“Ahmet Öğüt chases after good ideas. In his search, a good idea does not necessarily have to be about (or conceived for) the arts; but through its conceptual quality, it challenges how we label things art. His artworks are mostly based on the context of the exhibition, institutional setting, social dilemma or cultural climate, including some specifications for the art context such as site-specificity, social critique, locality and historicity. In other words, the ways in which they are conceptualized depart from these specifications, or include conscious decisions that respond to them. His methodology follows a consistent strategy of delineating twin terms like mobility and mobilization, means of transport and accessibility, political identity and civil society, individual rights and political power, the collective unconsciousness and subjective realities.”⁠ - Misal Adnan Yıldız

Born in Silvan, Diyarbakir, Ahmet Öğüt (*1981) lives and works in Berlin, Amsterdam and Istanbul. Following Diyarbakir Fine Art high school, he completed his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty at Hacettepe University, Ankara, MA from Art and Design Faculty at Yıldız Teknik University, Istanbul. He works across different media and has exhibited widely, more recently with solo presentations at Kunstverein Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery, and Van Abbemuseum. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone (2021); In the Presence of Absence, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020); Zero Gravity at Nam SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008).

Ahmet has been a guest mentor, guest tutor, advisor and research teacher at several schools. Among the schools are University der Künste Berlin; Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; Sandberg Institute Amsterdam; Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; TransArts - Transdisziplinäre Kunst, Institut für Bildende und Mediale Kunst Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien; and DAI (Dutch Art Institute) Arnhem.

Ahmet was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University (2013); the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2012); the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs 2011, Netherlands; and the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft, Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2010). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rdVenice Biennale (2009).

"Workshops with communities frequently inform my artistic practice and instigate⁠ further local research based on interactions around personal stories and histories. I explore economic models and common community-based forms of coexistence such as craft making, rituals connected to a sense of identity, or forms of collaboration which might function as a collective therapeutic experience.⁠
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My recent work explores pre-christian East European identity based on slavic mythology, as well as women and water symbolism, and its meaning in different religions and rituals.My recent work explores pre-christian East European identity based on slavic mythology, as well as women and water symbolism, and its meaning in different religions and rituals."
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Alicja Wysocka is currently studying at Städelschule in the class of Haegue Yang. She previously studied Graphic Design (Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, PL) and Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind.⁠
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Alicja’s most recent exhibitions include MoMA, Warsaw, and a solo at Jo-Anne Gallery, Frankfurt am Main. Upcoming shows this year include Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart Fffredrich Gallery, Frankfurt am Main and Kunstverein, Wiesbaden.⁠

Álvaro Guilherme was born in Angola, Africa, in 1992. At just eight years old, he arrived in Portugal where he performed street art from an early age, which led him later to fully dedicate his life to painting.

Álvaro's art captures the essence and spirit of the moment, rooted in the urban environment. His body of work constitutes a passage through and past the complex visual landscapes from daily life city routine. His concepts translate an early record of the emerging practice of Neo Brut.

Álvaro seeks the total form of the creative act, the driving force that pulls his painting towards a raw and free, but also tender and meticulous expression. His body of work gains strength through the absence of labels, and therein finds the freedom to be reborn, to assert itself and, simultaneously to self-reflect while observing the external setting.

In Álvaro's painting, there are no comfort zones:
“There's no other way, painting is like poetry and I act as an extension of these values.”

Bastian Gehbauer is a Berlin based artist working with photography. His work deals with rooms and details without focusing on the illustration of the architecture or objects, but rather on the emotional quality beyond the explicitly shown. Within the past years, his practice has evolved from describing the conversion of spaces, to their human purpose relation (over their rudimentary construction), to finally a growing abstraction.⁠⁠
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In his carefully composed photographs, an expression of silence and reduction can often be found.⁠⁠

"I want to create images of 'mental spaces' that are not referring to a precise place but rather an emotional state. I see my works also as a stage for a possible projection of the observer."⁠⁠
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After his studies at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin, Bastian graduated from Leipzig Academy of fine Arts (HGB) where he studied photography in the class of Heidi Specker.⁠⁠
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Bastian’s works were shown in solo and group shows such as “Grand Infinity Pool vol.III” at Folkwang Museum (DE), Photobastei Zürich (CH), SAP Kunsthalle Walldorf (DE) and Pavlov´s Dog Galerie Berlin (DE). He is among the nominees of Hans-Purrmann Art Prize, 2021.⁠⁠

Billy Bultheel is a composer and performance-maker based in Berlin and Brussels. His practice combines heavy electronics with medieval and baroque polyphony and subverts the traditional forms of musical concerts into choreographed performances. His ensemble exists out of dancers and classical and metal musicians.
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Amongst his latest works are 'Songs for the Contract' presented at folia.app (2021), 'When Doves Cry' at the Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin, 2019), 'Spat from My Mouth, a piano concerto' at KW (Berlin, 2019), ‘The Minutes of Olomouc’ at (PAF, CZ, 2020).
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Billy has been a collaborator of the German performance artist Anne Imhof as a composer and performer, working on Imhof's exhibition-as-opera ‘Angst’ (2016), ‘Faust’ (2017) and ‘Sex’ (2019). Other notable collaborators are the artist collective New Forms of Live, the choreographer Michele Rizzo and William Forsythe.  

Billy has a BA in music from the Royal Conservatory of The Netherlands and an MA in Choreography and Performance at the Justus-Liebig University, Germany.

In her multidisciplinary work, Berlin based artist Hannah Hallermann links clear, essential forms to complex social issues. Her sculptures that she builds in her own studio evoke an intense relation between body and objects, as well as powerful dynamics between the often disparate materials. Myths and symbols seem to drift through time and transfigure into contemporary form and relevance.⁠⁠

Hannah's sculptures act as tools for social transformation – embracing conflict and the paradox but refusing stagnation. The works may challenge the viewer’s imagination of how to relate to and how to use these tools, but also spark conversation about a reality of unequal opportunities. Hannah’s art supports ambiguity and a freer, less restricted kind of social interaction: more confusing, more chaotic, less reasonable, more dirty, more open, more vulnerable.⁠⁠
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Her work is featured in the major presentation “Still Alive” at Albertinum, Dresden. She is part of the Sammlung Hoffmann and the SKD (Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden). Hallermann has recently been awarded with the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Sonderstipendium des Landes Berlin.⁠⁠
-Text by Saskia Trebing

For his imagery of urns, severed limbs, cut fruit, tangled plant tendrils, dinnerware, celestial form allegorical animals, Czech painter Igor Hosnedl  delves into what he perceives to be a kind of Jungian “collective unconscious”—a vast memory-stock of symbols and meanings that convey a deeper understanding about human nature and existence. We are not singular, Igor’s paintings seem to tell us; we are part of a greater whole.

Igor’s work offers glimpses of a perceptual experience that is beyond the quotidian observation of the world and of ourselves. Beyond the facades created by his rounded archways there lie rooms steeped in perpetual dusk, where symbols and figures are backlit by an unearthly glow. The arm of a shadowy figure reaches out from the painting’s depths, an open wound in place of a hand. Silhouetted, phantom limbs, living plants metamorphic creaturesconduct strange, ritualistic displays just beyond our frame of vision. Life arrangements adorn the foreground; oranges and figs, spoons and bowls lie forgotten, as though abandoned by one who sat down to a meal only to abruptly rise and depart. This iconography of dining is attended often in Igor’s images by concepts of shame, anxiety and self-consciousness context of eating, of sitting down to dinner.

Another important element in Igor’s work is drawing. His figures and strewn objects are sharply demarcated, either by the precise definition of their contours with vividly contrasting or else by a series of deft, bold lines that gesture towards details without inclining to realism. Here and there, Igor employs his draughtsmanship to pick out a few strands of hair, the curve of an ankle, a dimpled back, an eye, a set of genitals. When this more illustrative style converges, in Igor’s images, with his painterly tendency to construct forms according to chromatic gradations, shading highlights, the whole becomes a play between depth and flatness. This optical variation implies a multiplicity of perspectives all existing in a single visual frame. Within thatreality, too, the viewer is forced to question the authenticity of the scene they are witnessing—is it avase? Or is it merely the cut-out shape of a vase, held up by an unseen hand to trick our eyes andhold our gaze? For Igor, the object and its shadow, the real and the false, the thing itself and theimagined have equal importance within the pictorial space. In his work, what is true and what weperceive to be true are no longer separate, for the fleeting perceptions of the subconscious arecaptured there, in form and substance, on the canvas. The space of Igor’s paintings is a space inwhich different planes of reality are so that the world we see and the world we dream one and thesame. Having studied in Prague, Igor is now based in Berlin, where he is currently working ondeveloping the system of enigmatic symbols and cryptic meanings that drive his practice. He speaksto us here about the things that stimulate his creative impulse, the importance for him of mixing hisown pigments, the relationship between his visual works and other disciplines, and his uniqueunderstanding of the pictorial space
-Text by Rebecca Irvin

Igor (*Úherské Hradiště, 1988) is a 2013 graduate of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, & studied in the drawing atelier of Jitka Svobodova & painting studio of Vladimír Skrepl/Jiří Kovanda. He has exhibited in solo & group exhibitions at Ribot Gallery (with Vera Kox), Milan, 2020; Nod Gallery (solo), Prague, 2019; FAIT Gallery (solo), Brno, 2019; EIGEN+ART Lab (solo), Berlin, 2019; VDIFF, DUMB, House of the Lords of Kunšt at Brno, 2019; Downs & Ross (solo), NY, New York, 2018; Horizont Gallery (solo), Budapest, 2018; After Late for Pro: Office work, Meetfactory, Prague, 2017; VOGL (with Klára Hosnedlová), hunt kastner, Prague, 2016; & Galerie Jeleni (solo), Foundation & Center for Contemporary Arts in Prague, 2016. He currently lives & works in Berlin, with his wife, also a 2013 AVU graduate, Klára Hosnedlová, with whom he often collaborates.⁠

Lito Kattou is a visual artist born in Nicosia, Cyprus in 1990. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London with an MA in Sculpture andthe Athens School of Fine Arts.

Part of an emergent continuum of production, Lito’s works negotiate understandings of materiality and subjectivity through a composition of practices, spanning from digital fabrication to thermochemical elaborations. Her works engage with the sculptural potentiality of flatness, processes of embodiment and the transfigurations of material properties within the margins of space and time. Her practice raises questions around the relationship between humans, animals, the environment and technology as well as on theissue of otherness and symbiosis.

Lito is the recipient of the Ducato Prize 2019 and the New Positions Award for Art Cologne 2018 and she has been the invited artist at the Fondation Thalie Residency 2021, ART HUB Copenhagen Residency 2020, the PCAI Residency 2019 and the 89plus Google Residency 2017.

Recent solo shows have been presented at Galeria Duarte Sequeira, Braga; T293, Rome; Tile Projects, Milan; Artothek, Cologne; Polansky Gallery, Prague; Benaki Museum, Athens; Point Centre for Contemporary Art and she has participated in various group shows at art spaces, galleries and museums including Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon, Muzeum Ludwig, Budapest, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, Komplot, Brussels, Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis, Benaki Museum and Deste Foundation, Athens.

Lito's works are included in prominent international and private collections as the Dakis Joannou Collection, the collection of the National Bank of Greece, the State collection of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Cyprus, the collection of Deutsche Telekom.

Lito is represented by T293, Rome and Galeria Duarte Sequeira, Braga.

Miriam Kongstad (b. 1991, DK) is an artist based in Berlin and Copenhagen. Expanding from a background in choreography and performance, her practice is anchored in investigations of embodiment and the human body, whilst materialising as images, installations, performance, sculpture and sound. Her work takes place in a social realm, visually depicting cultural and political structures surrounding the human body, with specific attention to habitual and naturalised movements and their identifications in popular culture. Miriam's work questions how currents and societies are changing bodies and ideals; and how bodies and ideals are changing societies, by exploring the metaphysical, organic, social and spiritual aspects of inhabiting a body - the extended experience of being flesh.

Miriam studied choreography and performance at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT) and completed her MFA from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions and presentations include The National Gallery of Denmark (DK), Het HEM (NL), Kunstfort Bij Vijfhuizen (NL), KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces (DK), Tanznacht Berlin (DE), Kunsthal Aarhus (DK), MMAG Foundation (JO), Fundación Botín (ES), Hamburger Bahnhof (DE), PPL (USA) and Sophiensaele (DE). Her performance piece Worker’s Choice has recently been acquired by The National Gallery of Denmark and will be presented live during 2021.

"I was taught to fear darkness and at the same time taught that I could never understand the light. I explore the relationship and implications of the movement meditation and the beauty in the dichotomy of light, at times through an unfiltered childlike lens or appeal to an emptying or filling sensation. My interdisciplinary practices include sound, ephemeral performance, video, sculpture, photography and existence. I seek to bring life into awareness, whether it is my own, the observed or that of the viewer."⁠⁠

Seeking to live in and learn through love, light, and playfulness. Nahir Francis is a soul within the human experience currently existing between Philadelphia, Berlin, and Amsterdam. They work in whatever medium available to best achieve the purpose and intent of the expression or message. ⁠Their art making includes photography, collage, installation, performance and video.⁠⁠

Ryo Koike is a Japanese self-taught painter based in Berlin. His artistic practice entails a translation of inner worlds, which include emotional, preconscious and translucid realities as well as charming arrangements and figurations. Ryo's artistic practice permeates preconscious realms, fairy tales and the emotional movement of mind that translates into surreal landscapes and fusions that combine beings of this world and that of the supernatural.⁠⁠

The painting itself becomes a shift gesture in which the subject dissolves, and the paper absorbs the painter as if he were the essence of fluidity, temperature and colour. A dark, enchanted and multi-layered world is interspersed with recurring themes and motifs, each signifying distinct worlds within the body of Ryo’s work.⁠
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Within its frameworks, fantasy and reality coalesce–they spark, transfix and interweave collective yet deeply personal imagination.⁠

"In my work art and activism flirt with each other. I initiated research labs with temporary groups that cuddle in the street, consolidated under the title “Gangs of performative activism”. My methodology builds on embodied and representative attributes of protests and on the possibility of turning 'being together' into a tool for empowerment. Through performance, video and textile sculpture I investigate the strength and perils of anonymity, communal bodies and collective identity in public space and how we can embody sensitive ways of relating to our surroundings, informed by its political and historical complexity."

Sunny Pfalzer *1991 is a performance and visual artist. They studied fine arts and history in Mexico City and Vienna, where they graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts. They live and work between their  hometown Ternitz, Vienna and Berlin. Sunny Pfalzer’s work was recently presented at KW Berlin, Shedhalle Zurich and Les Urbaines Lausanne. Sunny had been active in activist groups such as Do Demo and Burschenschaft Hysteria. Sunny collaborated with Isabel Lewis, Young Boy Dancing Group, Rebecca Korang and pIAR Ghana.

Yasmin Bassir is an Iranian artist based in Berlin. She lives and works between Berlin and Tehran. She studied Visual Communication at Tehran University of Arts, Iran and graduated from Berlin University of the Arts in 2019.

Yasmin’s body of works include drawings, sculptures and Installation which are articulated around multiple long-term historical and existential interrogations and research.

Through her artistic process Yasmin seeks for traces while leaving her own traces behind and casts an archeological relation to the world. She constantly negotiates the tension between a collective and worldwide appropriation and her individual and intimate interpretation.

Yasmin’s work was shown at institutions such as Galerie Wedding, Berlin, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Hengam Island Beach, Iran, Kunsthaus Dresden. She is a recipient of the DAAD Grant, Berlin for final project from the University of Fine Arts Berlin and Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt.

The structures and aesthetics of power embedded in political ideologies form the core of Zuzanna Czebatul’s work, which examines power relations through artifacts and decor. As a sculptor, Zuzanna concentrates on the visual seductiveness of contemporary and archaic objects and architectural elements, as well as the language of interior and graphic design. Using comparative methodology, the artist reveals the kinships and conflicts between them. Her work is influenced by the aesthetics of ancient sculptures, modern forms of display, as well as the club culture of the nineties.

Zuzanna (*1986, Miedzyrzecz/PL) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Städelschule Frankfurt in 2013, and later attended the MFA Program at Hunter College, New York as Fulbright Fellow. Czebatul has had solo exhibitions at GGM1 Municipal Gallery Gdansk; CCA FUTURA Prague; CCA Zamek Ujazdowski Warsaw; MINI/Goethe–Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, NYC and at the CAC Synagogue de Delme. This year her works will be included in group exhibitions at Museum Morsbroich; Baltic Triennale; Berlinische Galerie and Athens Biennale. In June opens Zuzanna's solo exhibition at Kunstpalais Erlangen alongside the publication of a first monograph.