Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian of 20th-century aesthetics, working on the interfaces of visual art, (left-wing/socialist) political thought, and historical transition during 20th-century decolonization in South Asia and across transnational formations in the Global South. She is an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. 

She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her writings have appeared in multiple peer-reviewed journals, including Third Text, British Art Studies, South Asian Studies, etc.

Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research. Colin's research focuses on the social, political and ecological dimensions of heritage and museums in the past and the present. He is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is co-editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues.

Christopher A. Nixon (PhD) studied philosophy and literature. Since 2013, he has taught and researched at universities and curated museum exhibitions. Nixon recently substituted for the Professorship for Social Inequality and Social Policy at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences. In 2023, he published his book Looking Back. Epiphany and Aesthetics Postcolonial; in 2024, an issue of the journal kritische berichte titled Visual Justice. In 2025, he will work as a guest researcher at the Zurich University of the Arts and start a senior fellowship at the University of Münster. He specialises in aesthetics, visual studies, and postcolonial, critical, and political theory.

Agnes Rameder completed her PhD at the Department of Art History at the University of Zurich in 2023. She wrote her MA thesis on contemporary photography in Tehran at the University of Vienna. Her research interests and publications include the intersection of violence and images, political images, memory and photography, and the decolonization of art history. She has also worked as a freelance curator of contemporary art since 2017 and is an assistant curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin. Her first monograph, Picturing the (Un)Dead in Beirut, was published in 2024.

Matthias De Groof is a Professor in Film Studies and Visual Cultures at the University of Antwerp and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in Film studies at the University of Amsterdam. After completing his thesis on Eurocentrism in Philosophy, he researched African cinema and postcolonial film theory at the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts as a Fulbright scholar; at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; at the University of Bayreuth’s Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and at the Waseda University in Tokyo. His works include an edited book Lumumba in the Arts (Leuven University Press), which reached a list of the top 100 ‘books to escape the news’ (LitHub), and the films Under The White Mask (2020), Palimpsest of the Africa Museum (2019). His films have been presented at the Berlinale, IFFR, Doclisboa and at New York Times’ Op Docs Channel.

María Suárez is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Her PhD research focuses on contemporary participatory art and heritage practices and their engagement in processes of ecological reparation within contexts of social and environmental conflicts in Latin America. She holds two BA degrees, in Philosophy and in Arts, from the University of Los Andes in Bogotá. She holds a Research Master in Arts, Media and Literary Studies from the University of Groningen. Her research has focused on art, memory-making processes and reparation in contexts of conflict and violence with a particular focus on Latin America and Colombia. 

Andrea Zarza Canova is a curator and archivist. Their practice reinterprets historical sound recordings within political, social, and cultural histories through exhibitions, listening sessions, and audio publications. Currently pursuing a practice-based, AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Nottingham with Nottingham Contemporary, Andrea has worked as a curator at the British Library's sound archive, focusing on preserving and sharing the collection through artist residencies and broadcasts on NTS Radio. She has curated exhibitions at Southbank Centre, Rhubaba Gallery, nGbK, and CentroCentro, and co-directs Mana, a record label publishing works with an archival and contemporary sound.

Deiara Kouto (she/her) is a Berlin-based researcher and freelancer, now employed at Dekoloniale Erinnerungskultur in der Stadt as a project assistant to commercial management. Her research deals with the production of narratives and history, as well as questions and discourses in the art and cultural field. She worked at Gropius Bau in the Curatorial and Outreach department for two years. Kouto is doing a bi-national PhD at KNUST University (GHA) and Leuphana University (GE).

Tony P. Jacob obtained an MA from the Royal College of Art. As an Assistant Editor at The Marg Foundation, a prominent academic publisher in South Asian art history based in Mumbai, India, he specialises in researching the history of photography within the South Asian context, spanning the nineteenth to the twentieth century. His work emphasises a commitment to exploring photography not just as an image but as a physical object through multisensory approaches to enhance access within art history for marginalised communities, including those from disabled, gendered, and racial backgrounds. In 2024, he presented a paper at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and has a forthcoming article in the peer-reviewed journal Philosophy of Photography in 2025.

Caroline Spitzner is a PhD candidate in Art and Philosophy at Radboud University (The Netherlands). She holds a Research Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology: Sociocultural Transformation from Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). She works as an Assistant Curator for the Art Foundation Niet Normaal (The Netherlands). Her research focuses on contemporary art exhibitions, with an emphasis on feminism and (de)coloniality, bodies and performativities, more-than-human relations and environmental concerns.

Mariam Elnozahy is a curator, researcher, and writer. She currently serves as the Artistic Director of Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden, where her program “Sacred Spaces” invites questions of religion and society in the realm of artistic production. She previously curated exhibitions in Cairo at the Townhouse Gallery, as well as in London, Oslo, Uppsala, Amsterdam, Jeddah, and Basel. Her work has explored histories of globalisation, development, and resource extraction. She has been published in Frieze Magazine, The Markaz Review, Hyperallergic, and MadaMasr. She was in residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL, from 2022-2023, investigating the archive of Royal Dutch Shell to understand the relationship between arts and extractive industries in the twentieth century.

Nav Haq is a curator and writer based in Antwerp. Haq is presently Associate Director at M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp – where he is responsible for the artistic programme. He is also an editor at Afterall journal. His practice focuses on contemporary questions of equality, as well as forms for progressive internationalism for the 21st century, particularly in the context of Eurasian multipolarity, and how to embed them within institutional and curatorial reflection. He previously held curatorial positions at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Gasworks, London, and has organised many solo exhibitions with artists including Otobong Nkanga, Shilpa Gupta, Haegue Yang and Imogen Stidworthy, as well as significant overviews of work by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Joseph Beuys and Laure Prouvost. At M HKA he co-curated the group exhibition Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics (2014), Energy Flash – The Rave Movement (2016), and MONOCULTURE – A Recent History (2020). With Pascal Gielen he edited the book The Aesthetics of Ambiguity – Understanding and Addressing Monoculture (Valiz, 2021). In 2012, he was recipient of the Independent Vision Award for Curatorial Achievement, awarded by Independent Curators International, New York.

Lara Khaldi is a cultural worker based between Occupied Jerusalem, Palestine and Amsterdam, Netherlands. She was a member of the curatorial team of documenta fifteen/Lumbung (2019-2022) and has been working as artistic director of de Appel, Amsterdam since January 2023. She has co-curated various exhibitions over the years, some of which are the Jerusalem show 5 & 6 and Sharjah Biennial 13. She taught at and was the head of the Media Studies Program at Bard (Al Quds Campus), Jerusalem 2017-2020. She is a co-founding member of the School of Intrusions and Question of Funding collectives. 

Mehmet Berkay Sülek is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Amsterdam. His PhD project investigates the historiographical challenges posed by large-scale exhibitions such as biennials and explores why Warburg’s understanding of art history and culture, based on his concept of Wanderstrassen der Kultur, should be brought into conversation with contemporary art history. He is also the co-founder of PNSA (Postgraduate Network for the Study of Art Historiography).

Liang-Kai Yu is a PhD researcher based between Rotterdam, Maastricht, and Taipei. His academic writings have appeared in Sexualities and the Journal of Material Culture. In 2020, he co-curated Survival of the Exceptional at Tainan Art Museum. In 2022, he co-founded Limestone Books Maastricht, an art publishing space dedicated to underrepresented voices. He is currently a participant at Jan van Eyck Academie and completing his PhD at Maastricht University, focusing on queer intersectional curatorial strategies in contemporary art institutions.

Assel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She received her PhD from the University of Leeds for a practice-led project that looked at art as a medium of memory, focusing on post-Soviet, postcolonial Central Asia. Her research interests include haptic visuality, embodiment, affect and trauma. Her works have been exhibited and screened in venues such as the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), QAGOMA (Brisbane), MillCHAT: Centre for Heritage, Art and Textile (Hong Kong), documenta 15 (Kassel), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), among others.

Caroline Deodat (1987, FR/MRU/BE) is a visual artist, filmmaker and researcher. Mixing ethnographic cinema and fiction, Caroline Deodat explores alienation and the archiving process, fictionality and spectral dimensions of moving images. Through her work, she gives body and sensations to her own research in anthropology while intentionally disrupting the cartographies drawn by academic disciplines. Her work has been shown at the Reina Sofa Museum in Madrid, in international festivals such as Jih.lava International Documentary Film Festival, at the Sandretto ReRebaudengo Foundation in Turin, at the Musee Theodore Monod – IFAN in Dakar, at the 14th Bamako Encounters and soon at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Steyn Bergs is a critic and an art historian and works as an Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary art at Utrecht University. His current research focuses on the aesthetics of infrastructure in contemporary art, as well as on artistic practices that address uneven development and trouble linear conceptions of time and history. His texts have appeared in numerous magazines, book publications, and journals, including Third Text, Radical Philosophy, Afterimage, Art Journal, and the Journal of African Cinemas. Additionally, he frequently collaborates with artists on various projects, and is a founding member of MAX, a self-organized space for artists, designers, and research practitioners in Brussels.

Florian Göttke is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and educator. He investigates the functioning of public images and their relationship to social memory and politics, combining visual modes of research (collecting, close reading, and image montage) with academic research. Göttke received his PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam about the peculiar practice to hang or burn effigies—scarecrow-like puppets representing politicians—as a form of political protest. His dissertation was published under the title Burning Images: A History of Effigy Protests by the Amsterdam publisher Valiz in September 2021. He teaches Artistic Research, Art and Activism, and Contemporary Art at the department of Art History, University of Amsterdam.

Ingrid Jones, a Toronto-based curator and creative director, integrates collaborative projects and decolonial methodologies to examine the erasure, commodification and unseen labour of Blackness within institutions. She has designed masterclasses on photographic best practices for Sheridan Institute and lectured at Toronto Metropolitan University on design for innovation and activism. Ingrid has curated exhibitions, projects and programs for the Doris McCarthy Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in Computer Arts Projects UK, Vice Berlin, Photografie, Waddington's and Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education. Ingrid is advancing her PhD in Art History at UofT.

Nancy Demerdash is an Associate Professor of Art History at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where she teaches an array of courses in art history and visual culture. Having previously taught at Albion College, she earned her doctorate from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University and an SMArchS from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. From 2016 to 2021, she served as an assistant editor at the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Her work has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and publications, such as Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art, Journal of North African Studies, Journal of Arabian Studies, and Journal of the African Literature Association, among others. She is preparing her book on the intersections of decolonisation and development in postwar Tunisian architecture, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press.

Pragya Sharma is an AHRC Technē-funded Doctoral Researcher in the History of Design (2023-27) at the University of Brighton (UK). She is working on unravelling stories of knitting from the Indian subcontinent while teasing out the finer concepts of domesticity, gender and labour within the craft practice. She was previously engaged as a design academic for over six years while pursuing various research projects that entailed fieldwork, working with artisans and ethnographic writing and documentation.

Rodrigo D'Alcantara is a Brazilian visual artist, researcher, and curator. Currently a PhD Candidate and part-time faculty in Art History at Concordia University, his studies are supported by the Concordia University Graduate Fellowship and the Concordia International Tuition Award of Excellence. He holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a BFA from the University of Brasilia. His artistic and academic research focuses on counter-hegemonic narratives, syncretism, dissident mythologies, and queer experiences, with international circulation in countries like Argentina, Canada, France, Italy, and the United States. Additionally, D'Alcântara has been working as a Research Assistant in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University since 2022 and has curated projects at cultural institutions such as SBC Gallery and Oxygen Art Centre.

Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Collective.

Amy Nygaard, PhD, is an assistant professor of Art History and director of Museum Studies at the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Professor Nygaard’s research interests include postcolonial aesthetics, contemporary art of the global south, and trauma studies. She currently holds a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Teaching Fellowship from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her forthcoming essay, “In the Shadow of Humanity Monsters and Mimicry in the Works of Jane Alexander”, will appear in the May 2025 issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. 

Pansee Abou ElAtta is an Egyptian visual artist, curator, and researcher. Her work examines themes of representation, migration, archives, and political struggle. She is an artist-researcher as part of the NWA-funded Pressing Matter research project, which investigates the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past and its afterlives, as well as a current research fellow as part of inherit, BMBF-funded Käte Hamburger Kolleg, examining addresses historical, contemporary and possible future transformations in heritage. Her research and art practice center is community-based responses to colonial projects of collection, display, and study.

Richenda Grazette has worked in Montreal’s nonprofit sector for 10 years, in both community and philanthropy, before her current position as Coordinator, Community Leadership & Capacity at the SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation. In her role, she leads SHIFT’s participatory granting program and governance system. She is also currently pursuing a Master's Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies at Concordia University, engaging “hauntology” to study how grassroots nonprofits attempt to build utopia through their internal structures. Her passions centre around exploring transformative, iterative, and creative approaches to organisational behaviour, resources (re)distribution and evaluation.

Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator and a PhD student in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University. She is interested in the analysis of contemporary art in post-independent Central Asia, viewing it as a window to explore the global turn in art histories. Alexandra curated exhibitions and programmed festivals in Almaty, Kazakhstan. In spring 2023, she curated Suture: Reimagining the Ornament as a part of the large group exhibition Clouds, Power and Ornament – Roving Central Asia at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile in Hong Kong. Alexandra is a co-editor of Stalinism in Kazakhstan: History, Memory, and Representation (Lexington Books, 2021). Her chapters appeared in The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan, edited by Marlene Laruelle, and The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia, edited by Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat.

Intizor Otaniyozova is a multidisciplinary artist based in Central Asia. The themes of her research are identity, ecology, feminism and Beyoncé. She participated in exhibitions in different countries in Asia and Europe. She also published in literature volumes. "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Side Chicks" is her debut feature-length documentary film in development.

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labour. Her work involves photography, film, performance, installation, publishing, and curating.  Hajjar was a recipient of the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award and received an honourable mention for the 2021 Emerging Digital Artists Award. Her film Don’t Forget the Water won the Jury Award and the Audience Choice Award for Best Manitoba Short Film at Gimli Film Festival. Hajjar curates the SWANA Film Festival, presenting Southwest Asian and North African short films from around the world.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is a Professor of Contemporary Art History at Concordia University. Prior to her appointment at Concordia, Dr Jim was Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Centre A. She also convened the international 2004 conference and exhibition Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas, whose 20th anniversary will be marked and revisited as part of the new CURC’s research activities to interrogate global Asian diasporic art and curatorial developments. Dr Jim is also founding co-editor-in-chief of the international journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), published by Brill (Leiden, NL) in association with the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art (Concordia University) and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute (New York University). She is a member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient in 2022 of UAAC’s inaugural Award for the advancement of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist and filmmaker of Mongolian roots. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, such as at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (USA), Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (USA), Sundance Film Festival (USA), TIFF and TIFF Canada's Top Ten, Annecy International Animation Festival (France), Biennial VIDEONALE at Kunstmuseum Bonn - Museum of Painting and Contemporary Art Bonn (Germany), OSTRALE Biennale (Germany), Anthology Film Archives (USA), CICA Museum (South Korea), UNESCO World Heritage Site Zollverein (Germany), Images Festival (Canada), Image Forum (Japan), among others. Telengut is currently an assistant professor in Film Animation at Concordia University in Montreal (Canada). 

Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her project ‘Re-imagining Water through Marginalized Stories in the Neerlandophone Space’ explores contemporary performance, arts and literature in the Netherlands and former Dutch colonial spaces. This project aims to pose resistance to the age-old Dutch narrative of a ‘battle against the water’ to make space for alternative encounters that reimagine ways of living with water. She is also an associate member of the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University (Canada) and a member of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).

Fabienne Rachmadiev is a writer and researcher. She publishes essays, fiction, and art criticism. From time to time she curates programmes and events on art and theory. In her current research, at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, she is interested in the way the entangled temporalities of (russian) imperialism, colonialism, (collective) memory, and extractive industries appear in art, especially in contemporary art from Central Asia.

Radek Przedpełski is a migrant artist and media scholar, lecturing in interactive digital media at Trinity College Dublin. He graduated from TCD with a PhD in Digital Art and Humanities. His dissertation explored the 1970s neo avant-garde intermedia in the People’s Republic of Poland, focusing on becoming-steppe of the Polish artist Marek Konieczny (1936-2022). Radek is currently writing a monograph on deterritorializing Sarmatism (a Baroque mythology of Eastness) in the works of this marginalised artist. He co-edited a volume Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Radek is a member of Substantial Motion Research Network, founded by Laura U. Marks and Azadeh Emadi for cross-cultural investigation of media art, and a curator, together with Laura U. Marks, of the annual Small File Media Festival hosted by SFU's School for the Creative Arts.

Juliana Robles de la Pava is an art historian whose work engages with Latin American art, environmental humanities, and art theory. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, inherit, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, her research focuses on the aesthetics and material practices of South America from an ecopolitical and ethical perspective. She explores how biospheric materials are transformed into art within colonial contexts of exploitation and extraction. Juliana has also worked as a Teaching Assistant at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she earned her PhD in History and Theory of the Arts.

Tuva Mossin is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Bergen. Her research spans visual culture and the history of ideas from the Enlightenment to the present, with a particular interest in the intersection of art and political activism (artivism). Her PhD project investigates Norway’s colonial relationship with Greenland, analyzed through artworks from the 1650s to the present. As part of her research, Mossin is coordinating an upcoming exhibition at the University Museum of Bergen that critically explores these historical ties. In addition to her academic work, she regularly contributes art criticism to Kunstkritikk.no, the largest art publication in Nordic countries. She has also gained practical experience as an educator and assistant curator at Bergen Kunsthall and as head of communications at Kunsthall 3,14.

Asel Rashidova is a museum worker and researcher from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She implements socio-cultural projects in the fields of inclusion, mobility, and memory. Currently, as part of the research platform Esimde, she is imagining and designing a memory museum dedicated to Ürkün. In 2021-2022, she worked as a manager of the Inclusive Programmes department at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia). In 2023-2025, Asel is doing her Master’s degree within the Erasmus Mundus programme Education in Museums and Heritage, run jointly by the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK), the University of Tartu (Estonia) and the Radboud University (the Netherlands).

Winona Pawelzik is a research assistant at the University of Hamburg (Germany) in the ERC Advanced Grant Horizon 2020 project “Visual Scepticism. Towards an Aesthetic of Doubt”. In her PhD project, she examines the potentialities and limits of contemporary artistic photography as a tool to disrupt colonial narratives in the museum space. She holds a bachelor’s degree in media and communication studies and linguistics and a master’s degree in photography studies and research.

Denis Esakov is a father, migrant, researcher, writer, and curator, born and raised in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan. As a result of several migrations, he arrived in Berlin, where he now lives and works. Denis received his MA from the Art Academy Weißensee (Berlin) under the supervision of Prof Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. The result of his presence in the program dedicated to the study of the space of decoloniality (Raumstartegien) is a published book titled Attentive Curiosity of Not Understandingness. It explores the production of knowledge and the marking of the problems of power domination within it, embedded in colonial (his)story. Denis' main research interest is Knowledge Production and Alternative Archives, discovering spaces for orality and other forms of discourse about the past and the shaping of (Her)story. His main curatorial method is relations building and multilingualism.

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker and researcher, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally and received major international awards. He teaches at LUCAS, Leiden University (Netherlands).