Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, born 1977 in French Guyana, lives and works in Paris. His recent solo exhibition includes Songs for a Mad King at Kunsthalle-Basel, Switzerland, and Kannibalen, at Kunstverein-Bielefeld, Germany. In 2012, two institutions—the Serralves Foundation (Porto, Portugal) and the Pavilion (Leeds, England)—mounted solo exhibitions for the artist. Abonnenc recently took part in the Paris Triennial in the Palais de Tokyo and in group exhibitions (all in 2012) in the Fondation d‘entreprise Ricard (Paris), as well as at the ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, USA). The exhibition at the Bielefelder Kunstverein is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Germany. Parallel to this event the Kunsthalle Basel is presenting a solo exhibition of the artist. In his works, Abonnenc researches into the history of colonial development, its effects on cultural identity, and global contexts. He is very concerned to engage with film history and the decolonization of African states in the 1960s. In all his videos, photographs, drawings, as well as through archival material, he investigates the causes of collective amnesia. In this way, the artist is not only looking for the historical reasons behind current conflicts, but makes it possible to realize the multiple relations between personal identity, community, and nation. Cultural objects always carry a form of memory within themselves, which Abonnenc sets up to be negotiated all over again in his works. 

Basma Alsharif was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents who immigrated first to Brittany, France, then to Chicago, Illinois. She has developed her practice nomadically since receiving an MFA in 2007. Living and working between Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, Gaza, and most recently, Paris, Basma’s work operates between cinema and installation. Her works have shown in solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation, A Space Gallery in Toronto, Darat ElFunun in Amman. Her works have been shown in group exhibitions, film festivals, and biennials, including: Institut du Monde Arabe Paris, VideoBrasil São Paulo, CATE Screening Series Chicago, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Forum Expanded the Berlinale, Manifesta 8, the Contemporary Art Center of Southern Australia, The Jerusalem Show, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths Program. Basma's work was awarded a Jury Prize at the 9th Sharjah Biennial, won the Marion McMahon Award at the Images Festival in Toronto and belongs to the collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Fundación Marcelino Botín, and the Khalid Shoman Foundation. Her work is distributed by Video Data Bank in Chicago and Arsenal in Berlin. 

Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat (both born 1983 in Tel Aviv) have been working in collaboration for several years and are creating works in the audiovisual field while living and working in Brussels. Their works have been produced by Auguste Orts and Argos (Belgium) and are distributed by EYE institute (Netherlands). Their work is shown at film festivals, such as IDFA, Rotterdam Film Festival, Courtisane (Belgium), New Horizons (Poland); and on television (Arte) and in exhibitions at STUK (Belgium), EMAF (Germany), and the Petah-Tikva Museum for Contemporary Arts (Israel). Their work has won prizes at the Images Festival (Canada) and the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany). Coming from different educational backgrounds—Sirah studied at P.A.R.T.S (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios), Brussels, and Eitan studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam—their work has been challenging the performative aspects of the moving image. In their latest film, Printed Matter, and in their upcoming installation, Journal, they question the spatial and durational potentialities of reading photographs that carry a common visual language and historical narrative. 

Jean-Paul Kelly is a Toronto-based artist, born 1977 in London, Canada. He creates drawings, photographs, and videos that are often displayed together. His work has exhibited at Scrap Metal (Images Festival, Toronto, 2013), the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto, 2012), Mercer Union (Toronto, 2010), Cambridge Galleries (2009), Gallery TPW (Toronto, 2005 and 2008), Tokyo Wonder Site (2006), and the University of Toronto Art Centre (2005). Screenings include the European Media Arts Festival (Osnabrück, 2013), International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal, 2013), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2013), Toronto International Film Festival (2012), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2012), Migrating Forms (New York, 2010), Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art (Berlin, 2009), Rencontres Internationales (Paris 2006, 2004), and Pleasure Dome (Toronto, 2003). From 2009 to 2012, Kelly was Programming Director and Curator of Trinity Square Video (Toronto). He holds a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2005).

Sarah Lewison’s interdisciplinary media arts practice enlists play, dialogue, and intimate forms of exchange to address political ecologies, obscured histories, and material relations between entities. She frequently collaborates with other artists. Her recent documentary TheMonsanto Hearings (2012), with Sarah Kanouse, screened at dOCUMENTA(13) (Kassel, Germany) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. Her site intervention project, Breathe,screened at Iberia Center for the Contemporary Arts (Beijing) as part of the international traveling exhibit Examples to Follow. She is a founding member of the activist media collective BLW (with Rozalinda Borcila and Julie Wyman); their media installations and performances have exhibited at Southern Exposure (San Francisco), the Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Gallery 400 (University of Illinois Chicago), and the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT). With Erin McGonigle, she produced and filmed The State of California v Lou Gottlieb for Radical Software at the Wattis Institute (San Francisco). With Nicole Cousino, she produced the award-winning video Fat of the Land (1995), the earliest chronicle of DIY biodiesel production. Her essays about media, sustainability, and culture appear in anthologies and journals, including An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Tema, Journal of Northeast Studies, Area, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest,and Third Person. She has presented work and lectured in Malmo, Reading (UK), Copenhagen, Dusseldorf, Tijuana, and in China. She teaches media production at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL. 

Sarah Maldoror is not African by birth, but her work and dedication to the cause of Africa grants her a privileged place in any comprehensive analysis of Black African cinema. In the 1950s, she created her own troupe, Griots, and abandoned the legitimate stage to become actively involved in the struggle for African liberation. With the Angolan writer Mario de Andrade, one of the leaders of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), she subsequently went to Guinea-Conakry, where she came to realize that in Africa, cinema was the most appropriate medium to raise the political awareness of the masses of people, many of whom were and still are illiterate. At that point Sarah Maldoror set out to become a filmmaker. She went to Moscow to study filmmaking on a scholarship awarded by the Soviet Union. Maldoror became Gillo Pontecorvo’s assistant during the filming of The Battle of Algiers. It was also in Algeria that she made her first film, Monangambee. Her next film, Guns for Banta, was made among Amilcar Cabral’s freedom fighters in the bush of Guinea-Bissau. Maldoror spent the following year in France, where she made commissioned films. Sambizanga won a Tanit d’or at the Carthage Film Festival in 1972 and the International Catholic Film Office Award at FESPACO in 1973. She then made various short films and documentaries about her favorite poet, Aimé Césaire. Sarah Maldoror has several film projects in store, among them are films about Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon. 

The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist-led collective and organization founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. It integrates film and video making, artists’ writings, workshops, exhibition curation, publication, and developing public platforms for close readings of the image in the contemporary world. The Group's work is formally engaged with research-led projects exploring the legacies and potentialities of artist-led proposals around the document and the essay film, the archive, the aural and sonic medium, speculative futures and science-fiction. Nationally and internationally, the Group has been commissioned to produce moving-image work, installations, and publications. These works act to support a structure that allows for wider research into aural and visual cultures and their historical and contemporary potentials. They have organized workshops, discussions, and curated and co-curated work at film festivals, programs, and exhibitions including the touring exhibition The Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982-1998 (2007), Harun Farocki. 22 Films: 1968-2009 at Tate Modern (2009), On Vanishing Land at The Showroom, London (2012), and the touring program Protest, which was conceived as part of the Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema, commissioned by the Independent Cinema Office (2008). Recent group shows include ECM: A Cultural Archaeology, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Death of Life and Fiction, Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2012); dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel (2012); Lunds konsthall (2012); Cultuurcentrum, Brugge, (2012); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2011); Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt (2011); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2011); 29th Sao Paolo Biennale (2010); Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing (2012); and Manifesta 8 (2010). Solo exhibitions include Westfailure at Project 88, Mumbai (2012); I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another, Fabrica, Brighton (2012); Thoughtform at MACBA, Barcelona (2011); and MAXXI, Rome (2011). In 2010, The Otolith Group was nominated for The Turner Prize. 

Eyal Sivan is a documentary filmmaker and theoretician, based in Paris. Born in 1964 in Haifa, Israel, and raised in Jerusalem, he now divides his time between Europe and Israel. Known for his controversial films, as a teenager Sivan abandoned formal education to dedicate himself to his hobbies: still photography and political activism. After working as a commercial photographer in Tel Aviv, he left Israel in 1985 and settled in Paris. Sivan has directed more than a dozen internationally acclaimed and award-winning political documentaries, and has produced many others: Common State (2012), Jaffa (2009), Route 181 (2003), The Specialist (1999), Izkor (1990), among others. Besides worldwide theatrical releases and TV broadcasts, Sivan’s films are regularly exhibited in major art shows around the world. He publishes, lectures, and programs events on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary filmmaking and ethics, political crimes and representation, political use of memory, genocide and perpetrators’ representation, etc. Sivan is the founder and artistic director of the Paris-based documentary production company momento!, and the film distribution agency Scalpel. He founded and was the first editor-in-chief of South Cinema Notebooks, a journal of cinema and political criticism published by the Sapir Academic College in Israel, where Sivan conducts a graduate seminar. In recent years Sivan co-led the MA program in film, video, and new media at the University of East London’s School of Arts and Digital Industries. Currently he is an honorary fellow at the European Center of Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, UK, and a visiting professor at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam, at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, and at the School of Sound and Visual Arts at the Sapir Academic College in Israel. Sivan is member of the editorial board of the Paris-based publishing house La Fabrique, publisher of Sivan’s latest book, Common State, between the Jordan River and the Sea (with Eric Hazan, 2012). 

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationship between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Most recently, they have questioned elemental historical narratives about faith, freedom, sonic subterfuge, expansionism, and the paranormal. Stratman works in multiple mediums, including sculpture, photography, installation, drawing, and audio. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Taipei National Palace Museum. She has done site-specific projects with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Temporary Services, Mercer Union (Toronto), Blaffer Gallery (Houston), Klondike Institute of Art & Culture (Yukon), and Ballroom Gallery (Marfa, TX). Stratman’s films have been featured at numerous international festivals, including Sundance, Full Frame, Ann Arbor, True/False, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, and the Viennale. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, and grants from Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, and the Wexner Center. Stratman teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago. 

Wendelien van Oldenborgh is an artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She received her art education at Goldmiths' College, London, during the eighties and has been living in the Netherlands again since 2004. Her practice explores social relations through an investigation of gesture in the public sphere. Van Oldenborgh often uses the format of a public film shoot, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce a script and orientate the work towards its final outcome, which can be film or other forms of projection. The double-screen installation La Javanaise (2012) was shown at the Berlinale Forum Expanded 2013; Bete & Deise (2012) premiered in the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Supposing I Love You. And You Also Love Me (2011) was first shown in the Danish Pavilion of the Venice Biennial 2011; and Pertinho de Alphaville (2010) premiered at the 29th São Paulo Biennial 2010. Van Oldenborgh has also participated in the 4th Moscow Biennial 2011, the 11th Istanbul Biennial 2009, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and the Images festival Toronto in 2010, where she received the Marian McMahon Award. She has exhibited widely, including at the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Sztuki, Lodz; Van Abbemusem, Eindhoven; Muhka, Antwerp. She was awarded the Hendrik Chabot Prize 2011 from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Netherlands. Wendelien van Oldenborgh is represented by Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam. 

Julie Wyman is a filmmaker and performer whose work engages issues of embodiment, body image, gender, and the politics, possibilities, and problematics of media spectatorship. Her 2012 documentary STRONG! premiered at Silverdocs, screened in theaters nationally, and was broadcast nationally as the closing film of the 10th season of PBS’s Emmy award-winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been awarded support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Independent Television Service and the Creative Capital Foundation. Her participatory workshops, which have been featured events at universities, academic conferences, art galleries, and at community centers nationally, draw on her experience as professor, writer, and performer. Her films, including Buoyant (2005) and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, London's National Film Theatre, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Wexner Art Center, the Walker Art Center, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Wyman is currently an Associate Professor in the Cinema and Technocultural Studies Program at the University of California Davis.