Serra Victoria Fels

Samara Golden (b. Michigan, 1973) received her MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Sculpture Center, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; CANADA, New York; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, among others. Golden was featured in the 2014 Hammer Museum Biennial, Made in L.A., and her work is in the permanent collections of L.A. MOCA and the Zabludowicz Collection. In 2015, a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA/PS1. A solo exhibition of her work, Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division, will remain on display at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in spring of 2016. She is based in Los Angeles.

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977) produces conceptual post-black art, in wide ranging forms from photos to audio to video to sculpture. He is known for both his unusual artistic productions and for his process, often combining various scientific techniques with black history so that his materials, which are formally independent, are augmented by their relation to black history.

He earned a BA in photography from Columbia College in Chicago in 2000, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; High Museum, Atlanta; and the Miami Art Museum; among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include Message to Our Folks, MCA Chicago, Illinois, USA, touring (2012); Shelter, South London Gallery, UK (2012); New Growth, Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA, touring (2013); Three Rooms, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland (2014); Magic Numbers, The George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece (2014); and Anxious Men, The Drawing Center, New York, USA (forthcoming, 2015). Recent group exhibitions have taken place at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA (2011); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA (2011); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2011); Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA (2012); and MAMBo Bologna, Italy (2012).

For three decades Dread Scott has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering norms of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed one of his artworks and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, Pori Art Museum (Finland), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and galleries and street corners across the country.  He is a recipient of grants form Creative Capital Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation and his work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.

Drawing from her wide-ranging interests and research into subjects including literature, mythology, cinema, anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion and history, Camille Henrot’s work acutely reconsiders the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian resulted in her film “Grosse Fatigue,” a benchmark work for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Developing on themes from the film, Henrot’s exhibition “The Pale Fox” was first shown at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2014 and travelled to Kunsthal Char¬lottenburg, Copenhagen, Bétonsalon, Paris, and the Westfällischer Kunstverein, Munster.

Henrot has forthcoming exhibitions scheduled at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Fon¬dazione Memmo, Rome. She has had one-person exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Jeu de Paume, Paris. She has exhibited in group shows at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; and SculptureCenter, New York. Camille Henrot participated in Prospect 3, New Orleans and the 2014 Taipei and Gwangju Biennials. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam Jun Paik Award.

She speaks on Grosse Fatigue here.

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).

Leigh Ledare (born 1976, Seattle, Washington) uses photography, archival material, text and film to explore human agency, social relationships, taboos and the photographic in equal turns. Through a wide span of artistic practices, Ledare examines issues related to desire, identity, and morality.

Ledare first gained recognition through his exhibition and artist book titled “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” (2000-2008), which examines the complex relations between the artist and his mother – namely, how she used intimacy, eroticism, and vulnerability to negotiate the balance of power within the family. The resulting images are often sumptuous, saturated with color, and surprisingly beautiful. But they also, and importantly, disconcert the viewer, making us uncomfortable, and, in the process, raising questions about the functioning of the image and the construction of subjectivity in contemporary culture. Ledare has continued this examination into personal relationships with works that’s feature images of his collectors, patrons, and ex-wife, often in sexual situations.

In 2009, Ledare was included in an exhibition “Ça Me Touche” curated by Nan Goldin in Arles France as part of the annual Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. Writing in the New York Times, Roberta Smith said that Ledare is “taking us deep into the darkness and torment that drive many artists.” In the series “Personal Commissions” Ledare “answered personal ads from women whose desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him in their apartments, in a scenario of their choosing.”

Read more about his controversial body of work “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” here.