Rosa Barba, Ph.D., is an artist and filmmaker who balances conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work. Suspended between dichotomies—permanent and impermanent, real and fictional, obsolescent and modern, conceptual and concrete, alien and familiar, Rosa Barba’s multiform practice encompasses films, sculptures, installations, live-performances, publications, text, and site-specific interventions that analyze the ways space is articulated by time and language.
Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role in the perception of her work. She interrogates the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging by inviting the viewers to participate in her cultural observations. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in time. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty, more legible as reassuring myth than the unstable reality they represent.
In 2021, Rosa Barba inaugurated Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), a permanent open-air cinema sculpture and film in the United Nations Buffer Zone in Deryneia, Cyprus and Pillage of the Sea, a permanent sculpture in the sea in Ostend, for the Beaufort Biennial. Barba deconstructs cinematic elements, merging physical materials with abstract concepts like time and sound. Her art often focuses on natural landscapes and human interventions, blending historical records with personal narratives. Her work is part of numerous international collections. She has exhibited at prestigious venues such as MoMA, New York (2024-25), Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb (2025), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023), Tate Modern, London (2023), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021-2022), HangarBicocca, Milan (2017), Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2017) and Secession, Vienna (2017), Schirn Kunsthalle (2016), and at Biennials such as the 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale, and Performa (2013).
She has been a visiting professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts and held a professorship in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Bremen. Rosa Barba holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts at Malmö Art Academy, Lund University and is Professor for Art in Space and Time at ETH Zurich.
Corinne Diserens, Ph.D., is an art historian, curator, and head of collection at Hamburger Kunsthalle. From 1989 to 2009, she was curator at Institut Valencià d'Art Modern and at MACBA, Barcelona as well as director of Musées de Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, and Museion Bolzano. She curated Tyne International, Newcastle; Carta Blanca, Madrid/Bilbao; Big Social Game, Biennial Torino; the 25th Biennial Sao Paulo; and T.I.C.A.B. Tirana. From 2010 to 2017, she headed the art academy ERG Brussels, was jury president of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and curator of the 2016 Taipei Biennial. From 2019 to 2023, she directed the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. Diserens curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions, artists retrospectives, publications, and seminars.
Nina Emge is a Zürich-based artist, who reflects on the social dimensions of sound, voice, silence, and practices of listening. Emge’s work is centered around issues such as decentralization, shared working methods, and redistribution. This is evident in her installations and drawings, which reflect her research and archival work, as well as in the production processes of her artworks. Emge is an active member of the Transnational Sound Initiative. Emge’s works have been exhibited at institutions including Lagos Biennale, Biennale Son, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthalle Bern, Istituto Svizzero Rome, Istituto Svizzero Palermo, Frac Bretagne + Centre culturel suisse de Paris, Uferhalle Berlin, Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Helmhaus Zurich, and at other national and international institutions.
Catherine Facerias (she/her) is an independent researcher and writer, trained as an urban anthropologist at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Her work examines the modes of production of public space in a built-up environment and the agents involved in its production. Her research observes the terms of access to any given public space and to the city in general and analyses the conditions of existence of interstices and margins in the urban environment. She is currently developing a project of fiction regarding the concept of borderland.
Heiner Franzen is a draughtsman and video artist living in Berlin. After two years at the HfK Bremen, he completed his studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1993. He processes collective memories from everyday life: teenage experiences, cinema, theater, advertising, news, sports, medicine, etc. and puts them into large drawing and video installations such as most recently in the Haus am Lützowplatz, at the Manifesta Palermo, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and the Berlinische Galerie. After holding visiting professorships at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin and the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts, he has been teaching at ETH since 2018.
Sam Ghantous is an itinerant artist working with the entanglements between environments and the networked media that shape and share them. Drawing on techniques from the web, architecture, and video games, his exhibitions combine videos and custom software with spatial installations, sculptures, and prints. Sam explores themes of change through technology: translation in states of materiality, the global circulation of images and exchanges between intimate and public experience. Recent exhibits include Postmasters Gallery, A83, ZKM at the Ludwig Museum, ASSAB One, OōEli Art Park, Art Basel Hong Kong, and YveYANG Gallery, where he is represented. Sam has taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also received his Master of Architecture.
Martin Hartung studied art history, anthropology, and theology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He has contributed curatorial and publication projects at various art and cultural institutions, including Dia Art Foundation (New York), Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein), Center for Art and Media (ZKM, Karlsruhe), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). He also served as an advisor to the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in Philadelphia. Martin is coordinator at the Chair of Art in Space and Time, where he develops and manages both research and special initiatives. His research explores discourses in contemporary art and architecture, as well as the historical development of representational practices and institutional theory.
Nicole L’Huillier, Ph.D., is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has been shown at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2025), 14a Bienal do Mercosul (2025), 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Tabakalera Donostia (2025), Kunsthalle Bern (2024), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Shanghai (2023), 6th Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg (2021), and 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2018), among others.
Sara Masüger is an artist who works with sculptures and large-scale installations. She studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and lives and works in Zurich. In her sculptures she explores memory as a process of distortion. Through direct imprints and deformations, she creates a fragile field of tension between recognizable bodily forms and amorphous landscapes as well as between visual and haptic perception.
Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Swedish National Museum, FRAC Auvergne, and Bündner Kunstmuseum. Since 2018, her installation Inn reverse has been on permanent display at the Muzeum Susch.
Monica Narula (IN) is an artist and curator based between Paris and New Delhi. She holds a BA in English Literature, and her postgraduate training is in cinematography and filmmaking – leading to a deep interest in the fantasy of the image. Alongside Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Narula is co-founder and member of the Raqs Media Collective. Founded in 1992, the word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. The collective have also curated exhibitions, staged situations, and collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors. Their works have been presented internationally at most major scenarios, from documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well as solo museum exhibitions. Raqs have curated large scale exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale and In the Open or in Stealth at MACBA, Barcelona. They co-founded Sarai—the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi—in 2001, where they initiated processes that have left a deep impact on contemporary culture in India, and where they also edited the Sarai Reader series (01-09).
Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, Ph.D., teaches Visual Culture, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. He received his Ph.D. in Literature Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG (Brazil) and École Normale Supérieure – ENS, Paris. He was a researcher at the Center for History and Art Theory – CEHTA, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – EHESS, Paris (2014-2016); Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte DFK, Paris (2022); and Max Planck Institute, Rome (2022). He is the author of the books Invented Skins – Epidermal Readings in Brazilian Art and Literature (Diaphanes 2025); O mundo a zero. Drummond, Haroldo de Campos, Ricardo Aleixo e as máquinas do mundo (Ed. UFMG, 2024), O fantasma do método (Iluminuras, 2024), Beschweigen, Bezeichnen: Mira Schendel und die Schrift unmittelbaren Erlebens (transl. by Melanie Strasser, Diaphanes, 2020); A invenção de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras (2018). As a filmmaker, he made a trilogy of film-essays on public joy with philosophers and thinkers in São Paulo, Lisbon, and Paris. With a strong interest in the connections between artistic writing and literary procedures, he is senior researcher at the Chair of Art in Space and Time at ETH Zurich.
Jonathan Pouthier is a curator at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, where he has overseen film programming since 2011. A graduate of La Fémis, the French national film school, he has published extensively on the relationship between film and the visual arts, including David Claerbout. The Silence of the Lens (2022) and L’histoire d’une histoire du cinéma (2023, co-edited with Enrico Camporesi). He has curated exhibitions such as The Site of Film (KANAL–Centre Pompidou, 2018), Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Diamon’d (2019), Le reste est ombre (2022, with Philippe-Alain Michaud), and Rosa Barba, Hear, There, Where the Echoes Are(2023). In 2024, he co-founded the music label Edited By and released Michael Snow’s final album, Music for Today.
Nicolas Rolle is a photographer and urban researcher based in Zurich, where he completed his Master of Architecture at ETH. In his research focus on architectural care through collaborative and active maintenance, the gardener plays a central role in the development and transformation of cities. While conceiving and conducting seminars in the field of photographic and post-media research at ETH, Nicolas participated in various exhibitions in Berlin, Bolzano, Seoul and Zurich as well as in the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), the Ornamenta Transferium in Pforzheim (2022), and the Swiss contribution to the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023). His photographic work has been published by Park Books, Hatje Cantz Verlag and Arch+, among others.
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Formerly
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