens.

Passionately interested in community-based art, Fatin wanted to engage in projects that involve the Arabic community in the US. In the climate of Islamophobia and racism, she was interested in exploring art as a form of resistance and resilience for marginalized communities. She believes the gap between the US and her home region is widening and that artistic cooperation is a powerful and vital instrument to foster deeper understanding.

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Leyli Gafarova was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, raised in The Netherlands, and is currently based in Baku. She is an independent filmmaker and co-creator of Salaam Cinema Baku, a community based cinema and art space. She has shot and directed “Once upon a Time in Shanghai” (2018), a documentary film about the production of a feature film in the eponymous neighborhood, itself located between Baku’s major railway lines. Her practice centers around processes, research and discoveries.

Leyli is interested in subjects such as gender, national identity, urbanism and (self)- censorship. When producing works she searches for ways to question what is natural and what is constructed. She has curated film programs, educational programs and exhibitions including Hometown Weather and co-curated Things We Sense About Each other.

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“My practice is rooted in the continuum of generations before me, the urgency for Indigenous visibility in this moment and the dreaming of Indigenous futures.” – Cannupa Hanska Luger

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger’s bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. His work has been exhibited at The National Gallery of Art, DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gardiner Museum, Toronto and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Georgia. Luger has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim, United States Artists, Creative Capital, Smithsonian and Joan Mitchell Foundation.

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Kendal Henry is an Assistant Commissioner, Public Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. As an artist and curator, he has specialized in the field of public art for over 30 years. Kendal practice illustrates that public art can be used as a tool for social engagement, civic pride and economic development through the projects and programs he’s initiated in the US and internationally. He believes that the most successful public artworks start with the question, “What is the artwork to achieve?” and takes into account both the audience and surrounding environment in the creation of that artwork.

Kendal served as the Director of NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program. He is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development as well as a guest lecturer at various universities and educational institutions, including the Rhode Island School of Design Senior Studio and Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management Program.

Previously, as the Director of Culture and Economic Development for the City of Newburgh, NY Kendal created the region’s first Percent for Art Program. Prior to that post, he was Manager of Arts Programs at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Arts for Transit for eleven years. During this time, he oversaw the commissioning, fabrication and installation of MTA’s permanent art projects, served as a member of the MTA’s in-house design team, and produced temporary exhibitions at Grand Central Terminal. He was also the Curator-at-large at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, NY and was elected to serve two 3-year terms on the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network Council.

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Ambrose Idemudia is one of the founding members of the Westsyde Lifestyle collective in Lagos, Nigeria. Deeply anchored in Lagos street and urban culture and featured in major blogs and lifestyle magazines, Westsyde Lifestyle is producing performances and videos, collaborating with afrobeat artists including Olamide, Burna Boy, Davido, Yemi Alade, but also music stars such as Major Lazer and Beyoncé. Closely working with Qudus Onikeku, they were awarded in 2018 the first Prize of the Nigerian dance award. In 2020, dancer Love Divine, one the group’s pillars, suddenly died. But Westsyde are going on – as they say, they are ‘survivors’.

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Elena is a curator, researcher and writer. Since 2017, Elena has been a curator at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art in Krasnodar. In 2018, Elena together with curator Maria Sarycheva organized an imaginary organization League of Tenders which researches notions of care and play in various collectivities. In 2015–17, Elena worked in the Research Department at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow as part of the research group for the project Open Systems: Self-Organized Art Initiatives in Russia: 2000–2015. Elena was a nominee for the INNOVATION Contemporary Art Prize 2017 in the Curatorial Project category and winner of the INNOVATION Contemporary Art Prize 2018 in the Regional Project category for Supercover exhibition and festival. Her curatorial and research work focuses on self-organized initiatives, art communities, and collective practices in art. 

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Qondiswa James is a cultural worker living in Cape Town, South Africa. She is an award-winning theatre-maker, performance artist, film and theatre performer, instillation artist, writer, arts facilitator and activist. She is currently studying her Masters in Live Art, Interdisciplinary and Public Art at the Institute of Creative Arts. Her work engages the socio-political imagination towards mobilizing transgression.

Qondiswa has directed theatre works including A Faint Patch of Light (nominated for Best New Director and Best Actor, Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards 2019 and winner of a 2019 Standard Bank Ovation Award). She staged two new original plays A Howl in Makhanda (Cape Town School’s Festival 2020), and Ndinxaniwe at the National Arts Festival 2021. In November 2019 she participated in Infecting the City Public Art Festival with her intervention, Jailbed. She was a curator of the Malibongwe Women in Theatre Festival (2020). Her onscreen appearances include High Fantasy (DIFF 2018 Best South African Film Award, Artistic Bravery Award), and Letters from the Continent (Holland Festival 2021). Her debut installation work was part of Spier Light Art Festival 2019/2020. She is currently working as a curator on the online stop-GBV+F campaign, Body of Evidence.

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Embracing ideas of consumption, gender, love, power, protest culture, experience of war, plants and dogs, Alevtina Kakhidze is co-founder of a residency program for international artists in the village of Muzychi, The Muzychi Expanded History Project.

To raise awareness of climate change and more sustainable living in the era of global shifts in society, especially in post-pandemic times, she has initiated the laboratory Adult Garden to observe coexistence and the dynamics of plants freed from the gardener’s intervention.

During her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Alevtina and her US collaborators embarked on a garden-focused project that centers on critical observation of organized experimental gardens and natural conservation areas. The artists and scientists from University of Kansas studied the competition and collaboration observable among plants and between plants and living organisms such as insects and birds.  Studies focused on the interaction between native and non-native (including invasive) plants, and explored the cases when a plant native to the US became invasive in Ukraine and vice versa. Alevtina also studied traditional Native American practices of gardening and medicinal plant use.

In Alevtina’s third year of ArtsLink International Fellowship in 2022, she is planning a collaboration with the Kansas University School of Visual Art on the project ‘Fate of Plants’. She will continue to research stable systems – prairies in Kansas, a steppe in Ukraine and the restored plant systems on the edge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – to generate new work, a series of texts for art and scientific publications and an online discussion. The project has been postponed until the end of war in Ukraine.

The artist profile in the Burlington Contemporary magazine, July 27, 2022
“With the Russian invasion in February 2022, Kakhidze’s art became more radical. Her critique of the war continues to be enacted through a personal lens, however her anti-colonialist narratives are more explicit and her reference points are wider, articulating the violence and imminent danger that characterize life for so many in Ukraine.” (Svitlana Biedarieva, Burlington Contemporary, July 27, 2022)

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Marat Raiymkulov is an artist whose works have been shown at the Central Asia Pavilion during the 54th edition of The Venice Biennial, Italy (2011); Laura Bulian Gallery, Milano, Italy (2012); the Oslo Screen Festival, Norway (2013); Art Dubai (2014); The Centre d’Art Contemporain, Switzerland (2015); die Grenze in Moscow (2017); the Asia Society during Asia Contemporary Art Week in New York (2017) and in many other international contexts. He is also a professor of physics, a director of experimental theater, an actor, a founding member and the creative nucleus of the Bishkek-based art space and collective, Group 705. His work ranges from performance lecture, animation and video art, drawings and installation, to the direction and production of plays, as well as dramaturgical writing, fiction, and essays.

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Megha Ralapati is the Program Director, Fellowships, at CEC ArtsLink. She specializes in artist mobility and has collaborated with community-centered organizations based in the US and internationally including Project Row Houses (Houston), ARTPORT Tel Aviv, and Center for Contemporary Art Lagos. She developed and oversaw the Jackman Goldwasser Residency at Hyde Park Art Center, where she forged partnerships with the MacArthur Foundation, French Embassy, Asian Cultural Council, Northwestern University, CEC ArtsLink and other institutions to design intentional cross-cultural artistic exchanges. Over her career, she has produced dynamic arts programming that centers the transformative relationship between artists, their ideas, and multigenerational audiences. Before joining Hyde Park Art Center in 2011, she was Director of Bose Pacia in New York, an international visual art gallery presenting contemporary work from across South Asia.

Megha regularly participates in award and fellowship juries, presents workshops to artists of all levels, including at the School of the Art Institute, NYU, and most recently at Asiko, an experimental pan-African summer intensive for artists, and has contributed to publications for Documenta 14, Brooklyn Museum, Sharjah Art Foundation, among others. Megha received an MA in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths and a BA in Art History and Anthropology from Columbia University. She is a board member of Artist Communities Alliance and Enrich Chicago.

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Photo credit: Portrait by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal

An internationally recognized hip-hop dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Amirah Sackett explores and embodies her Muslim American identity through combining hip-hop movement and Islamic themes. She is widely known for her creation of the choreography and performance group known as, We’re Muslim, Don’t Panic, which reached viral video fame after being featured on POPSUGAR Celebrity, The Huffington Post, AJ+, and Upworthy. Amirah was named one of “17 Muslim American Women Who Made America Great in 2016” by The Huffington Post. She was honored to be a TEDx speaker, guest lecturer at Harvard University, and a cultural diplomat with the U.S. State Department in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Kuwait. Based in Chicago, Amirah continues to teach the next generation and encourage emerging artists to use hip-hop culture as a way to uplift, inspire, and create social change.

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Artist and activist Mishiko Sulakauri’s practice focuses on engaging in deep dialogues with local communities. His research explores critical issues that transcend histories, borders, power dynamics, environmental and social struggles. His work questions systems of consumption, production, and human interaction recognizing our failure as a global society.

During his ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), the central idea of Mishiko’s research project into both environmental and sociological issues was focused on the trans-border experience and how it affects different species – people, insects and plants. Mishiko, in collaboration with his US host organization Unlisted Projects, engaged with artistic, scientific, and gardening communities in the construction of a wall near the South Texas border with Mexico.

Unlike the populist idea of isolationism, this wall’s purpose was to create a transitional oasis for the monarch butterflies, offering a regenerative habitat for their migration from Mexico to Canada. The wall-installation cradles milkweed plants, now an endangered species due to genetic modification of this poisonous yet decorative plant. The natural milkweed is the only source of nutrients for the monarch larvae. The installation went up in October 2021 in different locations in and around Austin.

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Born in 1987, Malika Umarova lives and works in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She has a background in medicine and pursued postgraduate studies in pediatrics. As an artist, Malika specializes in graphics, painting, and animation and has worked in Art Group 705 since 2014 as part of artistic collective. She has participated in projects such as the children’s art project at Bilimkana school (2020-2021) and in the curatorial group of Bishkek April Fool Contest since 2017.

Malika’s curatorial projects in collaboration with Art Group 705 include: Meetings with artists 2015-2017, various Childrens’ workshops between 2016-2019, and a variety of exhibitions.

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Artist and curator Ann Mirjam Vaikla works at the intersection of art practice and arts management. With a background in the performing arts, Ann’s work includes scenography and directing. She served as the Director of the Narva Art Residency (NART), a unique cultural platform facilitating residencies, art exhibitions, talks and educational workshops in Narva on the Estonian-Russian border.

During her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies at Triangle Arts Association and Grand Central Art Center), Ann Mirjam’s research departed from her own ancestry touching upon the notions of migration, embodiment and body as an archive. It incorporated collecting imagery from various sites (waterfronts of New York City and Jersey City and Port of Los Angeles) and meetings with artists, curators, and historians and other professionals in the field. The collected information and materials will be used for a future art project with the working title Where The Fun Never Sets.

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Cultural manager, researcher, consultant and theater performer, Iman Zaki co-founded Reflection for Arts, a training and development organization in Alexandria, Egypt in 2007. The organization provides space and support for visual and performing artists and promotes the role of the arts in community development. Her work experience ranges from cultural management and facilitation to curating and producing work that investigates oppression, sexual harassment and domestic violence among other social issues, with a focus on personal transformation and the use of theater and other art practices as tools for social change. Deeply concerned by governmental censorship, a lack of adequate funding and the rejection of contemporary methodologies in local academic art schools, Iman recently opened a school for emerging artists.

During her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residency), Iman conducted her research in the United States’ heart of independent theater, the legendary La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. Working closely with Artistic Director, Mia Yoo, Iman explored the unique theater scene of New York’s East Village and beyond. As a cradle of the off-Broadway theater, La MaMa E.T.C. opened broad opportunities for Iman to expand her professional network, create new connections and develop further cultural exchanges between New York and Alexandria, Egypt.

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