The Oceanic

Laura Anderson Barbata, born in Mexico City, is a transdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn and Mexico City. Since 1992, she has worked primarily in the social realm, and has initiated projects in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States. Barbata is also known for her project Transcommunality (2001–ongoing), working with stilt walkers, artists, and artisans from Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean. This project has been presented at various museums, schools, and other venues in the US, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Singapore. Her work is in various private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; El Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F.; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; Museo Jaureguía, Navarra, Spain, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Austria. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Sculpture Today, Kunstforum Germany, ARTnews, Art in America, ArtNexus, and 160 Años de Fotografía en México (INBA).

Nabil Ahmed holds a PhD in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a senior lecturer at the Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. As an artist and researcher, Ahmed looks at environmental violence and new forums for environmental justice through spatial analysis, writing, and interdisciplinary projects. Since 2013, he has been investigating the impact of mining, land grabs, and self-determination in West Papua. He is the founder of Inter-Pacific Ring Tribunal (INTERPRT), a long-term project on ecocide in Oceania and the Pacific region, commissioned by TBA21–Academy. He has participated in the two-year Anthropocene Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin; the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial; the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016); and numerous other exhibitions. More recently he has published in art, science, and architecture publications such as Third Text, Scientific Reports, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014), Volume, and South Magazine (Documenta 14).

Atif Akin (Turkey/United States) is an artist and designer, and Associate Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Akin’s work examines science, nature, mobility, and politics through an (a)historical and contemporary lens. Through a series of activities made up of research, documentation, and design, his work considers transdisciplinary issues through a techno-scientific lens, in aesthetic and political contexts. In 2015, Akin received the apexart Franchise Program award in New York, organising the zine project and exhibition Apricots from Damascus, hosted by SALT, Istanbul. His ongoing long-term research-driven project on nuclear mobility and archaeology, Mutant Space, was presented at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016). Tepoto Sud morph Moruroa was exhibited in Tidalectics, curated by Stefanie Hessler, at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna.

Dr PerMagnus Lindborg is a composer, sound artist, and researcher. He has authored more than 100 media artworks and compositions presented worldwide, notably at Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); Tonspur, Vienna (2016); National Gallery Singapore (2015); Onassis Centre, Athens (2014); World Stage Design, Cardiff (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003). Lindborg studied piano and composition at the Norwegian Music Academy in Oslo, music computing at IRCAM in Paris, contemporary musicology at Université de Paris Sorbonne, and holds a PhD in sound perception and design in multimodal environments from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (2015). Since 2005, Lindborg has taught at institutions in France and Singapore. He has published 33 peer-reviewed articles and papers in PLoS One, Leonardo, Applied Acoustics, and Applied Sciences, and book chapters for IRCAM-Delatour and Springer-LNCS, as well as numerous conference proceedings. He created the biannual Soundislands Festival (2013, 2015, and 2017).

Filipa Ramos (Portugal/United Kingdom) is a writer and editor, currently Editor-in-Chief of art-agenda, commissioning and publishing experimental and rigorous writing on art. She is a lecturer in art and moving image at the Experimental Film MA Programme of Kingston University, and at the MRes Art: Moving Image of Central Saint Martins/ University of the Arts, both in London, and works with the Master Programme of the Institut Kunst, Basel. She is co-founder and co-curator of Vdrome, and was previously Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal; contributed to documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). Interested in the way art, and particularly time-based work, provides a site of encounter for humans and nonhumans, Ramos has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions and film programmes on the topic, having edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press, 2016). Ramos was a Writer-in- Residence at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016. She has been a guest curator at several institutions and her writing has been published in several magazines and catalogues.

Dr Guigone Camus (France) holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology (EHESS), and since 2002 has lectured at l’Ecole du Louvre in Paris, l’Institut Catholique de Paris (IRCP), and the University of French Polynesia in Tahiti. Camus has worked on the social organisation of Kiribati, which is a small atoll country covering a large part of the Central Pacific. During two missions (2015 and 2017), she observed the I-Kiribati symbolic representations of Nature, their social organisation, and the kin ties between their cosmology and genealogies. In 2014, she published Tabiteuea Kiribati, a book dedicated to Tabiteuea Island (Hazan). As a Scientific Advisor of the Ocean and Climate Platform, she is committed to putting light on issues related to the consequences of global warming on the preservation of biodiversity, and the livelihoods of the human societies living in small island countries, addressing physical and psychological security, food security, and migration. She also works on the pragmatic and emotional perception of climate change and on the political and social parameters influencing the protection of natural resources.

Lisa Rave is an artist, filmmaker, and photographer. In her work, she often explores issues surrounding postcolonialism, and history’s repeating patterns in the complex interplay of culture, economy, and ecology, as well as natural phenomena. Rave studied experimental film at the University of the Arts Berlin and photography at Bard College, New York. She was a fellow artist at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2014. Some of her recent exhibitions and screenings include Lofoten International Art Festival (2017); Arsenal Kino Berlin (2017); Glasmoog Cologne (2017); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary–Augarten (2017); Württembergischer Kunstverein (2016); 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial (2016); FLORA ars+natura, Bogota (2015), Meulensteen Gallery, New York (2014); Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2013); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2011); and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011).

Kristy H.A. Kang is a practice-based researcher whose work navigates the triangulation of place, geographies, and cultural memory. She is Associate Professor of Urban Media Art and Design in the GAME School and the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Prior to joining ASU, she was Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and received her doctorate in media arts and practice at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Her research interests combine urban and ethnic studies, mapping, and emerging media arts to visualise cultural histories of cities and communities. Her works have been presented at the Gwangju Design Biennale, South Korea; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; and the Jewish Museum, Berlin, among others and received the Jury Award for New Forms at the Sundance Online Festival.

Armin Linke is a photographer and filmmaker who combines a range of contemporary image-processing technologies in order to blur the borders between fiction and reality. He was Research Affiliate at MIT Visual Arts Program Cambridge, guest professor at the IUAV Arts and Design University in Venice, and professor for photography at the University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe. Linke analyses the formation, the gestaltung of our natural, technological, and urban environment, perceived as a diverse space of continuous interaction. His photographs and films function as tools to become aware of the different design strategies. Concerned with different possibilities of dealing with image archives and their respective manifestations, Linke works with his own archive, as well as with other media archives, challenging conventional practices, whereby the questions of how photography and film are installed and displayed become increasingly important. In a collective approach with artists, designers, architects, historians, and curators, narratives are procured on the level of multiple discourses.

Ute Meta Bauer is a Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). She is currently the Acting Director and Principal Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore); and is the Chair of the Masters in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MA MSCP) programme. Having served as the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore for over a decade, her work as educator and curator over the past years has focused on Climates. Habitats. Environments. At the Centre, she curated and co-curated The Oceanic (2017/2018), Trees of Life. Knowledge in Material (2018), and The Posthuman City (2020). In 2022, she served as curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, featuring artist Shubigi Rao. Her recent large scale projects include the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), co-curated alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar, and the artistic direction of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024. She is a Trustee of the Art Foundation TBA21 and a member of the Governing Council of n.b.k. Berlin. Bauer was recently conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Art and Design by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland.

Markus Reymann is the Director of TBA21–Academy. He joined TBA21 in 2011 and subsequently cofounded TBA21–Academy with TBA21 Foundation Chairwoman and Founder Francesca von Habsburg. As a central programming unit of TBA21, the Academy provides a moving platform of cultural production and interdisciplinary exchange. Since 2011, Reymann initiated and conducted numerous expeditions, each trip designed as a collaboration with invited artists, scientists, and thinkers eager to embark on oceanic explorations. The Academy commissions ambitious projects inspired by these unusual encounters.

Stefanie Hessler (Germany/Sweden) is the curator of TBA21‚Academy. Recent projects for TBA21‚Academy include Tidalectics at TBA21‚Augarten, Vienna, Austria (2017); The Current Convening #2, co-curated with Ute Meta Bauer and Cesar Garcia in Kochi, India (2016); and the conference Design of the Seabed, co-curated with TBA21‚ Academy director Markus Reymann at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2016). Hessler is the co-founder of the art space Andquestionmark in Stockholm, Sweden together with Carsten Höller. Other curatorial projects include Sugar and Speed, Museum of Modern Art in Recife, Brazil (2017); Winter Event ‚ antifreeze, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile and Flora in Bogotá, Colombia (2015/2016); the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss, Norway (2015); and Outside at Index‚ The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2014). She regularly writes for publications such as ArtReview and Mousse Magazine and recently co-edited the book Life Itself (2016) for the Moderna Museet.