KONTEJNER

Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist, director of Cultivamos Cultura, the leading institution devoted to experimental art in Portugal, and director of Ectopia dedicated to facilitating the collaborative work between artists and scientists. She has worked at the intersection of art and biology since the late 90s, in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and Portugal, exploring the conceptual and aesthetic opportunities offered by biological sciences for visual representation in the arts. Her work has been widely exhibited in major venues in all continents, presented in most anthologies devoted to bio art, discussed in doctoral dissertations, and considered an example of research in the visual arts. Besides her work as artist, de Menezes curated major international exhibitions including for European Capital of Culture (Portugal), KONTEJNER’s festivals (Zagreb), Verbeke Foundation (Belgium) and FACTT – Transnational and Transdisciplinary Festival of Art and Science that took place in Lisbon, New York, Mexico City, Berlin and Toronto.

Erich Berger is an artist, curator and cultural worker based in Helsinki. His artistic interests lie in information processes and feedback structures, which he investigates through installations, situations, performances and interfaces. Throughout his artistic practice he has explored the materiality of information and information and technology as artistic material. His current interest in issues of deep time and hybrid ecology led him to work with geological processes, radiogenic phenomena and their socio-political implications in the here and now. As director of the Bioart Society he develops opportunities which create transdisciplinary encounters and work situations between professionals from art, natural science, technology and the humanities, recognizing science and technology as fundamental transformative powers of our life world. Berger has exhibited widely in museums, galleries and major media-art events in Europe and worldwide.

Oron Catts is the Co-Founder and Director of SymbioticA: The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia (UWA), and was a Professor of Contestable Design at the Royal College for the Arts UK. Together with Ionat Zurr, he founded the Tissue Culture & Art Project. From 2000–2001 he was a Research Fellow at The Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Catts curated thirteen exhibitions, published/co-edited four books, published more than seventy book chapters and journal articles. His work was featured in exhibitions at venues such as MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Mori art Museum, Science Gallery London and Dublin, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China, and more.

Jens Hauser is a media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He is currently a researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, and a distinguished affiliated faculty member at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program. He is an affiliated faculty member at Danube University Krems, a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and at the University of Innsbruck, a guest professor at the Department of Arts and Sciences of Art at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a researcher affiliated with École Polytechnique Paris Saclay. Hauser has been the chair of the European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts’ 2018 conference in Copenhagen. At the intersection of media studies, art history, and epistemology, he has developed an aesthetic and epistemological theory of biomediality as part of his PhD at Ruhr University Bochum, and also holds a degree in science and technology journalism from Université François Rabelais in Tours.

Ionat Zurr is the Chair of the Fine Arts Discipline at the School of Design UWA, and SymbioticA’s academic coordinator. She was a Visiting Professor at Biofilia – Based for Biological Arts, Aalto University, Finland (2015-2020); a visiting scholar at The Centre of Arts and Art History at Stanford University (2007), and a Research Fellow at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School (2000-2001). She is considered a pioneer in the field of Biological Arts, and publishes and exhibits nationally and internationally. Her work was exhibited and collected by museums such as Pompidou Centre in Paris, MoMA NY, Mori art Museum, NGV, GoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China, and more. Zurr, together with Catts, has ideas and projects that reach beyond the confines of art; their work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as bio-fabrication, cellular agriculture, new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food.

Jurij Krpan has been developing mission and programme of Kapelica Gallery since 1995, characterized by explicitness, politics and devotion to high criteria of contemporary art research. As curator and selector, he has participated in numerous local and international events, as well as the biggest international productions such as the Slovenian pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennial in 2003, the biggest intermedia exhibition in history of Slovenia ArzenalDepo 2K9 at Viba Film Studios in 2009 and the Slovenian pavilion in Arsenale at the Architectural biennial in Venice in 2014. As the consultant of the arts department at the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, he has been raising the artistic level of the event since 2004. In 2013 he also took part of the jury for Hybrid Arts for the Ars Electronica Prix (Linz, Austria). The curatorial focus of Jurij Krpan work is highlighting the production of meaning by works of art and their tactical intervention in contemporary society.