(German, 1938-1997) As a major figure of the German Pop Art artist initiative called Capitalist Realism that culminated with the catalogue Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus by René Block in 1971, KP Brehmer found new ways to visualize the abstract processes of global capitalism, which are of increasing relevance today. From West Berlin, Brehmer confronted the visual regimes of the Cold War, interpreting the city’s double life of socialism and capitalism. Using common information systems as templates – figures and charts from educational books and magazines, maps of racism and fascism and graphics from sociological studies – he linked data-management to the operations of capitalism, and anticipated much of the effects of its globalization familiar today. Drawing influence from Fluxus and Pop art, but also reacting to the doctrine of Socialist Realism that dominated art behind the Iron Curtain, his work considered everyday life and the pervasive mediatization and consumerism of Western industrialized society. Brehmer sought ways to mass distribute his work, using his early training in graphics and printmaking to address the commodification of art. Brehmer also co-founded the co-operative gallery Vorsetzen in Hamburg, where he taught at the Art Academy until his death in 1997. In sympathy with (though not a member of) the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei when it was banned in West Germany, he authored his work using the initials of his first names, Klaus Peter. Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at Loris, Berlin (2016), Raven Row, London (2014), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2013), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville (2011) and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2008). (2018)

Pamela Carter is a playwright and dramaturg and lives in London, UK. Her plays include: Lines; Fast Ganz Nah/Almost Near; Skåne (winner of the New Writing Commission at the Berliner Festspiele Stückemarkt in 2012); What We Know; Slope; Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. She is currently commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre in London, the National Theatre of Scotland, and Freiburg Theater in Germany. Since 2010 Pamela has written for a number of Goldin+Senneby projects, including Standard Length of a Miracle, Money Will Be Like Dross, and A3 The Plot.  She also writes for film and dance, and has recently adapted a Don Delillo story as a libretto for composer Lliam Paterson. (2018)

(Canadian, b. 1979) Based in London and New York, Melanie Gilligan works in a number of different media, including video, performance and installation. Her dramatic film work reflects disturbing and sombre dystopian worlds; they are produced with the smooth conventionality of TV serials and a keen eye to contemporary media, technology and political economy. Gilligan graduated with a BFA from London’s Central Saint Martins in 2002, and from 2004 to 2005 she was a fellow with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Gilligan works across media and is prolific as a writer and teacher. Her critical writing appears in publications such as Artforum and Texte zur Kunst, although Gilligan is best known for her foreboding video works Crisis in the Credit System (2008) (a four-part fictional mini-drama about the recent financial crisis commissioned by Artangel Interactive), Self-Capital (2009), and Popular Unrest (2010). Gilligan’s recent work, The Common Sense (2015), takes the form of a science fiction mini-series which looks at how minds, bodies and interpersonal relations are shaped by technological advancements within capitalism. Though much of her work is freely viewable online, it has also appeared in group exhibitions at venues such as Tate Britain and Manifesta 8, and in solo exhibitions at the Banff Centre, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, Chisenhale Gallery, London and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. Honours include the 2009 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and the 2010 Illy Present-Future Award. (2018)

Goldin+Senneby is the framework for collaboration between Swedish artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby. Since 2004, Goldin+Senneby have initiated projects that explore juridical, financial and spatial constructs through notions of the performative and the virtual. Through actions and theoretical pursuits, they interrogate the mythologies created by virtual economies and fictional personae. In their recent body of work, Headless (2007-), they approach the sphere of offshore finance and its production of virtual space through legal code. Since 2010 their work has focused on The Nordenskiöld Model, an experiment in theatrical finance, in which they attempt to reenact the anarcho-alchemical scheme of eighteenth-century alchemist August Nordenskiöld on the financial markets of today. Goldin+Senneby’s current project, “M&A” (Mergers and Acquisitions), uses the exhibition infrastructure as lab­oratory for developing algorithmic trading models. Mirroring the design of the algorithm intended to detect activity in the stock market that indicates early stages of possible mergers and acquisitions, Goldin+Senneby combine the speculative nature of both theatre and finance and the precarious labour conditions that characterize late capitalism. Jakob Senneby and Simon Goldin received MFA degrees from Stockholm’s Royal University College of Fine Arts in 2004 and 2007, respectively. In parallel with his artistic work, Goldin has studied management at the Stockholm School of Economics. Recent solo exhibitions include Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2013), Artspace NZ, Auckland (2013), NAK, Aachen (2012), Kadist, Paris (2010) and The Power Plant, Toronto (2008). Group exhibitions include Tate Liverpool (2013), 13^th Istanbul Biennial (2013) and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011). Residencies include: Headlands, San Francisco (2012); SALT, Istanbul (2012); Kadist, Paris (2010); Gasworks, London (2008); IASPIS, Stockholm (2007). (2018)

Jamie Hilder (Canadian, b. 1977) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer whose work often addresses the intersections of economics, aesthetics and performance. His book Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971, was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2016. He is an instructor in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. (2018)

(Canadian, b. 1979) Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Vancouver-based Metis artist who works in drawing, sculpture and public installation to inquire into concepts of history and place. Using surplus materials from illicit economies, such as the bright plastic insulation stripped from copper wire, Hill constructs delicately composed works with an attention to form, negative space and surface. Balancing their beauty is an attention to the use value of the objects and materials, summoning up the personal and social histories they imply. Bundled like caches, woven, propped and provisionally fastened, the sculptures evoke the conflicted and contested ways that the spaces of the city are claimed and used. Hill’s work questions how ideas of private property, trespassing, and Indigenous land rights shape urban space – and our experience of it – in ways that counteract dominant narratives of the city as a settled and cohesive whole. Using the surplus or waste from the unauthorized and furtive economies of the city’s marginal spaces, Hill’s work compounds our understanding of the market and its effects. Hill holds a BA with honors in English and a BFA in Visual Arts from Simon Fraser University. Hill is currently pursuing an MA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Along with Sophie McCall, Hill edited The Land We Are: Artists unsettle the politics of reconciliation (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015). Hill’s work has been exhibited at Sunset Terrace, Gallery Gachet, Grunt Gallery and Red Gate, Vancouver, TRU Gallery, Kamloops and Get This! Gallery, Atlanta. (2018)

Based in Montreal and Durham-Sud, Quebec, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens work at the intersection of visual and performance art. Spanning across multiple media, their practice explores the material, affective and sensory dimensions of experience that cannot be fully translated into signs or systems. This investigation is fuelled by a critique of the rationale upon which economic actions are described and represented, and how the logic of economy has come to infiltrate the most intimate aspects of life. Their art practice investigates the ways in which the economic sciences and the theories of management represent the world. The notion of work, seen through the lens of its recent transformations, is central to Ibghy & Lemmens’ approach, as it embodies what Michel Foucault defined as biopower; that is, the capacity of economic thought to control, direct and orient the life of human beings. Most recently, their work has been shown at the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), La Biennale de Montréal (2014), 27th Images Festival, Toronto (2014), Quebec City Biennial (2014), Scène Nationale, Mulhouse, France (2013), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway (2013), Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2012) and the 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011). Recent solo exhibitions include Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and VOX-Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2014), Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2014), La Bande Video, Quebec (2014) and Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2012). Their writings have been published in Le Merle, C-magazine, New Social Inquiry, and Pyramid Power. They have published two artist’s books Tools that Measure the Intensity of Passionate Interests (2012) and Spaces of Observation (2012). (2018)

Maria Lind (Swedish, b. 1966) is a curator, writer and educator based in Stockholm, Sweden. She is Director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm and Professor of Artistic Research at the Art Academy in Oslo, Norway. She was artistic director of the 11^th Gwangju Biennale (2016), director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010) and director of Iaspis, Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München where, together with a curatorial team including the curator Sören Grammel, she ran a program including artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Annika Eriksson, Bojan Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno and Marion von Osten. From 1997-2001 she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, responsible for Moderna Museet Projecs with 29 commissions with among others Simon Starling, Apolonija Sustersic, Koo Jeong-a and Matts Leiderstam, and, in 1998, co-curator of Manifesta 2. She has taught widely since the early 1990s, including at the Art Academy in Munich and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogues and other publications. Among her recent co-edited publications are Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art, and Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe, all at Sternberg Press. She edited Abstraction as part of MIT’s and Whitechapel Gallery’s series Documents on Contemporary Art. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In the fall of 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press. (2018)

Marianne Nicolson (Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱’enux̱w First Nations, b. 1969) is an artist and activist of the Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱’enux̱w Nations who are part of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (Kwak’wala speaking peoples) of the Northwest Coast. She is trained in both traditional Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw forms and culture and contemporary gallery and museum-based practice. Her practice is multi-disciplinary, encompassing photography, painting, carving, video, installation, monumental public art, writing and speaking. She works as a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural researcher and historian, as well as an advocate for Indigenous land rights. She holds a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1996), an MFA (2000), MA in Linguistics and Anthropology (2005) and PhD in Linguistics and Anthropology with a focus on space as expressed in the Kwak’wala language (2013) all from the University of Victoria. Solo exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2008); Artspeak, Vancouver (2006); Esquimalt Municipal Hall (2004); Thunder Bay Art Gallery (2002); National Indian Art Centre, Hull (2001); Campbell River Public Art Gallery (2000) and Or Gallery, Vancouver (1992). Group exhibitions include the 17^th Biennale of Sydney (2020); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2019-20); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018-19) and the National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2017-19), among others. Major monumental public artworks are situated in her home territory of the Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱’enux̱w First Nation, Vancouver International Airport, the Canadian Embassy in Amman, Jordan and the Canadian Embassy in Paris, France.

Following Nicolson’s Hexsa’a̱m: To Be Here Always, a 2019 project with the Belkin that functioned as research, material, media, testimony and ceremony to challenge the western concept that the power of art as limited to the symbolic, This Is An Emergency Broadcast (2023) is another moment to amplify Indigenous tradition.

Based in New Delhi, the Raqs Media Collective (pronounced rux) was formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi (Indian, b. 1965), Monica Narula (Indian, b. 1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Indian, b. 1968) after the three graduated from Mass Communications Research Centre at the Maia Milia Islamia University, Delhi. Artists, media practitioners, researchers, editors, catalysts of cultural processes and most recently curators of the 11^th Shanghai Biennale (2016), their work takes the form of installations, performances, online interventions, objects and encounters. The collective plays a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators and sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They have worked with architects, scholars, coders, writers, designers, translators, performers, artists, curators and theatre directors, and founded processes that have become an influential force in contemporary intellectual and cultural life.  Raqs remains closely involved with the Sarai program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (www.sarai.net), an initiative they co-founded in 2000. Exhibitions include solo shows at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, (2012), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2010), Tate Britain, London (2009), Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2009) and Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (2004). The group curated Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition (2012, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi) and co-curated Manifesta 7 (2008, Bolzano, Italy). Works by Raqs are part of several contemporary art collections and museums. (2018)

Lorna Brown is Acting Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and a visual artist, writer, educator and editor. She has exhibited her work internationally since 1984. Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. Her recent curatorial projects include Digital Natives and Institutions by Artists. Brown received an honorary doctorate of letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2015, the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Belkin, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank. (2018)