Susanne Jirkuff is a visual artist and filmmaker. In her works she depicts urban spaces and the stories and narratives that are embedded in them. The(re)presentation of space via media channels is footage for drawings and is further developed to semi-fictional animated films and installations.

Meike Schmidt-Gleim was born in 1972 in Wolfsburg, Germany. From 1995 to 2000 she worked as a freelance art critic. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, she graduated with a doctorate in philosophy in 2005. From 2007 to 2008 she taught at the Kunstakademie Münster. She has been a research associate at Fulda University of Applied Sciences since 2019, specializing in democratic theory, critical theory, image theory, and gender studies.

Markus Schinwald's interdisciplinary body of work encompasses video, performance, dance, theatre, painting, photography, installation, and even puppetry. The artist creates mysterious and unsettling atmospheres that hint at their Viennese production context, through references to the austere Biedermeier style or to psychoanalysis. His work focuses on processes of manipulation and transformation of bodies and their environments. This emphasis is rooted in his early training in fashion and costume history, which not only awakened his general interest in clothing, but also drew his attention to the ways in which people are physically and emotionally limited by their cultural context.

Schinwald has declared himself a 'builder of prostheses for undefined cases', and alters 19th-century portraits by painting improbable apparatuses on the characters' faces and bodies, such as bandages, splints or wires that seem to fasten their limbs together. The artist has also developed a series of manipulated pieces of furniture, often using Biedermeier table or chair legs that are characteristic of the style valued by a growing middle-class in that period. He transforms these items by sawing off the legs and rearranging them in uncanny ways that often bring out their anthropomorphic qualities.

Jun Yang is a self-taught, multifaceted, and resourceful artist who uses a broad range of techniques and materials creating art pieces in a variety of sizes and locations, from intimate canvases to full scale murals. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Jun has made San Francisco his home for the past 12 years. The city continues to inspire Jun and his art with its cultural diversity, celebrated urban landscape, natural beauty as well as the socially inclusive culture which provides support and protection for queer artists like him.

Jun’s work seeks to evoke emotions through his use of space and colors. Jun’s art speaks to viewers across cultures and continents in a unique way, transcending the need for common language. Each piece is incomplete until the viewers contribute their own contexts to the artistic conversation.

painting animals, plants, humans, mythes fairy tales and old truths

Mathias Poledna was born in 1965 in Vienna and has lived in Los Angeles since 2000. His work often takes the form of highly sophisticated films that betray a tension between the visuals presented and their cultural and political implications. Entertainment and its production are key subjects for Poledna as he focuses on the forms and materials that capture the imagination and illustrate societies to themselves. In all of his works the detail and precision of the images are seductive as they, in a sense, explore artifice through artifice. Although invariably newly produced, they often create the impression of having been found as they are, seemingly extricated from present-day or historical collective memories.

Poledna studied at the University (then College) of Applied Arts and at the University of Vienna. He has participated internationally in numerous major and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Berlin Biennial, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Yokohama Trienniale, the 2013 Sydney Biennial, the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, and Made in L.A. 2020. In 2013 Poledna represented Austria at the 55th Venice Biennial. Other solo exhibitions include the Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria, in 2001; Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna, in 2003; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 2006; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, in 2007; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (with Christopher Williams), in 2009; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, USA, in 2010; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 2013; and the Vienna Secession, Austria; The Renaissance Society, Chicago, in 2014; Halle für Kunst, Graz, Austria, in 2024; Central Museum, Utrecht, in 2026, amongst others. In 2009, the artist was awarded the City of Vienna Prize for Visual Arts, and in 2023 the Austrian State Prize for Art.

Judith Ammann was born in 1954 in the Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. From 1970 to 1976, she studied Graphic Design at the Lucerne School of Design. Between 1988 and 1997, she pursued studies in Film and New Media in Frankfurt and Offenbach am Main, Germany. She lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Tobias Urban was born in 1966 and lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He is a member of Gelitin, a collective consisting of artists Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban, and Wolfgang Gantner, who first met at summer camp in 1978. They formed Gelitin in the mid-1990s in Vienna and began exhibiting internationally in 1993.

Ali Janka was born in 1970 and lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He is a member of Gelitin, a collective consisting of artists Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban, and Wolfgang Gantner, who first met at summer camp in 1978. They formed Gelitin in the mid-1990s in Vienna and began exhibiting internationally in 1993.

Johan Frid was born in 1971 in Malmoe, Sweden, and lives in Sandviken, Sweden. He received an MFA in Visual Art from Umea University, Sweden, in 1997.

Åse Frid (b. 1969, Uppsala, Sweden) holds an MFA from Umea Art Academy, Umea University, Sweden (1995-2000). Lives and works at Stockholm archipelago 1 hour north of Stockholm. She works with text-based watercolor and ink, film installations and poetry. Her work investigates relations between language, image, dream, humour and contemplation.

The white of the paper is saved out inside the little marker-written letters, the warp of the painting, to which she relates in time and with watercolor around the text. This way of writing and painting started in Los Angeles in 1997 where she started making meticulously painted travel letters to the king of Sweden and to Iggy Pop. Recently she has been copying letters and writings from Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and other artists and writers and made watercolors starting from the quotations. She has also made works that starts with ”false friends”, a linguistic term for words from different languages that look the same but have different meanings, such as ”barn”; meaning child in Swedish, but something else in English. She encircles these words in repetitive painting.

She has made a film projected on a 10 meter watercolor paper roll, with text and painting.

Ase Frid describes her work as connected to the holy work of medieval monks, illuminating holy scriptures. The concentration and the endless work creates a dreamlike state, and merges with the chance of color spread on the paper. Her work involves her own writings and poetry, qoutations from books or newspapers and surrealistic writings.

Constanze Ruhm is an internationally renowned artist, filmmaker, author, and curator whose diverse practice transcends the boundaries between film, media art, and theoretical reflection. After studying Media Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Institute for New Media at Städelschule Frankfurt am Main under Peter Weibel, she developed an internationally recognized artistic and theoretical practice.

Since 2006, she has held a professorship in Art and Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As a curator, her significant projects include "FATE OF ALIEN MODES" at the Vienna Secession (2003) and "PUTTING REHEARSALS TO THE TEST" in Montreal (2016). Her works are regularly presented at renowned international festivals including the Berlinale, FID Marseille, Essay Film Festival London, Diagonale, and Viennale.

From a consistently feminist perspective, Ruhm examines the complex relationships between time-based media formats and representations of women. Her work deconstructs patriarchally shaped histories and theories, focusing particularly on rehearsal processes and casting formats as artistic procedures that question hegemonic forms of representation and develop alternative feminist performativities.

Ruhm develops innovative feminist strategies in dealing with found material to discover lost, excluded, and suppressed voices of women. Her works, situated between essay, fiction, and documentation, fundamentally question patriarchal narratives by extracting female film characters from male-dominated narrative structures and developing them into independent, complex subjects.

Film theorist Christa Blümlinger calls Ruhm's practice "film-related archive art" – an explicitly feminist approach that breaks up patriarchal correlations of cinema and media art. Ruhm is considered one of the most important representatives of critical, feministically grounded media art in the German-speaking world.

Anna Meyer was born in 1964 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and lives in Vienna, Austria. From 1983 to 1984, she attended the School of Design in Lucerne.

She has held several teaching positions, including a professorship at the Summer Academy in Salzburg from 2007 to 2008, and a lectureship in Painting/Digital Realities at the Lucerne University of Art from 2010 to 2012.

Marko Lulić lives and works in Vienna. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. His work deals intensively with topics such as architecture and modernism, the interweaving of ideology and aesthetics, and the contrast of bodies in flux with the motionlessness of monumental structures. In his artistic practice he makes use of a number of media including video, performance, photography and installation. In recent years he has also curated several exhibitions as part of his expanded artistic practice. For the past five years he has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Lulić’s work has been exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Vienna; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; The Biennale of Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Migros Museum for Contemporary Art, Zurich; 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, Biel / Bienne and the Frankfurter Kunstverein.

Gerry Ammann was born on April 18, 1962, in Bregenz, Austria. From 1984 to 1990, he studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in the master class of Bruno Gironcoli. In 1990, he received his diploma in sculpture. He lives and works in Vienna.

Noa Schiller is a professional photographer, born in 1968 in Hungary, now living in Budapest. She graduated from The Hungarian Journalist School. Working on personal and commissioned projects and she has worked as a photographer and picture editor since 1993. Since 1994, she got several prizes, also in Hungarian Pressphoto Competition, stipends and scholarship programs internationally.

Martin Liebscher was born in 1964 in Naumburg/Saale, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin and Offenbach, Germany.

Liebscher's works are created through the digital processing of scanned photographs that he takes of himself using an automatic shutter release. The figures in his images are not digitally manipulated; they are photographs of a real person in action. In his Family Pictures series, Liebscher consistently works within a specific architectural or social environment. The titles of his works are simply the names of the sites he "invades" as an omnipresent protagonist.

Isa Rosenberger (1969, Salzburg, Austria) studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at: 2023 Bauhaus Dessau Foundation; Kunsthaus Graz. 2020 Camera Austria, Graz. 2019 Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna. 2014 Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles. 2011 Grazer Kunstverein. 2009 Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg. 2008 Secession Vienna. In 2008 she received the Otto Mauer Prize and in 2012 the Outstanding Artist Award for Video and Media Art.

Rosenberger's works are held in permanent collections at Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz; Collection of Wien Museum, Vienna; Collection of Dom Museum Wien, OM Contemporary; Artothek – Collection of the Austrian Culture Office; Fotosammlung des Bundes – Museum der Moderne Salzburg; GfZK Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.

Helena Huneke (1967–2012) was a German artist and designer whose practice deftly moved between industrial design, installation, performance, and collaborative projects. Born in Münster and educated at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Huneke's approach integrated theoretical and spatial inquiries with a deep engagement in contemporary art and design culture. She earned her diploma in industrial design in 1995, with a focus on interior architecture, furniture design, and theory.

Martin Behr (1964, Graz) is a trained art historian and wears the multiple hats of a newspaper journalist, editor, curator, artist, and member of the G.R.A.M. artist collective. Behr lives in Graz.