ARTIST PANEL
With Nguyen Trin Thi, Sasha Pirogova, Mariana Vassileva,
Marina Belikova, moderated by David Elliott

MOTHERS, HEROES AND HISTORY’S PLAYGROUND
By Laima Kreivyte

ARTIST PANEL
with Else Twin Gabriel, Nezaket Ekici and Selma Selman,
moderated by Bojana Pejić

Nezaket Ekici

Nezaket Ekici’s video, installations and performances are often process-based and ask viewers to derive their own emotional and intellectual interpretations. Activated by the audience, the use of her body as a means of expression becomes a vital material in her work, where complex, often controversial topics are countered by their aestheticizing presentation. Ekici frequently uses her own Turkish origins and education as a subject of tension, pitting her background against her living environment in present-day Germany. Cultural, geographic and individual boundaries, transgressions, gender, cross-border connections and authorial bodies are central to Ekici’s works. By highlighting these themes in everyday life and placing them in a new context, she aims to interconnect every element to form a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Born in Kırşehir, Turkey in 1970, Ekici studied art pedagogics, sculpture and performance in Munich and Braunschweig, Germany. She then began working with performance and completed a master’s degree in Performance Art with Marina Abramović. She has exhibited internationally, with a total of more than 120 different performances on 4 continents in more than 100 cities and 30 countries. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Stuttgart.

else (Twin) Gabriel

Else Gabriel came to prominence within circles of the GDR art scene during her time at the Dresden Art Academy in the mid 1980s. After becoming a member of the notorious group Autoperforationsartisten, Gabriel began collaborating with artists such as Michael Brendel, Volker (Via) Lewandowsky and Rainer Görß. Their performative works became synonymous with challenging GDR ideology, using shocking techniques such as self-mutilation to question the repressive teaching methods used within schools and universities. After meeting Ulf Wrede (now her partner and father to their two children) in the late 1980s, they began their long term collaborative project under the name else Twin Gabriel in 1991. Their work spans across digital and performative mediums, with themes ranging from social/political repression, late capitalism, the family system and reconfiguring German identity (post-Wall), whilst introducing humour and the absurd into everyday situations. Else Gabriel has been a professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee since 2009.

Laima Kreivytė

Laima Kreivytė is an art critic, curator and lecturer at Vilnius Academy of Arts and European Humanities University. She participates in feminist art and research projects and works with artists group Cooltūristės. Exhibitions she has curated include Lithuanian pavilion in 53rd Venice Biennale, Baltic Mythologies in 3 Prague Biennale, Woman’s Time in National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Space Travellers in AR/GE Kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano among others.

Bojana Pejić

Bojana Pejić (born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia), is an art historian and curator, living in Berlin since 1991. Having studied History of Art at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Belgrade, from 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University and organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. She started to write art criticism in 1971 and was editor of art theory journal “Moment, Belgrade” (1984 – 1991). She organized an international symposium “The Body in Communism” at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 1995. She was Chief Curator of the exhibition After the Wall – Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe organized by David Elliott at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (1999), which was also presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest (2000), and at HamburgerBahnhof, Berlin (2000-2001). She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions held in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Vienna in 1999. Between 2002 and 2004, she was one of international advisers of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Japan) where she also curated a retrospective of Marina Abramovic (2003), which also toured to Morigame (Japan). In 2003, she had the Rudolf Arnheim guest professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (history of art). She was adviser of the project De/Construction of Monument organized by the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo where she also held seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts dedicated to the “Communist Body.” (2004-2005) In May 2005 she has defended her Ph.D. “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power the SFR Yugoslavia (1945 -1991)”. She was a Maria Goeppert-Mayer guest professor for International Gender Research at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University in Oldenburg (2006-2007). Bojana Pejić is the chief curator of Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009-2010) at MUMOK, Vienna and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She is also the editor of the “Gender Check Reader”. Dr. Bojana Pejić teaches at the Bauhuas University in Weimar and works as an independent curator and writer.

Selma Selman

Selma Selman is an artist of Romani origins. Her work is representative of her life struggles and the struggles of her community. Selman utilizes a multiplicity of art mediums, ranging from performance, painting, and photography to video installations, in order to express herself as an individual, a woman, and an artist. Her work, though personal, is also political. Selman defines herself as an artist of Roma origins, and not a Romani artist. The difference is subtle, but critical: through her work, Selman seeks to speak to the universal human condition, utilizing her background as a lens through which she can understand the entirety of the human experience. In her work, she wishes to break down prejudices that stereotype her community as a collective, robbing members of their right to individual expression. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from Banja Luka University’s Department of Painting, where she studied under the supervision of Veso Sovilj, and worked with renowned Bosnian performance artist Mladen Miljanović, who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 55th Venice Biennial in 2013. Selman participated in Tania Brugera’s International Summer Academy in Salzburg, “Arte Util” (Useful Arts) in 2013. She was a fellow for the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary the following year. That year, Selman was also the recipient of the prestigious “Zvono Award”, given to the best young artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, winning her a residency in New York City. Her work has been shown at numerous international festivals and exhibitions, including the Luxembourg City Film Festival, Sarajevo’s PichWise Festival, Slam Fest in Osijek, the Summer Academy is Salzburg, BL-art festival in Banja Luka, and the Perforation Festival: A Week of Live Art in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Thus far, she has had several solo exhibitions, with “Me postojisarav – Postojim – I exist” being her first solo show in the United States, exhibited at Dreamland Gallery. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Syracuse University, where she also works as a teaching assistant.

Mariana Vassileva

Vassileva’s work looks at how boundaries are tacitly implied. She is interested mainly in experiencing ‘the boundary’, the fine line between the known and unknown, the accepted and unaccepted, in a manner that is resonant with a sense of balance. It comes back to her own personal experiences and her movement between places, leaving the communist regime and her beloved family in Bulgaria behind. Vassileva’s home was and is always Bulgaria, in the northern part of the country where her mother still lives. From this perspective, her work has always reflected another world, a world outside or beyond where she is. This sense of otherness inspires Vassileva, introducing an autobiographical and biographical approach, between the self and the other, between personal and social needs, between needs and dreams, are recurrent themes spreading throughout her work. Mariana Vassileva moved to Berlin in 1989. She has studied pedagogy and psychology at Veliko Turnovo University. After this, she wanted to study art in the Academy of Art in Sofia, but instead worked as one of the artist-professors. She first went to Leipzig to study theatre and to prepare herself for art school, where two years later, she was accepted into the Universität der Künste in Berlin. After her studies, she worked for about three years in scenography for a film company, drawing large-format mountain- and cityscapes for film backdrops. Then, by virtue of some sales of her early work, Vassileva was able to devote herself to being an artist full-time.