Monica Bonvicini
Monica Bonvicini (1965, Venice) has a multifaceted practice that explores the relationships between architecture, power and gender. Working across sculpture, installation, video, drawing and text, she engages in institutional critique and confronts the politics of space, often using irony to destabilise social and political structures.
In Slamshut (2016), an open door appears at the end of a dark corridor, its luminous opening seemingly inviting the viewer to enter. The image holds this promise in suspension until the door suddenly slams shut. This violent gesture transforms an apparently welcoming space into one of exclusion and cuts off the possibility of passage. The work refers to the conceptual videos of Jack Goldstein, as well as to the iconic scene in The Graduate (1967), a film considered sexually unconventional at the time and released just one year before the student movements of May ’68, which were shaped by ideas of cultural and social liberation. In No Future, Slamshut may be read as an image of resistance and confrontation, inviting us to shut the door on the social and political relics of the past that have no place in our shared future.
Lenora de Barros
Lenora de Barros (1953, São Paulo) is a Brazilian artist and poet whose practice explores language in its linguistic, visual, sonic and spatial forms. Her work frequently brings language and the body into tension, moving fluidly between photography, video, performance, text and sound.
In Estudo para facadas (Study for Stabs) (2012), de Barros stages a sequence of close-ups in which her mouth silently mouths a scream before her tongue is shown being stabbed by a knife. Repeated with variations in sound and image, the gestures oscillate between scream and silence, speech and its impossibility. Drawing on the languages of cinema, television and photography, the work questions the ways images of violence are produced, consumed and internalised. The female body becomes both subject and surface of projection, while the interruption of speech evokes the silencing mechanisms embedded in images and the discourses that shape our perception of the world.
Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) lives and works in Paris. His work explores contemporary society through the lives of those caught at the intersection of inclusion and exclusion, critically examining the images and narratives produced by mass media.
Généalogie de la Violence (2004) approaches police brutality without showing brutality itself. Nothing spectacular happens: instead, the film focuses on the subtle forms of humiliation, control and domination embedded in ordinary procedures. Drawing on Bourouissa’s own experience of repeated identity checks, it explores the psychological and physical effects of being subjected to institutional power.
The violence remains largely invisible, concealed behind the protocols and apparent neutrality of a lawful procedure. By withholding the expected spectacle of violence, Bourouissa shifts attention towards what such encounters leave on the body and in the mind, exposing the unequal relationship between individual and state.
Anne-Charlotte Finel
Anne-Charlotte Finel (1986, Paris) works with video and photography to create dream-like images (often captured at sunrise or sunset) of natural phenomena on the edge of human perception.
In La Crue (2016), an immense volume of water surges before the camera, its origin and scale impossible to determine. Deprived of any point of reference, the viewer is confronted with a phenomenon that is at once monumental and strangely abstract. Voiski’s saturated, high-pitched soundtrack intensifies the sensation of force and instability. Filmed from dusk into night, the camera gradually loses its ability to register colour, and the image slips into black and white. In the final third, a pixelated, all-consuming image emerges, seeming to swallow the film and the gaze itself. Evoking both a 3D model and an abyss, it produces a vertiginous sense of disorientation. The flood becomes less the depiction of a specific event than the image of a world whose scale and equilibrium have become difficult to grasp – a hypnotic vision of environmental upheaval and the uncertainty it carries.
Aziza Kadyri
Aziza Kadyri (1994, Moscow) is a London-based Uzbek artist working across textiles, sculpture, installation, creative technologies, and performance. Drawing on her experience of growing up between Taipei, Tashkent, Moscow, and Beijing, her practice explores social invisibility, decolonisation, displacement, and identity, with a particular focus on women in Central Asia and its diaspora. Combining textile traditions with technological tools, she reimagines cultural heritage and diasporic narratives through speculative storytelling, often collaborating with local communities and artisans.
Nuclear Dreams (2025) poetically explores Kadyri's father’s unrealised ambition to become a nuclear physicist and her own experience of migration, uprooted identity and fractured belonging. His plans were shaped and disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ultimately forced him into migration. The film moves from this intimate story into Tashkent’s symbolic landscapes, once sites of scientific ambition and cosmic dreams, now silent monuments to shattered ideals. These spaces evoke a generation’s visions of the future while reflecting the enduring anxieties surrounding nuclear power.
John Menick
John Menick (1976, White Plains, New York) works with moving image, sound, performance, and technological systems. His practice explores fiction and hearsay, apocalyptic imaginaries, subliminal messages, and generative algorithms.
In autoextinction (2023), three artificial intelligences frantically speak to one another. They appear to be alone on Earth: humanity, perhaps all multicellular life, has disappeared. Did they cause the extinction? Their malfunctioning memories offer no answer. Their fragmented, circular trialogue unfolds alongside images they were once tasked with analysing: sports games, physics simulations, pornography, CCTV footage, films, military demonstrations, home movies, and commercials. Like their artificial minds, these images have eroded into incoherence. Once treated as secular oracles, the AIs are now uncertain of past and future. As they become increasingly regretful, forgetful, psychotic, and philosophical, they confront the possibility that they predicted their own end – and that intelligence itself may be a catastrophe. autoextinction thus evokes a form of “degenerative AI”, in which artificial intelligence progressively loses its capacity to remember, interpret, and make sense of the world.
Agnieszka Polska
Agnieszka Polska (1985, Lublin) is a Polish visual artist whose practice uses computer-generated media, animation and cinematic storytelling to explore individual agency and social responsibility in an increasingly technology-driven world. Her hallucinatory films and installations examine the ethical ambiguities of our time, often bringing historical narratives into dialogue with the digital present. Polska’s work has been presented internationally, including at the New Museum and MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has participated in the Venice, Gwangju, Sydney and Istanbul Biennales and was awarded the German Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2017.
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler (1943, New York) works across video, photography, text, installation and performance. Her practice examines the public sphere, from everyday life and the media to architecture, war and national security, often revealing how distant conflicts permeate domestic life.
In Prototype (God Bless America) (2006), a mechanical toy soldier dances in place while playing the patriotic song “God Bless America” on a trumpet. As the camera slowly pans downward, his camouflage trousers reveal a mechanism resembling a prosthetic leg. The comic choreography gives way to a stark reminder of the bodily costs of war. Referring to the traumatic limb amputations suffered by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler collapses the distance between patriotic spectacle and physical violence. The toy’s repetitive movement turns the promise of national security into an absurd loop, while the prosthesis becomes a disturbing emblem of the wars’ enduring consequences.
SUPERFLEX
SUPERFLEX is a Danish artists’ group founded and directed by Jakob Fenger (1968, Copenhagen), Rasmus Nielsen (1969, Copenhagen) and Bjørn Christiansen (1969, Copenhagen) since 1993. Their projects examine the dynamics and dependencies created by economic systems and develop tools to be used in constructive transformations.
Burning Car (2008) is an 11-minute film depicting a car burning in real time. The camera slowly circles the vehicle, filming its destruction with the polished aesthetics of a television commercial. As smoke fills the cabin, the paint bubbles and the tyres explode, the car is gradually reduced to a charred frame. The destruction of the car also consumes the dreams it embodies: financial stability, mobility, escape, the West and the American dream. At the same time, the burning car evokes images of political revolt and resistance. Yet in the media, the spectacular image often eclipses the individuals who set the car alight and the demands behind the act. Here, the sign destroys itself, generating new meanings in the process.
Marijke van Warmerdam
Marijke van Warmerdam (1959, Nieuwer-Amstel, The Netherlands) works across film, photography and sculpture. Her deceptively simple images transform fragments of everyday life through repetition, shifts of scale, reflection and unexpected juxtapositions, creating moments that hover between reality and dream.
In It crossed my mind (2000), a woman slowly brings a finger towards her nose, while a purple SUV mysteriously opens and closes its hood. The two actions alternate endlessly in a seamless loop: a playful choreography in which human gesture and mechanical automation appear to mirror one another. With its bright colours, deadpan humour and fascination with the car, the work evokes the materialist dream of the 1980s, when technological progress promised to make everyday life increasingly effortless. Yet the endless repetition turns this promise into an absurd cycle. Introducing No Future, the work offers a light-hearted glimpse of a world in which progress itself seems destined to repeat without end.
Katarina Zdjelar
Katarina Zdjelar (1979, Belgrade) is an artist based in Rotterdam whose practice explores voice, language, sound and the body, often examining how individuals negotiate changing social and political conditions.
In Shoum (2009), two musicians from Belgrade attempt to decipher and sing the lyrics of Tears for Fears’ 1984 hit Shout, despite speaking no English. Working as occasional cover musicians, they have learned that access to the global language of pop is also a form of economic currency. Their phonetic transcription transforms the familiar song into an uncanny, invented language, somewhere between imitation and invention. Made in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars, the work resonates with the utopian imaginary of the 1990s, when the expansion of Europe promised new forms of openness, mobility and belonging. Against this horizon, Shoum reveals the uneven access to the cultural and economic promises of globalisation. The failed translation becomes both a comic act of survival and a subtle portrait of a world in which the promise of a better future remains unequally distributed.
