Short bios

Lizza May David (b. 1975, Philippines) lives and works in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Lyon and Media Arts in Berlin and works on issues of memory and nationhood. Her research-based practice ranges from video to installation and explores strategies of image production, labour and ideological worlds. Since 2007 she has collaborated as a member of the artist group Global Alien. Recent exhibitions include: On Surface, Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila (2012); Being on the move: Reflections on migration, Litmus Community Space, Seoul (2011); Nothing to Declare, Blanc Compound, Manila (2011);  Endlos umstritten, ewig schön, D21 Kunstraum, Leipzig (2011); Beyond Re:production, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin (2011).

Gio Dì Sera

Born in Italy, Gió Di Sera has been based in Berlin since 1986. Since 1984, Di Sera has been working as a multimedia artist involved in a number of international solo and group shows and performances. In 1992 he created the project ‘To stay here is my right posse’ against racism and intolerance in co-operation with the youth centre Naunynritze. In 2007 he initiated and co-founded the acclaimed youth project Streetunivercity (aka SUB), in Berlin-Kreuzberg; in 2012 he co-implemented the Juniorvercity as integral to SUB. Di Sera has been the recipient of some distinguished awards such as the Mete-Eksi award (1993 and 1994), the Freiherr-vom Stein award of the Töpfer Foundation for Societal Innovation (2009); he was also appointed as Ambassador for Democracy and Tolerance by the Union (Bündnis) Democracy and Tolerance.

Ntone Edjabe is the founder and editor of Chimurenga, a pan-African publication of writing, art and politics. He also co-edits the African Cities Reader and co-curates the Pan African Space Station. He also works as a DJ and artistic director of Tagore's jazz bar in Cape Town. He lives between Douala and Cape Town. 

Writer and curator Marie-Hélène Gutberlet (*1966) studied Art History, Philosophy and Film Studies in Frankfurt/Main and Basel (Ph.D.). Gutberlet was a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Frankfurt. Gutberlet is co-founder of the experimental film programme ‘reel to real’ (www.realtoreal.de/) based in Frankfurt. She also co-initiated the current project Migration & Media (www.migrationandmedia.com/) with platforms in Frankfurt/Main, Bamako and Johannesburg.  Gutberlet has numerous publications, magazine contributions and editorial work in relation to African Cinema, experimental and documentary films and film in artistic contexts under her belt, as follows: among others

•             Shoe Shop, co-edited with Cara Snyman (2012; accompanying the Shoe Shop Exhibition in Johannesburg; www.shoeshopproject.co.za/)

•             Die Kunst der Migration, Aktuelle Positionen zum europäisch-afrikanischen Diskurs (Material, Gestaltung, Kritik), co-edited with Sissy Helff (2011)

Patrick Mudekereza is an author and a cultural operator from Lubumbashi in DR Congo. With Sammy Baloji, photographer, he created and he runs the association Picha ASBL, which works in the field of visual arts and participates in advocacy for the status of artists in Congolese civil society. He is involved in many artistic activities, initiated and participated in the implementation of several events and structures in visual art, music, theatre, literature and cinema. In parallel to these actions of creation and cultural management, he studied civil engineering and graduated in industrial chemistry from the Polytechnic Faculty of the University of Lubumbashi. He has been professionally engaged in the cultural sector since 2004, when he worked as an editor of cultural magazine Nzenze, general secretary of Vicanos and Project Manager of forum citoyen de la jeunesse organized with the support of the European Union. He was involved in the administration and programming of visual arts in Halle de l’Etoile, French Cultural Centre in Lubumbashi. He also leads the biennial of image arts Picha, the third edition of which will be held in October 2012.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim is a writer, filmmaker and cultural historian who grew up in Ghana, Germany and the UK. After studying Russian Literature and Politics, she worked for the Eastern European Section of United Nations in New York. She returned to the UK to do an MA in African Art History and received an AHRC award for doctoral research into historical aesthetic and philosophical concepts of the Akan in Ghana. Her works deal with the construction of narratives and identity, as well as language and the play of power. She has presented it across various platforms: She has created books and films for exhibitions at The New Museum, New York; Neue Gesellschaft fürBildende Kunst, Berlin, and The Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; has written for publications, such as African Metropolitan Architecture, The National Geographic, frieze, and The Statesman; has presented her scholarship at the Universities of Legon, Oxford, Cambridge and London; curated exhibitions and events at museums and institutions including The Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Festival Hall and Liverpool Biennial; and has broadcast for HBO, BBC and Vox Africa.

Didier Schaub,

Cultural producer and curator.

•             Co-founder of doual’art, a centre for contemporary art in Douala, Cameroon, in 1991. Artistic director of the centre.

•             Jury member of the Forum des Arts, Libreville 2002 and 2003, co-curator at the Dakar Biennial 2004, president of the jury for the International Symposium of Monumental Sculpture in Libreville 2005.

•             Consultant for the European Commission and head of contemporary art department of Central Africa Proculture Program 2000-2004, curator and member of the sculpture jury for the 6th Francophony Games, 27th September-6th October 2009, Beirut, Lebanon.

•             Artistic director and co-curator of the first edition of the Salon Urbain de Douala, SUD 2007, an international public art festival.

SUD 2007 is also a triennial urban programme of cultural and artistic activities directed and designed by doual’art. By transforming Douala into a case study, SUD facilitates site-specific productions, documents art initiatives within the urban space and gives international visibility to the most experimental projects produced in Cameroon.

•             Artistic director and co-curator of the second edition of the Salon Urbain de Douala, SUD 2010, and the third edition, SUD 2013, planned in December 2013.

•             Last publications:

- KokoKomégné, Survivre et frapper,

Editions du CCF Blaise Cendrars, 2006, Douala.

- Biographie du Prince René Douala Manga-Bell, 

AfricAvenir/Exchange & Dialogue, 2007, Berlin.

- Douala in Translation,

Episode Publishers, 2007, Rotterdam.

- Guide touristique de Douala, historique et artistique,

Doual’art, 2009, Douala.

- Trimestriel «Liquid »,

Editoriaux, de janvier 2009 à décembre 2010, Doual’art, Douala.

- Ato Malinda, l’Ondine,

Contact Zones NRB-04, Goethe Institut Kenya, 2011, Nairobi.

Bisi Silva is an independent curator and the founder and director of Centre for Contemporary Art,Lagos (CCA,Lagos), which opened in December 2007.  She was co-curator of J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere:Moments of Beauty, Kiasma, Helsinki (April-Nov2011). She was co-curator for the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece, ‘Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty’, September 2009. In 2006 Silva was one of the curators for the Dakar Biennale in Senegal.  At CCA, Lagos, she has curated Fela, Ghariokwu Lemi and The Art of the Album Cover, 2007,  Ndidi Dike, Waka-into-bondage: The Last ¾ Mile (2008), ‘Like A Virgin...’, Lucy Azubuike(NIG) and Zanele Muholi (SA)(2009), J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere; Sartorial Moments and The Nearness of Yesterday (2010) and All We Ever Wanted (2011). Silva has participated in several international conferences and symposia and written essays for many publications as well as for international art magazines and journals such as Artforum, M Metropolis, Third Text, The Exhibitionist, and is on the editorial board of N Paradoxa, an international feminist art journal.   In 2010 she was the Independent Curators International (ICI) inaugural touring curator. She has been the recipient of several prestigious international fellowships and residencies including Clark/Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at Clark Art Institute, MA, 2011, IASPIS Curatorial Residency, Sweden 2010, HIAP/FRAME, Curatorial Residency, Finland, 2006 &2009. She is a recipient of the Getty International Travel Grant to the 100th CAA Conference 2012 as well as the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Programme, Italy, in July 2012.

Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London,and is a fellow of the ZEIT-Stiftung, Hamburg. She is currently completing her PhD research about cultural diversity in the arts policies and precarious and racialised artistic labour in the case of the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin. Her research interests include Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, Cultural Policy, Postcolonial Studies and Art and Performance Theory.

Françoise VERGÈS is currently consulting at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is president of the Comité pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage (www.cpmhe.fr).

Françoise Vergès was an activist for feminist and human rights and a writer in France before getting her degree at Berkeley in Political Theory. She has written on vernacular practices of memories, on slavery and the economy of predation, the ambiguities of French abolitionism, French republican colonialism, colonial and postcolonial psychiatry in the French colonial empire, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, French postcoloniality, postcolonial museography, the routes of migration and processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world.  She has worked with filmmakers and artists – Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Arnaud Ngatcha – and was a project advisor for Documenta 11 in 2002. Between 2003 and 2010, Françoise Vergès was Head of Scientific and Cultural Development and Program of Maison des civilizations et de l’unité réunionnaise (www.mcur.re). Launched in 1999 by Reunion Island Regional Council, funded by Reunion Island Regional Council, the French State and the European Community, the MCUR’s objectives were: to valorize intangible culture, the millenary world of exchanges and encounters in the Indian Ocean between Asia, Africa, the Muslim World and Europe, the processes and practices of creolization the dynamic of centres and peripheries through history, and cultural creativity in the contact zones of migrations. Françoise Vergès wrote with Crapanin Marimoutou the founding report on the scientific and cultural objectives of the project, followed the architectural contest, and worked closely with the architects and scenographers. She developed the notions of “Museum without Objects” and of “Six Worlds”: African, Malagasy, European, Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, which have made the indiaoceanic world. In March 2010, the newly elected conservative majority at Reunion Island Regional Council voted to withdraw its investment in the MCUR project and to stop all actions of the MCUR team.

Among her most recent publications:

•             L’Homme prédateur. Ce que nous enseigne l’esclavage sur notre temps (2011).

•             Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française avec Nicolas Bancel, Florence Berbault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubakeur, et Achille Mbembe (2010).

•             “Figures of a Superfluous Humanity,” Exhibition Jardin d’amour, YinkaShonibare, Musée du Quai Branly, 2007.

•             La Mémoire enchaînée. Questions sur l’esclavage. Paris: Albin Michel, 2006. Françoise Seligman Award against Racism.

•             La république coloniale: essai sur une utopie, with Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Paris: Hachette Littérature, collection Pluriel, 2006.

•             Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai. Entretiens avec Aimé Césaire. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005.

•             Catalog, Isaac Julien’s Exhibition “Phantom Creole”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2005.

•             Amarres. Creolisations India-océanes, with Carpanin Marimoutou (2004° transl. in English Moorings (2009)).

With collaboration as a recurring approach to his practice, Kemang Wa Lehulere has worked across disciplines from Theatre, Radio, Television and the Fine Arts. He works in various mediums ranging from drawing and performance to writing. He is the co-founder of Gugulective (2006), the Center for Historical Reenactments and a member of the Dead Revolutionaries Club and non non collective.

With collaboration as a recurring approach to his practice, Kemang Wa Lehulere has worked across disciplines from Theatre, Radio, Television and the Fine Arts. He works in various mediums ranging from drawing and performance to writing. He is the co-founder of Gugulective (2006), the Center for Historical Reenactments and a member of the Dead Revolutionaries Club and non non collective.