Noor Abed (b. 1988) is an artist and researcher from Palestine. She works at the intersection of performance and film, as well as alter-
native pedagogy. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was a curatorial assistant in documenta fifteen, kassel 2021-22. She is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24 and was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.

Giulia Essyad’s research revolves around representations of the human body, employing video, photography, sculpture, poetry, and performance as her mediums. Her works utilize her own body as raw material, delving into the various forms of alienation inherent to the production and consumption of body imagery. In her ongoing cycle, BLUE PERIOD, she employs the color blue as a lens to explore the visual lexicons of alterity, ranging from the blue liquid replacing blood in menstrual product advertisements to the erotic fixation on the fictional character Violet Beauregarde, famously associated with “blueberry inflation”. Essyad (b. 1992, CH) made her institutional debut with the solo exhibition “A Selene Blues” at Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg (2020), and premiered BLUEBOT: Awakening, a new video commissioned by DIS for the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in 2021. In 2023, Essyad received the Swiss Art Awards and the PAX Art Award, and she was the recipient of the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize in 2021. Her forthcoming solo presentations are scheduled at CEC, Geneva (2024), and MCBA, Lausanne (2025).

Vir Andres Hera (b. 1990, Yauhquemehcan, Mexico) is a filmmaker and time-based media artist currently living in diaspora. They conceive their projects as research fields plowed with the complicity of a community of artists and researchers. Oscillating between video installations, moving image, sound, and text, they question the multiple relationships between reality and memory, interrogating the colonial weight of History through emancipatory intimate narratives. Their multiscreen montages reflect a nonlinear, fractured time, bringing queer, Chicanx, and Black perspectives to the fore, as well as handcrafted and enigmatic images. Recent exhibitions include “Cacophony as collectivity”, SBC gallery, Montréal (2023); “Soleil Triste”, Mo.Co – Montpellier Contemporain, France (2023); “Exchange: London”, Mimosa House, London (2023); and “Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World)”, HKW, Berlin (2022). They pursued postgraduate training in Le Fresnoy Studio National as well as at the University of Quebec. They are part of the editorial board of Qalqalah قلقلة and teach at the Experimental School of Annecy-Alps, France. They are currently doing a research residency at Salzburger Kunstverein. In 2024, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City will publish an online edition of selections from their writing practice.

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981) is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts. Interweaving myths, rituality, and dreams within the tapestry of everyday life, her films investigate the historically complex and layered cul ture of Central Asia which stand at the cross roads of diverse material histories and mi gratory legacies. Departing from her personal history marked by growing up in the post Soviet Uzbekistan, Ismailova reaches out to the collective dimension of memory. She ini tiated the Davra research group in Central Asia, 2021. In 2022 she participated in 59th Biennale of Venice and presented new work at documenta fifteen. In 2022, she received The Eye Art & Film Prize, Amsterdam. Her works are in the collections of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Centre of Pompidou, Paris and others. Her work is featured in the on going group show “Nebula” (Fondazione In Between Art Film), Venice.

Joyce Joumaa (b. 1998, Beirut) is a video artist working between Montreal and Beirut. Her work has been exhibited in Montreal at the CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture (2023); the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022); FOFA Gallery (2022); Articule (2020); DAZIBAO (2018), and in Toronto at Joys (2023). Screenings of her works have been featured internationally at the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts; Images Festival, Toronto; Open City Documentary Festival, London; mudac, Lausanne; 18e Écrans du Réel, Beirut; and the 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial, among others. She was the recipient of the 2021–22 Emerging Curator Residency Program at the CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture, and has forthcoming solo exhibi tions at the Centre d’exposition Plein sud, Longueuil, Quebec, and Galerie Eli Kerr, Montreal. In 2024, she participates in the 60th Venice Biennale.

Beatrice Marchi (b. 1986) is a visual artist living in Berlin. She studied at the Brera Academy in Milan and the HfbK in Hamburg, earning an MA in 2017. Through video, per formance and painting, in her work she ex plores identity roles in group dynamics. Her work has been exhibited in institutional spaces in Italy and abroad, including: Museion, Bozen; KW, Berlin; MAXXI L’Aquila; Fondazione Prada, Milan and Tokyo; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; Istituto Svizzero, Milan; MACRO, Rome; Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Performance Space, New York; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; 16th Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. In 2022, she was one of the recipients of the Part 2022 Prize. In 2023, she won the ArteVisione prize promoted by Careof to support Italian artists working with moving images.

Noha Mokhtar (b. 1987, Geneva) is a Swiss Egyptian artist and anthropologist. Her prac tice includes photography, video, objects, installation, as well as writing, and borrows from ethnographic methods. She is inter ested in the mechanisms of production and reproduction of places, objects, and bodies. How do we shape the world around us, and how are we shaped by it? In her work she seeks a critical engagement with concepts of culture, family, gender and power. Noha works and lives with her partner and her daughter between Zurich, Cairo and the USA, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Social Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. Together with Gregor Huber and Ivan Sterzinger, she runs the pub lishing initiative Edition Hors-Sujet.

Valentin Noujaïm born in France in 1991 to Lebanese and Egyptian parents, graduated from the screenwriting department of La Fémis, Paris, FR (2020). Noujaïm took part in several group exhibitions: in 2022, Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge; Galerie Air de Paris; Getting Real Biennale, Los Angeles; Prix Utopi·e, Magasins généraux, Pantin; Festival Parallèle, Marseille; in 2021, The Self and the Other, Saatchi Gallery, London; CNAC Magasin, Grenoble; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The triennale of Nimes. Currently finishing a guest program at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Noujaïm was formerly a resident of the Académie de France à Rome — Villa Médicis, Rome (2023) and at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023). The artist has started a trilogy of videos entitled La Défense. The first part, Pacific Club, premiered at CPH:DOX where it received a special mention from the jury. The film also entered the public collections of the CNAP in 2023 and was pre-selected for the best short docu mentary at the French Cesar Competition. The second film has just premiered at IFFR Rotterdam, Tiger Shorts Competition.

Jiajia Zhang (b.1981, CH) works across differ ent digital (moving-)image media, video, and photography, which she presents in spatial installations. She rearranges the partly self-produced and partly found visual ma terial in an exact process by relating the frag ments to each other in unexpected ways. This way, social phenomena, and mass produced products meet minor matters like private YouTube videos or Instagram posts. The artist thus opens up a tension-filled bor derland that blends the personal and the generic, challenging our entrenched defini tions and notions of private and public. Jiajia Zhang studied architecture at ETH Zurich from 2001 to 2007 and photography at the International Center of Photography, NY, from 2007 to 2008. In 2020, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her work has been part of various exhibitions and screenings, includ ing Alte Fabrik, Rapperswil (2024), Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2024), Giorno Poetry Systems, New York (2024), All Stars, Lausanne (2023), Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (2023), Kunstraum Riehen, Basel (2023), Fluentum, Berlin (2022), Swiss Art Awards, Basel (2022); Werkstipendium Zürich (2022); FriArt, Fribourg (2022); Coalmine Gallery, Winterthur (2021); Kunsthaus Glarus (2021); Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris (2021); Haus Wien (2020); Kunsthalle Zürich (2020); Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2019).