Artists in Conversation: Annabel Daou (Lebanon/USA) and Atef Hetata (Egypt) in conversation with Noha Radwan (Egypt/USA)

Friday, September 15, 2006; 11:00AM - 12:30PM

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at the New School, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor
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Resurgent Cities: On the Lost Balkan Highway
Dragan Protic (Serbia), Marko Sancanin (Croatia), Yane Calovski (Macedonia) and Zoran Pantelic (Serbia) in conversation with Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Serbia/USA)

Friday, September 15, 2006; 2:00PM - 4:00PM

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at the New School, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor
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Artists in Conversation: Yolande Mukagasana (Rwanda/Belgium) and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards

Friday, September 15, 2006; 4:15PM - 5:45PM

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at the New School, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor
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Artists in Conversation: Antjie Krog (South Africa) and Carmen Boullosa (Mexico/USA) In conversation with Yvette Christiansë (South Africa/USA)

Saturday, September 16, 2006; 9:30AM - 11:00AM

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at the New School, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor
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Artists in Conversation: Tran Luong (Vietnam) , Arahmaiani (Indonesia) and Seiji Shimoda (Japan) in conversation with Yu Yeon Kim (Korea/USA)

Saturday, September 16, 2006; 11:15AM - 1:15PM

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at the New School, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor
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Unnatural Landscapes: The Future of the City
Raul Cardenas Osuna (Mexico) Ole Bouman (Netherlands) and Dilip da Cunha (India/USA) in conversation with Raymond Gastil

Saturday, September 16, 2006; 3:00PM - 5:00PM

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center at the New School, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor
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Participant Biographies

ARAHMAIANI is a leading figure in the contemporary art scene in Indonesia, working in performance, painting, drawing, installation, poetry, dance and music. She was one of the artists in the Indonesia National Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Her work has grappled with contemporary politics, violence, critique of capital, the female body and in recent years, her own identity, which although Muslim, still mediates between Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist beliefs. She often uses her public presence in order to attract attention to violence against women in general and to female discrimination in Indonesia’s Islamic society, in particular. Since September 11, she was combined her critical attitude toward Islam with a fight against its general stigmatization.

CARMEN BOULLOSA (born in Mexico City in 1954) is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets and playwrights. The prolific author, who has had literally scores of books, essays and dissertations written about her work, has received rave reviews from critics on several continents. Half of her twelve published novels deal with historical themes - the world of Moctezuma, the early Colonial time in Mexico City, the life of pirates in the 17th Century Caribbean - and some have been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Chinese, and Russian. Boullosa's many plays have had also had major critical and popular success--Los Totoles won the Mexico City critics Play of the Year prize and Cocinar Hombres ran for three years. Boullosa also writes (and prints) art books, mixing image and text, which have been exhibited at (and are in the collections of) the Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de México, the Sala Pablo Ruiz Picasso del Museo de Arte Moderno de Madrid, and the New York Public Library owns a full collection. Her poems have also appeared in the art books of leading painters such as Juan Soriano, Magali Lara, Othón Tellez and Philip Hugues, whose book with Boullosa, Jump of the Manta Ray, was a 2003 British Book Design Award finalist. With Salman Rushdie, Boullosa co-founded the Mexico City House for Persecuted Writers at Mexico City, and together with Rushdie, Laurie Anderson, and Distinguished Professor of History Mike Wallace, she has been exploring the possibility of a similar operation being established on Governor's Island under CUNY's auspices.

OLE BOUMAN is director of the Archis Foundation, Amsterdam. He is editor-in-chief of Volume Magazine, a project by OMA/Rem Koolhaas + Columbia School of Architecture, New York + Archis Foundation, Amsterdam. A designer, author, lecturer and curator, his publications include The Invisible in Architecture (1994), RealSpace in QuickTimes: architecture and digitization and The Battle for Time (2003). He curated, among other things, the Dutch contribution to XIX Triennale di Milano (1996), and the Manifesta Visual Art Biennale, 2000. See www.archis.org

YANE CALOVSKI has lived and studied in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands and currently lives and works in Skopje (MK). He is the editor of D magazine focusing on contemporary drawing and the Artistic Director of Press to Exit project space. Calovski studied sculpture and architecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and University of Pennsylvania, US (1992/96) and Bennington College, US (1997) and precipitated in the post-graduate studio program at the CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (1999/00) and at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Post-Academic Institute for Research and Production in Fine Art Theory and Design, Maastricht, Netherlands.

Calovski has exhibited his collaborative, context-oriented and drawing-based work internationally in individual and group exhibitions; venues include: The Drawing Center (New York) 1998; Philadelphia Museum of Art 1999; Center for Contemporary Art CCA Kitakyuhsu (Japan) 1999/00; a Manifesta 3, (Ljubljana, 2000), Museum of Contemporary Art (Skopje) 2001; AR/GE Kunst, Bolzano (Italy, 2002); Nova Galeria Zagreb (Croatia) 2002; Contemporary Art Center, Skopje 2002; Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius) 2003; and Quatro Venti, Manciano, (Italy) 2003 and BAC- (Baltic Art Center) Sweden in 2004. He was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2001; a research residency in Vienna in 2002 supported by KulturKontakt Vienna and a research residency in the Fine Art department at the Jan van Eyck Academy, the Netherlands in 2002/04. Essays and reviews of his work have appeared in Afterimage, Flash Art, Village Voice, Tema Celeste, and other art and culture magazines. Recent publications/catalogues include "here.now.200-1997" with Gaku Tsutaya published by the Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan (2000); "Small Talk" Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje (2001); "To Actuality" ARGE Kunst, Bolzano, Italy (2002); "Hurts so good" Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania (2003); and "Spiral Trip" with Hristina Ivanoska, published by Contemporary Art Center Skopje (2003).

RÁUL CÁRDENAS OSUNA is the founder of Torolab, a spatial and contextual research laboratory located in Tijuana, México. Torolab was established in 1995 as a socially engaged workshop committed to examining and elevating the quality of life for residents of Tijuana and the trans-border region through a culture of ideologically advanced design. The themes range from research on the identity of the border region, to housing and security to community building and survival—the areas of concern are as broad and varied as the lifestyles and environs of study. The traces left behind with these investigations vary from such things as Urban Interventions, Media Projects, Construction Systems, Survival Units to everyday things like furniture and clothing. Torolab’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art (2002), and their work has appeared at MACLA, San Jose; the Liverpool Biennial; and the 2002 Montreal Biennial, ARCO’05, in Madrid and inSite_05 in San Diego/Tijuana, among other venues. Torolab works on projects that combine design, music, clothing and architecture to achieve safety and a better quality of life in the urban environment. The work of Torolab revolves around the concept of “emergency architecture”, conceived as a response to a singular catastrophic event but rather a means to address the widespread struggle for basic necessities that characterizes daily life in cities such as Tijuana.

YVETTE CHRISTIANSË is a poet and novelist. She was born and raised in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Mbabane. She now lives in New York where she teaches African American and postcolonial literatures, as well as poetics, at Fordham University. Her book of poems Castaway was short-listed for the PEN International Poetry Prize 2001. Her novel, Unconfessed, grew out of her research into forms of self-articulation amongst slaves in the Cape Colony, South Africa. The novel is based on the life of a Cape Colony slave woman (Other Press, November 2006). Her poetry, prose and scholarly writing have been published in South Africa, Australia, Canada, France and the USA. She maintains a strong connection with South Africa, and has taught as a visiting scholar at the University of Witwatersrand, and as a visiting writer at the University of Cape Town. In 2005, she was invited to perform at the Wits Theater, Johannesburg, in the lead role of a contemporary miracle play that she had written - Vitamin R: A Talent to Survive is based on the life of St. Roche, patron saint of plague victims. The play bridges to the current HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa and the persistence of superstition, misinformation and stigmatization in the face of the HIV/AIDS.

DILIP DA CUNHA is an architect and city planner. He is on the faculty at Parsons School of Design, New York, and visiting faculty at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. He is principal in the practice, Mathur/ da Cunha which received the Young Architects award for 2000 by the Architectural League of New York. Their awarded projects are part of a publication by Princeton Architectural Press and the Architectural League titled Second Nature. Da Cunha is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001) and Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2006). Both works looks beyond objectifying landscape and draw out more dynamic and layered terrains that demands negotiation more than control.

ANNABEL DAOU's recent solo exhibitions include AMERICA at Josee Bienvenu Gallery, in New York, ideas about the thing and the thing itself at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, The Last Painting Show at Conduit Gallery, in Dallas, TX, and Fleshpots, at Entwistle Gallery, London. Her recent work has dealt mainly with text and language often using translation and transliteration. A founding member of the "dB foundation," Daou was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon and moved to New York in 1999. Both members of the dB foundation, Daou has collaborated with Greta Byrum on Aporia, an exhibition with an accompanying catalog, Heuristics (2006) at the EFA Gallery, New York; White Rose (2005), a radio broadcast with the August Sound Coalition; Civil Disobedience, a radio broadcast at the White Box, NY through free103point9; and (ongoing) Ruined Cities, first installed Fall ’05 at the Elizabeth Foundation. Daou and Byrum also collaborated on the sound piece which is a part of Daou’s installation, “In Lebanon we have no bomb shelters,” included in Double Exposure, September ’06 at the Makor Gallery, New York.

RAYMOND GASTIL is Director of the Manhattan Office for the Department of City Planning, City of New York, where he began working in 2005. Major current projects include the 125th Street River to River Study in Harlem, the Lower Manhattan East River Waterfront project, and the recently approved Special West Chelsea District Rezoning and High Line Open Space.

He was formerly Executive Director of Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture, where he led the Institute’s program of design exhibitions, workshops, forums, publications, and competitions, including the Exhibit OPEN: new designs for public space (2003 New York, 2005 National Building Museum, Washington D.C, 2006 Chicago Architecture Forum). Additional major projects include the 2002-03 exhibit (New York and Glasgow), in response to the events of 9/11, Renewing, Rebuilding, and Remembering, documenting seven cities that have come back after disaster. Recent projects that he initiated during his tenure include an international competition for the “parachute pavilion” in Coney Island, 2004-2005.

He directed several waterfront studies and competitions, and authored Beyond the Edge: New York’s New Waterfront (2003), which brings national and international examples to bear on major urban waterfront projects. He served on the jury for the 9/11 Memorial on the Hoboken waterfront, and was chair of the Canal Park jury in Washington DC.

Previously, he was Director of the Design Program at Regional Plan Association in New York, and he received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and his B.A. from Yale University. Gastil has taught graduate seminars and studios at University of Pennsylvania and Pratt Institute, and lectured on urban design, waterfronts, and design and public policy internationally. He has served as chair of the advisory board of the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

ATEF HETATA is a filmmaker based in Cairo. At the age of eighteen he won the Cairo University Literary prize for a collection of short stories. Four years later (1988) he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering (Department of Communications) with honors. During the years 1989 to 1993, he worked as an assistant director for a number of filmmakers, including the great Youssef Chahine (whose films The Land and Destiny have shown in earlier Festivals). He also worked on Spike Lee's Malcom X. He has written and directed three short films: Salut Barbès (Paris 1989), Violin (Cairo 1990), and The Bride of the Nile (Cairo 1993). The last two films earned him a number of international awards, including Best Fiction Film at the Bilbao Film Festival and the Grand Prix du Jury at the Montpellier Film Festival and. His feature film, The Closed Doors (1999) has gone on to win a number of awards at film festivals, including Venice, Alexandria, Carthage, and the Biennale du Cinema Arabe in Paris.

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is an associate professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2003. Some of his recent essays and articles have appeared in Bookforum, Chimurenga, Critical Inquiry, The New York Times, Positions, Representations, Research in African Literatures, Small Axe, and Transition. His translations include essays, poems, and fiction by authors including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Sony Labou Tansi, and Monchoachi. He is co-editor of the journal Social Text, and serves on the editorial boards of Transition and Callaloo. With Robert O'Meally and Farah Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His own next book, currently near completion, is a study of the interplay between jazz and literature in African American culture, tentatively titled Epistrophies. In 2005-2006, Edwards was researching a new book project on the performing arts in downtown New York in the 1970s as a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

SRDJAN JOVANOVIC WEISS is an architect working between New York and the Western Balkans. He is the principal of Normal Architecture Office based in New York and Novi Sad and a founder of School of Missing Studies network for architectural research. Weiss recent book "Almost Architecture", published by Merz&Solitude Stuttgart explores the roles of architecture vis-à-vis democratic processes, abrupt political changes and disappearance of Communist ideology. [ISBN 978-3-937158-11-2]. His current work includes Stadium Culture - Center for Recreation and New Media located in Novi Sad designed to reanimate the city through a combination of public recreation and digital media. This project is featured at the Van Alen Institute's "Good Life" exhibition installed at the Pier 40 in Manhattan this fall. Weiss teaches geo-political seminars and architectural design at the University of Pennsylvania and is a PhD candidate in architectural research at Goldsmiths College in London with a dissertation on Balkanization as a contemporary spatial practice. www.thenao.net

ANTJIE KROG is a poet, writer, journalist and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Western Cape and also a Director of the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation. She has published twelve volumes of poetry in Afrikaans, two volumes of verse for children, a short novel, a play and two non-fiction books in English: Country of My Skull based on her experiences of reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and A Change of Tongue tracing the humor of change and the pain of belonging through the narratives of individuals, families, groups, poets, officials and politicians in a transforming South Africa. Country of My Skull won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, the BookData/South African Booksellers' Book of the Year prize, the Hiroshima Foundation Award, the Olive Schreiner Award for the best work of prose published between 1998 and 2000, and received an Honourable Mention in the 1999 Noma Awards for Publishing in Africa. It appears as one of ‘Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century' and has recently been adapted into a feature film. It is widely prescribed at universities as part of the curriculum dealing with writing about the past. Antjie Krog has been awarded numerous other prizes for her works, including the Eugene Marais prize for the most promising young writer, Rapport prize for best literary work in a particular year, Hertzog prize for the best poetry volume over three years, as well as the Foreign correspondent award and Pringle award for excellence in journalism for her reporting on the Truth Commission. She has been keynote speaker at events such as the Zimbabwe Book Fair, the Conference on Women and Violence (organized by the World Bank in Washington), given lectures worldwide on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and appears as a frequent guest on current affairs programs of the BBC and other stations. A sought after participant at poetry festivals, conferences & literary events, Krog formed part of the South African writers invited to Aix-en-Provence for the Cite de Livre in 1997 and was part of the La Caravane de la Poesie – seven poets from Africa who travelled the ancient slave route from Goreé back to Timbuktu.

YOLANDE MUKAGASANA survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994. She lost her three children as well as her husband, brothers and sisters. In memory of the genocide and with a view to assist the reconstruction of the country, she wrote three books entitled La mort ne veut pas de moi ( Death does not want me ), N'aie pas peur de savoir ( Don't be afraid to know ), and Les blessures du silence ( Wounds of Silence ).

Today, Mukagasana has formed a new family by adopting three of her nieces who were orphaned in the genocide. She built a new house where she used to live in Rwanda and looks after around twenty orphans. She created the Association Nyamirambo Point d'Appui, Foundation to Remember the Genocide and Assist the Reconstruction of the Country. The head office of the Association is in Brussels while the Rwanda counterpart is an NGO called Nyamirambo Point d'Appui which aims to support the regeneration of the Rwandan social fabric.

Yolande Mukagasana devotes her time and effort into informing and educating people on living together in the midst of differences, and gives conferences in schools and associations. Among the many awards she has received are the Alexander Langer Foundation Testimonial Award, in Italy (1998); Award for International Understanding Between Nations and for Human Rights conferred by the European College of the Iena University, in Germany (1999); The Peace Golden Dove Award conferred by the Archivio Disarmo Association of Rome; Woman of the 21 st Century for Resistance Award, in Brussels (2003); Honourable Mention for Peace Education by UNESCO, in Paris (2003).

Yolande Mukagasana has co-authored the theatre play entitled Rwanda 94 in which she plays her own role.

YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR is a writer and arts manager. Born in Nairobi , Kenya, Owuor beat a field of 120 African writers in 2003 to win the prestigious Caine Book Prize for African short story writing with Weight of Whispers . On receiving her prize Owuor, the second Kenyan to receive the Caine Prize, said the award “has given me the right to write”. Weight of Whispers , narrated by an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in Nairobi the aftermath of the 1994 massacres, dramatizes the plight of the refugee. Owuor is concerned with the place of African art and artists in a globalizing world. She feels that “where there are no government cultural policies, especially where culture and expression is relegated to the periphery of national growth, we are at the risk of losing our stories. This goes beyond identity loss, because as long as we have no recognition of the need to archive tales of being, we will forever look to others to tell us who we are and how to be.” She holds an MA (TV/Video Development) degree from the University of Reading in Britain.

ZORAN PANTELIC is a co-founder of the new media group, Kuda based in Novi Sad. Kuda.org has three main segments: infocentre, kuda.lounge and production. For the time being, the activities have focused on the first two elements. Infocentre is a library/mediateque where people can obtain information about the current developments in the field of new technologies and art, exhibitions etc. This includes free internet access. Kuda.lounge is a program of presentations and talks by guests from Serbia and abroad. The aim for the next year is to further develop these two elements, and to start with the production segment. Zoran Pantelic received his MA in sculpture from the Academy of Art in Novi Sad. In 1993 with three others, he founded apsolutno association which focused on interdisciplinary art and social projects.

DRAGAN PROTIC is the co-founder of Skart, an art/design action group that was formed in 1990 at the Belgrade architecture faculty. After ten years with projects like Nothing for beginning, Sadness, Accused, Survival Coupons, Your shit - your responsibility, in the year 2000 Skart formed a 45 member choir and orchestra called the Horkeskar, a music collective which has performed more than 70 concerts and is still trying to develop a rationale as well as places for public speech.

NOHA RADWAN is Assistant Professor at the Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Columbia University. Raised in Cairo, Egypt, she has a B.A. in Economics and Political Science. In the 1980s, she worked with several feminist organizations and for Egyptian newspapers and literary periodicals. She has published several short stories in Arabic, one of which has been included, in translation, in Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing by Margot Badran. Radwan moved to the United States in 1995 and got her PhD. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

MARKO SANCANIN is a founding member Platforma 9,81 (Zagreb, Croatia)

Platforma 9.81 - Institute for research in architecture explores spatial and urban phenomena in the context of shifting political, economic and cultural identities. Developing new methods in architectural practice, using cross disciplinary educational and research networks, it promotes activism and new urban techniques through public events and mass media. Current projects deal with spatial implications of contemporary public and cultural spaces ( Invisible Zagreb); urban phenomena of tourist development on Adriatic coast (3D Žurnal – Tourist Transformations); cultural cross disciplinary and tactical networking (Zagreb Cultural Kapital 3000); territorial installations of military and economic control on Cyprus (Cyprus Territory); models of participatory urban planning and bottom up development on 7 locations of Adriatic coast (Croatian Archipelago NL).

SEIJI SHIMODA is a performance artist, poet and director of NIPAF (Nippon International Performance Art Festival). Born in 1953 in Nagano, Japan, he started to write poetry in high school and then discovered performance art. Shimoda explores the boundaries of writing with his action poetry and is well known for the daring use of his body in his performance and for his uncompromising approach to environmental and political issues as pollution and nationalism. Using his large network of international performance artists, Shimoda has organized the Nippon International Performance Art Festival since 1993.

TRAN LUONG is an artist and curator based in Hanoi. He was the Artistic Director and founder of Hanoi’s Contemporary Art Center from 200 to 2003, the co-founder of Nha San Duc, the first independent underground artspace Iin Vietnam. Tran Luong was a member of the Fine Arts section of the Hanoi Palace from 1965-1977 and holds a degree from the Hanoi Fine Arts Institute. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout Vietnam, Amsterdam, France, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Thailand and New York City. His work has been exhibited at The 2nd Fukuoka Asian Trienniale 2002, The International Festival of Contemporary Visual Arts at the Liverpool Bienniale 2002 and at Civitella Ranieri Center in Perugia, Italy, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt , Berlin (2005), the Queensland college of Art, Brisbane (2005), the Satu Kali Performance Art Symposium in Kuala Lumpur (2006), among others . He has recently begun to develop work that incorporates video and performance into his visual installations.

YU YEON KIM (born South Korea) is an independent curator based in New York and Seoul. She was an International Researcher of the Liverpool Biennale 2004 (UK), the Commissioner and curator for Latin America for the 3rd Gwangju Biennale 2000 (“Exotica Incognita”) and a principal curator of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa, 1997-1998, (for which she curated “Transversions” at the MuseumAfrica). Last year she curated “DMZ_2005”; Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, an International Art Project (2005) at Paju Book City, Heyri Art Village and Mt. Odu Observatory (near DMZ), S. Korea. In 2001, she curated the controversial exhibition, Translated Acts” - Performance and Body Art from East Asia, which was initially presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2001) and then traveled to the Queens Museum of Art, New York (2002) and the Museo de Carrillo Gil in Mexico City (2002-2003); “Fragmented Histories”, (Asia-Pacific section) for Cinco Continentes y Una Ciudad (Five Continents and One City) http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/cinco-cont/english.htm exposition at the Mexico City Museum in Mexico (1998) ; “In the Eye of the Tiger”, a survey of Korean contemporary art at Exit Art/The Third World, New York , and the Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul (1997-98); and “OMNIZONE”, Perspectives in Mapping Digital Culture, an on-line project featured on both the Plexus and the Guggenheim Museum websites (1996). Her recent curatorial project was “PYONGYANG REPORT” - Architecture, Design and People in North Korea (2006)