TEAM

Anja Foerschner
Anja is the founder of ECC Performance Art. Originally trained as a visual artist, she holds an MA in Art Pedagogy, Art History and Philosophy and a PhD in Contemporary Art History from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Anja has researched and curated performance art for almost a decade and worked with institutes such as Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and PerformanceHUB in Belgrade. She is passionate about exploring the many facets of performance art and the various ways in which it engages with our cultural, social, and political landscape.  

Francesca Albrezzi
Albrezzi is an art historian, curator, and digital humanist. She completed her PhD in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA), She also holds a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate through UCLA's Digital Humanities Program. Her research interrogates modes of publishing, display, and information capture in museums and archives that illustrate a break from “traditional” models, and argues that digital modalities provide a distinctly different paradigm for epistemologies of art and culture that produce greater contextualized understandings. Specifically, she is interested in spectrums of immersive experience within GLAM organizations as offered by technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360 photo and video capture. For over a decade, she has worked with museums including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.), the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (Paris, France), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, California). Francesca has garnered significant experience in developing and teaching digital tools for art historical practice and humanistic research, such as The Getty Scholars’ Workspace™ for conducting collaborative arts research and preservation. She currently works as a Digital Research Consultant at UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education.

Ayça Ceylan
Performance artist and environmentalist Ayça Ceylan creates site-specific performances about perception processes through employing disciplines such as comparative mythology, dance, spiritualism, herbalism and technology together. In her performances, she focuses on how the body and space construct each other, the concept of healing, body politics, and multispecies. For her performances, she prefers galleries, museums, public spaces, nature, and ancient sites that affect our archetypical memory. Rituals, symbolism, goddess cults and synchronization with nature are among her biggest inspirations. She uses photography, video, installation, artists books, AR and live art to present her concept. Ceylan is the founder and creative director of Body in Perform (2018). She has carried out performance workshops and residencies in numerous venues across Turkey,  Japan, India, and the UK. She also writes about climate issues for Cumhuriyet Daily Newspaper. Her performance documentations are in private art collections. https://aycaceylan.wordpress.com/ 

Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi [aka crazinisT artisT]
Born 1981 in Ho, Ghana, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [ aka crazinisT artisT] is a trans woman with the pronoun sHit if not She. Va-Bene lives in Kumasi, Ghana but works internationally as a multidisciplinary “artivist”, curator, philanthropist, artvangelist and a mentor across several countries. She is the founder and artistic director of crazinisT artisT studiO (TTO), Our Railway Cinema Gallery (ORCG), perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR) and Trans African Ambassadors Network (TAAN). All of which aimed at radicalising the arts and promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and critical thinkers. As a performer and installation artist, crazinisT investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics and conflicts, sexual stigma and their consequences for marginalised groups or individuals. With rituals and a gender-fluid persona, She employs her own body as a thought-provoking tool in performances, photography, video, and installations, ‘life-and-live-art’ confronting issues such as disenfranchisement, injustice, violence, objectification, internalised oppression, anti blackness, systemic indoctrination and many more. crazinisT has performed and exhibited across the globe including countries such as Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany, Netherlands, Cape Verde, USA, Spain, Brazil, France, Sweden, Hungary, Belgium, Luxembourg, Japan, Finland, Portugal, Denmark, Austria, Romania, Kosovo and UK/Ireland. Learn more at https://www.crazinistartist.com/

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Katja Hilevaara
Katja Hilevaara is a collaborative artist, researcher, and teacher who works in performance, installation and art writing. Ideas around maintenance, care and enchantment are often foregrounded in her artwork, and she plays close attention to the everyday in the making and thinking of her various projects. Recent works have drawn on (auto)biography and reimagined histories, exploring ways that question existing narratives, and which might deliberately mis-remember or otherwise creatively interpret events to shift their perspective and meaning. Creative constraints such as tasks and instructions often shape her projects. Katja creates works with other artists and thinkers, cherishing the change to be inspired by dialogue and conversation. She is involved in a long-term collaboration with artist Emily Orley with whom she creates performances and writes. Katja is currently a lecturer in Theater and and Performance at Goldsmith's University of London.
Learn more about Katja on her website www.katjahilevaara.com
 

Rah Eleh
Rah Eleh is a video, net and performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. Rah's work focuses on and critiques the visual stereotypes and performative aspects that shape female gender identity and national and ethnic identity. She is interested in how race and gender are performed from multiple layered perspectives: exilic, decolonial, queer and diasporic. Rah has lectured and exhibited extensively internationally at institutions including NYU Tisch, The New School, Alfred University, Dalhousie University, Images Festival (Toronto), Museum London, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), Pao Festival (Oslo, Norway), Kunst am Spreeknie (Berlin, Germany), Kunsthaus Graz Museum (Graz, Austria), and Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). Rah is represented by VTape, Canada's leading artist-run distributor for video art. 
Learn more about Rah on her website: https://www.rah-eleh.com/

Natasha Jozi
Natasha Jozi is a Fulbright scholar, performance artist and curator from Pakistan, interested in the collective human experiences and the intersections of science and the spiritual body. She has widely performed and exhibited her work in Colombo (Sri Lanka), New York, Chicago, Delaware, Winnipeg (Canada), Tetley (UK), Fribourg (Switzerland), and Venice. She is the founder and director of House Ltd., a platform that aims to promote performance art in Pakistan. Through her curatorial projects, she strives to generate critical discourse around the body, gender, and censorship. She is the recipient of the Prince Claus mobility grant. Jozi resides between Pakistan and Germany. 
Learn more about Natasha on her website: http://www.natashajozi.com

VestAndPage
Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage internationally in performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing and temporary artistic community projects. For over a decade, VestAndPage have been exploring performance art and filmmaking as phenomena through their collaborative creative practice, artistic research and curatorial projects. They have produced performance-based art and films among others under Antarctic glaciers, at the Himalayan foothills, in the vastness of Tierra del Fuego, in military enclaves, or inside prehistoric caves systems. In a psychogeography of symbiotic realms they move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. Their works have been presented at various sites and in theatres, museums, galleries and cinemas worldwide. They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their research and poetic writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They share their methodology and mentoring on collaborative performance and filmmaking in co-creation master classes and have been guest lecturers at art academies worldwide. For more information and current projects visit their website

Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen
Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen is an artist and researcher, who works at the intersection between performance art, media, and matter. Madsen is currently a doctoral candidate at Aalto University School of Arts, Design, and Architecture in Finland, where their artistic research evolves around environmental performance art and affective relations in a critical ethico-aesthetic practice. Madsen has an art educational background from the College of Arts, Crafts, and Design (Denmark) where they started studying performance art in 1999, and holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Aarhus University in Denmark. Madsen has performed internationally in many formats and contexts. They are the founder and organizer of Performance Protocols, a nomadic platform for instruction-based art and collaborative processes. Madsen has lecturing and teaching experience from Node Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin (online courses), Kunstpionererne at Kunsthal Nord (Denmark), Aarhus University, and Aalto University Department of Art and Media, among others. Madsen is further a certified facilitator of Deep Listening Workshops from the Center for Deep Listening, Rensselaer Polytech Institute in the US.
For more info on Tina visit http://tmkm.dk/ and http://performance-protocols.net/

Emily Orley
Emily Orley is an artist, writer, and educator based in London. Her work includes performance, video, installation, and hybrid modes of writing. She has published many chapters and articles that explore and enact practices of creative-critical writing. She also co-edited The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice with Routledge in 2018.
Emily's research interests often revolve around ideas to do with memory, maintenance, and enchantment, and un-fixing notions of time, heritage, and place. Always open to new forms of experimentation, nothing inspires her more than lively discussions, new encounters, and unlikely assemblages. As a practitioner-researcher, she is a firm believer in breaking down the false binaries that separate practice and theory, making and thinking and writing about making.
More information about Emily and her work can be found at www.emilyorley.com

:mentalKLINIK
:mentalKLINIK is a Brussels-based artist duo from Istanbul, composed of Yasemin Baydar & Birol Demir, who began their collaborative practice in 1998. :mentalKLINIK strides with undisguised dexterity the invisible political strategies and the social dynamics by ultra-contemporary devices of an apparent lightness. Like a discoball, :mentalKLINIK shows are a selection of their multifaceted appraoch on their universe. Resisting to the limitations of a single vocuabulary or style, their world is a playone one full of hedonistic appeal which can be experienced as festive and glamorous but also surprising as one approaches to discover with a closer view an underlying violence suggestive of a bad trip after a party or a creepy beginning of the end.  Their works shift between emotional and robotic attitudes. The artist duo reclaim the sparkling and authoritative visual languge of the media and night spheres in a climate of sensory hyperstimulation engendered by ultiple neons, slogans, light beams, mirror balls and confetti while playing with our unanimous attraction to objects glittering and seductive. It is all the work of encryption to which they summon us, between the true and false, the artificial and the superficial, as if everything were a case of falsification. :mentalKLINIK has an open laboratory approach to process, production, roles, conception and presentation. Their works are a mix of oxymora and paradoxes, darkly humorous, self-contained and range from immersive time-based installations to sculptures and objects that thwart categorisation. :mentalKLINIK's experimental appraoch has been praised in numerous international group and solo exhibitions. More information can be found on their website: https://www.mentalklinik.com/

Marilyn Arsem
Performance artist Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years, presenting her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with their history, use or politics. Marilyn has been the recipient of fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s.  Recent awards include the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship; a 2017 City of Boston Artist Fellowship, and project grants in 2017 and 2018 from Boston Foundation’s Live Arts Boston program.
Arsem taught for 27 years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, establishing an extensive program in visuallky-based performance art. In 1975 Arsem founded an artist collaborative for experimentation, now known as Mobius Artists Group. Mobius has presented work involving thousands of artists over its 40+year history. A book on Arsem/s work, Responding to Site: The performance work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.
Additional information about her work can be found on her website: http://marilynarsem.net

Rosie Gibbens
Rosie Gibbens is a British artist who makes performances, videos, sculptures and installations that feature her body. Using absurd humour, she explores gender performativity, sexual politics, consumer desire, labour, and the slippery overlap between these. The mindset behind her work is often of someone attempting to participate seamlessly in contemporary life, but not quite managing.
Rosie studied Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art (2018), and Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins (2015). She has exhibited and performed at institutions including: Konig Gallery, South London Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Elephant West, Zabludowicz Collection, TJ Boulting and Giant. In 2022 she won the Ingram Prize, was shortlisted for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and was awarded the Sarabande residency.
More information about Rosie and her work can be found on her website: http://rosiegibbens.com 

Abigail Conway
Abigail Conway is a live artist who works with material objects, craft and actions to create playful site-specific installations and immersive encounters for audiences. Her work crosses many disciplines, including sound and video design, music technology, nature, architecture and performance. Her environments offer a space for dialogue, community, and contemplation.
Abigail’s work has been presented in galleries and theatres and showcased by the British Council. Nationally it has presented at the: ICA, Battersea Arts Centre, Southbank Centre, The Barbican, The National, Forest Fringe, The Wellcome Collection, Attenborough Centre for Contemporary Arts, Latitude and Summerhall. Internationally her work has toured Europe, China, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Canada and USA.
Abigail is an Associate lecturer at Goldsmiths University. Abigail’s research focuses on instruction led performance and the politics surrounding participatory arts. Her practice as an artist is centred around a methodology called, The Hobby project.
For more info visit abigailconway.com; homesweethomecommunities.com; aneveningwithprimrose.com