Keynotes / Authors - bio
Magda Danysz (France) - Based in Shanghai and Paris, Magda Danysz supports emerging artists from all horizons, as well as talents already recognized throughout the world in a variety of practices ranging from photography, painting, sculpture to digital art.
Pedro Alonzo (USA) - During Art Basel Miami Beach 2012, Alonzo organized a panel discussion for the Royal Bank of Canada at the Architectural Digest Oasis @Raleigh Hotel. The panel discussion was titled “Global Shift: Transforming the Art World”. The panel discussed the effects of the influx of capital from new markets such as Brazil, China, México, Russia and Ukraine. Since 2012 Pedro is an Adjunct Curator at the Dallas Contemporary. He was formerly an Adjunct Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston from 2011-2013 and at the Institute of Visual Arts, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee from 1996-2002.
OX (France) – http://ox.com.fr/wp/ - Recognized for his practice of taking over these huge advertisements, adorning them in a cloak of humor with irresistible simplicity. “Advertising billboards are like huge windows, oversized paintings, hanging in the city,” OX says, explaining why he is attracted to these particular visual spaces. His artistic concept is based on the philosophy of culture jamming, a practice that suggests physical alterations to large outdoor advertising structures. This French renegade nurtures an aesthetic of shock within his highly recognizable visual language, characterized by minimalist imagery cleverly embedded inside a commercial message. With a long-standing career behind him, OX is one of the most revered culture jammers today.
Benjamin Gaulon aka Recyclism (France) Currently Associate Professor at The New School Parsons Paris, where he is the program director of the MFA Design + Technology and the BFA AMT (Art, Media and Technology). In 2011 he has created the Recyclism Hacklab - a collaborative workspace focused on contemporary DIY and hacking practices.
Alain Colombini is a contemporary art scientist at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Conservation et de Restauration du Patrimoine, Marseille, France. His research interests include both expertise and degradation of materials found in Contemporary Art as well as establishing a long standing collaboration with artists and paint manufacturers. He has concentrated his research on industrial paints, fluorescent colours and in 2015, has been granted a Scholarship at the Getty Conservation Institute of Los Angeles on the subject of the use of spray paint by Street Art artists and the relevant implications in conservation. More recently, he has participated to a project on “social and cultural innovation in the context of a fast changing society”, in Beijing, China where his research was mainly focused on Chinese spray paint brands compared to most well-known American and European brands, on the interaction between artists and industry and to some extent, the place of graffiti in today’s Chinese art scene.
Christian Gerini is a philosopher and a researcher in the Faculties of Toulon, Nice and Marseille (France). His research examines history, sociology and memory of graffiti and street art in the south of France, and especially in the city of Marseille. He has published widely in those fields and works closely with artists (for his sociological and historical approaches), and with local public or private institutions (for the urban developpement of the Street Art), and he regulary writes papers in the French newspaper Street Art Magazine. For example: "Le street art, entre institutionnalisation et altérité" in "L'artiste, un chercheur pas comme les autres", Revue HERMES, CNRS Editions, France, 2015 and "Interview of Ernest Pignon-Ernest", Street Art Magazine, #4, november 2016.
Miguel Januário aka ± (Portugal) - Activist artist assumed, Miguel Januário was born in 1981. Graduated in Communication Design (FBAUP), he has been highlighted in the area of graffiti and street art. ± (Mais Menos/Plus Minus) is his most visible side and is through this identity that he claims and interferes in the urban landscape.
Rita L. Amor Garcia. (Spain) PhD candidate researching on conservation of graffiti and street art, mainly about aerosol art. She has participated in various projects on the conservation of wall paintings, including collaborations with artists, and she is a member of the Street Art Working team of Grupo Español del International Institute for Conservation (GE-IIC). The team's main purpose is to establish good practices for the conservation of contemporary public art interventions.
Elena Garcia Gayo (Spain) is senior art conservator-restorer at Diputación de Ciudad Real and independent researcher, focused on street art. She was one the minds behind the heritage registration (BIC) of a piece of pioneer graffiti artist Muelle in Madrid. Also, she is member of INDAGE association of Spanish researcher on graffiti and street art; coordinates the working teams of Grupo Español del International Institute for Conservation (GE-IIC) - including the Street Art working-group; manages the Urban Art Observatory (Observatorio de Arte Urbano) and is editor of the magazine Mural Street Art Conservation.
Ronald Kramer (New Zealand) , University of Auckland, research focuses on how power asymmetries impact our thinking about crime and deviance, and how they shape everyday practices within criminal justice systems. The relationship between power, deviance and control has been explored through empirical studies on graffiti writing culture, fieldwork conducted in Rikers Island, and an institutional ethnography of district courts. My current project revolves around the misguided faith we place in science and technology to curtail criminalized behavior.
Peter Bengtsen, Lund University, Sweden
One of my main areas of interest is street art as an artistic and social phenomenon. I have been writing about street art academically since 2006. In 2014 I published a book on the topic entitled The Street Art World. My research on street art has led to an interest in the publicness of public space in general and spatial justice in particular.More recently, I have also been working within the field of visual ecocriticism. In this research, I investigate how themes like biocentrism, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism are treated in visual art and how this may influence the relationship between human beings and the environment.
Susan Hansen, Middlesex University, UK
Susan Hansen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University, London and Chair of the Forensic Psychology Research Group. She has research interests in communities' material engagements with, and affective responses to, street art and graffiti; in the analysis of graffiti as a form of visual dialogue; and in the promise of an archaeological approach to understanding street art and graffiti through the longitudinal photo documentation of single sites.
Lachlan MacDowall, University of Melbourne, Australia
Lachlan MacDowall is an artist and researcher in the Faculty of the VCA and MCM at the University of Melbourne, Australia.His research examines modes of urban informality such as graffiti and street art. He has published widely in this area and works closely with artists, local governments, heritage agencies and galleries.
Javier Abarca, PhD in Fine Arts, Spain
Javier Abarca (Madrid 1973) is an artist, researcher and educator in the fields of graffiti and street art. A leading figure from the first generation of Spanish graffiti, he taught a class on graffiti and street art at the Complutense University of Madrid between 2006 and 2015. He founded the website Urbanario in 2008. His teaching, curating and writing have been commissioned by museums and institutions in Spain and across Europe.
David Demougeot, Bien Urbain artistic routes in (and with) public space, Besançon, France. Now imagined with the help of an artist, the festival welcomes each year about fifteen international artists among the most influential of their generation (murals, installations, multimedia creations …) for a time of creation of about two weeks. Each comes in its way, surprise us by intervening through (and with) the public space, investing walls, streets and parks around us. We propose you to realize that step with them, through our visits (downtown campus, through the city…) or at meetings, conferences and workshops, most of which take place Chez Urbain! Chez Urbain is open to all and offers a living space where curious meet, volunteers and artists in a unique atmosphere. It is above all a friendly place offering a specialized bookshop and a refreshment area, around which everyone can learn about the various appointments of the festival and meet for workshops, meetings or visits the artistic routes.
Jacob Kimvall, Stockholm University, Sweden
Art historian and former graffiti writer Jacob Kimvall studies different ways of describing and framing graffiti in four historical and cultural contexts: The graffiti writing on the Berlin wall; the Zero Tolerance on graffiti in Stockholm during the 1990s; The interactions between subcultural graffiti and the cultural and commercial interest of the institutional art world in the 1970s and 80s; The collecting, organizing and publishing of images by graffiti enthusiasts. His PhD thesis published on book with the title "The G-Word" visualize how different institutions, public and commercial interests have acted to influence and affect the understanding of graffiti as both art, crime and a broad socio-cultural phenomenon.
Erik Hannerz, Lund University, Sweden
Erik Hannerz earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Uppsala University. Hannerz’ research interests include cultural sociology, subcultures, urban sociology, and ethnography. He is currently working as Assistant Professor in Sociology at Lund University on a project on graffiti writers’ perception and use of space, mapping out spatial and temporal heterogeneities within the subculture. In his PhD thesis Performing Punk he investigates the ordering and structuring of style and behavior among punks in Sweden and Indonesia, pointing to how the subcultural centers on plural definitions of both what punk should be and what it should be against. The thesis was reworked and published by Palgrave in 2015. Hannerz is a faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University.
Nuno Sacramento - Peacock Visual Arts has appointed Nuno Sacramento as its new Director. Nuno has moved from a successful term as Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Nuno brings with him a wealth of experience as a Director in the arts, as well as expertise in the areas of research, project curation, writing, and lecturing, with the ability to work internationally on projects and bring new artists to the city. Nuno added: “Peacock Visual Arts is an internationally-known, artist-led organisation with a long history. I am honoured to have been chosen to take on its directorship, and will, alongside our fantastic team, create a meaningful artistic programme. I see this as an opportunity to investigate alternative futures, in terms of economy, energy, housing, food, and culture in a wider sense, something we will do by bringing together artists and the people of Aberdeen.”
Martyn Reed, James Finucane, Nuart is an international contemporary street and urban art festival, held annually in Stavanger, Norway since 2001. It is widely considered the world's leading celebration of Street Art among its peers.
Nuart Festival provides an annual platform for national and international artists who operate outside of the traditional art establishment. From the first week of September an invited international team of street artists leave their mark on the city's walls, both indoor and out, creating one of Europe's most dynamic and constantly evolving public art events.
Nuart consists of a series of citywide exhibitions, events, performances, interventions, debates & workshops surrounding current trends and movements in street art practice by some of the worlds leading practitioners and emerging names. The artists who attend the festival are among the most acclaimed and progressive public art practitioners in the world. Nuart continues to pioneer a new breed of art exhibition that is neither institutionalised nor commercial. Without the usual restraints of curatorial and corporate preferences, the event consistently brings out the best in its invited guests.
