BIOS

Mega Mingiedi Tunga
Mega Mingiedi Tunga is a visual artist, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa (2001) and from the Rhine University of the Arts (2008). He works on urban space by producing drawings, collages and installations. Co-founder of the Eza-POSSIBLES collective in Kinshasa, a group of artists whose aim is to bring contemporary art closer to the reality and daily life of the people of Kinshasa, he is an artist as committed as he is engaging. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies such as Scénographies Urbaines Kinshasa in 2006, the Dakar Off Biennale in 2010 and the Lubumbashi Biennale. Recent projects include his participation in the exhibition « Kinshasa Chroniques » (Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine, 2020-2021) and his exhibition at the Haute école des arts du Rhin (« Année Zéro », September 2021). https://www.multitudes.net/author/mega-mingiedi-tunga/

Ruth Mateus-Berr
Ruth Mateus-Berr is artist, researcher and social designer, full professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna; Head of the Center for Didactics of Art and Interdisciplinary Education. The focus of her work is on art, artistic research, (social) multisensual design research, interdisciplinary art and design education and health. She received her PHD and a venia docendi for Design Education; she also holds a diploma in art therapy. She has published several articles and books and exhibits art and artistic research internationally. https://www.theartresearcher.com/

Laboratoire Kontempo
Laboratoire Kontempo is a Platform for digital and analog experimental Kontemporary Art in Kinshasa founded by the Congolese/German duo Mukenge/Schellhammer in Kinshasa in 2019. Within the project, local and international artists, researchers and theorists work together in a transdisciplinary experimental space to question common structures of postcolonial power and dominant trends in international contemporary art scenes. “Kontempo” is a term that emerged as a neologism in the Kinshasa independent art scene. As a counter-narrative to the Western-influenced academic discourse, “Kontempo” has established itself as a new code and a reinterpretation of the term “contemporary” in Kinshasa.

Pamelia Stickney
Pamelia Stickney, born in Los Angeles in 1976, the Vienna-based composer and multi- instrumentalist first made a name for herself as a jazz double-bass player with Arthur Blythe. In 1997 she discovered one of the oldest electronic instruments, the theremin. Today she is one of the few recognized virtuosos on this instrument worldwide. Pamelia tours nationally and internationally as a soloist, with her Vienna-based trio Blueblut, as well as in collaboration with a variety of artists in the realms of Jazz/Improvisation, Classical, Contemporary, Black Metal, Hard-to-describe weird stuff!
http://pamelia.weebly.com

Lena Fankhauser
Lena Fankhauser is a violist of Trinidadian-Swiss heritage born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She started playing the violin at the age of 4. She has received both her Bachelor and Master’s degree from the Julliard School of Music in New York City on a full scholarship. Fankhauser has toured worldwide, across numerous genres, and played in many halls including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the Royal Albert Hall in London. As a passionate chamber musician, Lena Fankhauser founded a Chamber Music Festival in Bad Ischl and (CH)AMBER, an association for new chamber music. She is a founding member, contractor and manager of the film orchestra, Big Island Orchestra Vienna and a founding member and musical curator of Salon Souterrain. https://www.lena-fankhauser.com

Melissa Coleman
Melissa Coleman was born in Melbourne Australia where she graduated in 1990 at the Victorian College of the Arts with distinction. Since 1992 she has lived in Vienna and performs and tours as soloist, chamber and ensemble musician in renowned classical, modern, jazz and world music festivals throughout the world. She also works as a composer, arranger and improviser together with individual artists, modern dance, theater productions (Burgtheater Vienna) and multimedia projects. Melissa Coleman has recorded over 60 CDs with diverse ensembles and bands since living in Vienna.
http://www.melissacoleman.at

Albert R. Farago
As DJ Universal Beatnik (Accordia Record Club / ORF Pratersterne), Viennese media artist/musician/author Albert R. Farago (aka Al Bird Dirt and Al Bird Sputnik) plays « worldwide rare grooves », i.e. hot dance music from the remotest corners of the world. Music from decades ago, when records were still a mass medium and even offbeat novelty productions were created in the touching hope of taking the charts by storm – and sometimes even did … The variety of mixed genres and sub-genres seems inexhaustible, with priority given to 7″ singles that the Universal Beatnik dug up on early morning flea market tours: Girl-group pop from Singapore, belly-dance funk from Lebanon, yodel-rock-n- roll from the USA, minimal disco from Turkey, Schnitzelbeats from Austria … A sweaty affair that regularly drives music recognition software into a crash and only comes to an inebriated end in the late hours of the morning: « It’s been long overdue. We’ve been needing something new: Sophisticated boom boom! »
https://www.youtube.com/c/universalbeatnik

KVSAL
« My journey through the Viennese hip-hop scene started in 2015. Under KVSAL I released 12 tracks since 2020 and performed over 5 live gigs. In addition, radio stations like BBC Asian Network (UK), Ö1 and FM4 (AT) and Yes 101 FM (SL) featured me. The music magazine « The Message » also featured my debut EP « white fears brown soul » in the Austro Round-up January 2022. A healthy mixture of the charm of my city and the spice of my roots – that’s how I would describe my music in one sentence. Be it the weekly violin lessons, my grandmother’s Harry Belafonte CDs, my father’s Sinhalese folk songs or the church hymns at daily prayers – music played a formative role in my childhood. As a teenager, I started playing jazz on the violin – soon after, the Wu-Tang Clan and Notorious B.I.G. accompanied me on long bus rides through the 22nd district.
Also always present: the theme of « crossing borders » – starting, of course, with my family’s migration from Sri Lanka to Vienna. The crossing of borders is reflected in my music – be it the unique melange of traditional elements from the Sri Lankan and South Indian cultural areas and contemporary black music, or my multilingual « flow » in German, English and Sinhala. Love, sexuality, colonialism, emancipation, stories from my life or bubble tea – through my music I process the topics that are important to me and thus offer the Austrian music scene a whole new perspective. »
KVSAL

https://www.instagram.com/allriceonme/

Hyeji Nam
Hyeji Nam is an interdisciplinary artist working with the themes related to literature, sexuality, social taboos and cultural history. Finishing her B.A.F at Korea University, Seoul, South Korea she has been working in Australia, Iceland and Norway, being based in Vienna, Austria. She produces performative films and has recently performed as part of the works from Ingri Fiksdal Diorama (2019) at brut Wien and Doris Uhlich Habitat / Halle E (2019) at Tanzquartier Wien. Recent projects are focused on inventing new presentation contexts and movement languages.

https://www.instagram.com/hyejinam/

Anna Maria Niemiec
Anna Maria Niemiec was born in Poland and moved to Austria at the age of three. She has a particular passion for contemporary music, which has led to collaborations with reputable composers such as Wolfgang Rihm, Johannes Maria Staud, Bernhard Gander or Jörg Widmann, as well as taking part in numerous premieres of their works. Anna Maria made her debut as a soloist in the Great Hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus in 2018, performing at the prestigious festival “Wien Modern”. She has given many performances both as a soloist and as a chamber musician in some of Europe’s most notable concert halls, including the “Gläserner Saal, Musikverein”, the “Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus”, the “Philharmonie Paris”, the “Kiev Philharmonie”, the “Philharmonie Opole”, the “Radiokulturhaus” in Vienna, the “Schloss Esterhazy” in Eisenstadt and the “Arnold Schönberg Center” in Vienna, with other musical endeavours also having taken her to Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Georgia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, the Ukraine and Switzerland.
Anna Maria Niemiec is a prizewinner of a range of significant international competitions, such as “Fidelio Spezial”, “Prima La Musica”, “Duc de Richelieu” and “Fidelio Kreation”. She is an Art Scholar of the European Forum Alpbach, a scholarship holder of Bank Austria and of the “New Austrian sound of music” and also enjoys being a member of the Yehudi Menuhin foundation “Live Music Now”. She complements her extensive work as a soloist by focussing increasingly on chamber music, working with ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain and Quasars ensemble, amongst others.

https://www.instagram.com/detlevspinell/

ContextCocktail
ContextCocktail is a fluid art collective based in a major city on the Danube. Recurring themes are queerness, feminism, community building and the questioning of social norms. Context Cocktail is all about performance, video&photography and actions in public space. CC flirts with internet and social media culture. ContextCocktail creates temporary open spaces and provides a stage for queer feminist perspectives through happenings, workshops and club culture. CC constantly multiplies and transforms itself through collaboration with members of the ContextCocktail community.

ContextCocktail

https://www.instagram.com/allriceonme/
https://www.instagram.com/hyejinam/
https://www.instagram.com/detlevspinell/

Lau Lukkarila
Lau Lukkarila (they/them) is a choreographer and performer born in Oulu, Finland. Lau studied at the Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki and at the Royal School of Performing Arts in Madrid, and currently lives in Vienna. In 2018, Lau received the START grant from the Austrian Federal Chancellery for Music and Performing Arts and the danceWEB grant at ImPulsTanz Festival. Recent works include Trouble (2019) at the Rakete Festival in Tanzquartier Wien, NYXXX (2020) at imagetanz with brut Wien, kneading to the 3rd millennia (2021) at brut Wien as part of Freischwimmen Network and Lapse (2022) duet with Luca Bonamore at the S_P_I_T Festival in Tanzquartier Wien. Under LAUX (lapdog) Lau has released two internet EP’s: Superlike (2019) and HUFKLANG (2020). In the performative works Lau searches for interdisciplinary encounters, devoted awkwardness and the presence of an emotional body in dance and performance.
https://www.laulukkarila.com

Alexandru Cosarca
Alexandru Cosarca (born 1987 in Arad, Romania) works as a freelance artist in Vienna and Graz. He works at the intersection of stage performances, language art, serial photography and object art. Cosarca’s themes are community building, gender, queer and feminist issues. Bringing together and collaborating with other artists is an important element in Cosarca’s artistic practice. As well as opening saf(er) spaces from a queer-feminist and political-activist perspective. He is the founder of ContextCocktail and WERIStdICHTER?

JG Danso
JG Danso (she/her) is a Black woman, queer poet, intersectional equalities advisor and human resources expert. Her multidisciplinary approach to writing connects queer joy to the push for structural equality, intersectionality and inclusion in all spaces. Born and raised in East London to parents from Sierra Leone and Ghana, JG Danso now lives in Vienna.
JG Chairs the Verein hint.wien which is committed to highly intersectional queer-centered storytelling and runs the publishing organisation Verlag Triple Threat WOW | Vienna which works to increase the presence of intersectional queer books. Her first book ‘A Thousand Ships’ is available from independent bookstores around Vienna.
For more about JG’s work see Linktree https://linktr.ee/jgdanso, Instagram and Facebook @jgdanso.

Prof. Dr. phil. Vassilis S. Tsianos
Prof. Dr. phil. Vassilis S. Tsianos (Kiel UAS) teaches sociology at Kiel UAS. His main research interests include the sociology of post-migrant society, social science research on racism, and the biometrization of the European border. Vassilis Tsianos is chairman of the board of the Council for Migration, founding member of the Hamburg Institute for Migration and Racism Research (ImiR), founding member of the Netzwerk kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung, member of the section Migration Sociology and Ethnic Minorities of the DGS, member of the commission on „Refugee and Immigration Policy“ of the Heinrich- Böll-Stiftung. He has published numerous books, including, most recently, the co-authored monographs Mobile Commons, Digital Materialities and the Right to the City. (Palgrave Macmillan Pivot Series Mobility and Politics, 2015); Escape Routes. Control and Subversion in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2008); and the co-edited Racism in Post-migrant Society. Movements (Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research, 2016); The Art of being Many. Towards a New Theory and Practice of Gathering (transcript, 2016); Empire and the Biopolitical Turn (Campus, 2007); as well as a book on Turbulent Margins: New Perspectives of Migration in Europe (transcript, 2007). His publications on mobility studies, critical urbanism and anti-racist movements have appeared in Citizenship Studies, European Journal of Social Theory, Peripherie, Darkmatter, Multitudes, Boundary 2, Soziale Systeme, Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte and Texte zur Kunst, amongst other journals. He is currently working on a textbook Racism in Social Structures and Lifeworlds for Kohlhammer Verlag, in which institutionalized forms of racism in post-migrant society are analyzed following critical race studies.

Dr. Helga Klug
Dr. Helga Klug is a psychoanalyst, training analyst, supervisor and lecturer at Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität Vienna and Berlin. Research interests: social critique from a psychoanalytical perspective, literature and psychoanalysis, theories of intersubjectivity.

Dr. Olga Latowa
Dr. Olga Latowa, graduate of the Medical University of Vienna and then training as a specialist in general medicine, has specialised in aesthetic medicine with applications for the entire facial field. Using the most modern methods and techniques of aesthetic medicine, she helps her patients to emphasise and optimise their own attractiveness and, most importantly, to counteract the signs of ageing.

Andrijana Miljus
Andrijana Miljus was born 1985 in Serbia. Fashion and design graduated in 2021 at Vienna’s college HLMW9 Michelbeuern, with a thesis on « 3D printed fashion and sustainability – objection or consent ».She is a big supporter of sustainable and second-hand fashion, which she proudly wears herself. In 2020. she presented part of her collection at Vienna Fashion Week, after which she became part of Vienna’s first textile workshop Schnitt Bogen, where she works on developing her ideas and her own collection. Her vision is a great global revolution in the world of fashion as well as the « awakening » of human consciousness, so that our planet can be saved from the waste that we, as its inhabitants, are the main and only perpetrators of.

Designer Katarina Tutić
Designer Katarina Tutić (37) is a native Croatian who took a rather unusual path to fashion and design. Katarina graduated from Electrotechnical University following her talent for numbers and mathematics. However, she found that electrical engineering does not give her the same butterflies in her stomach as fashion does. Designing and tailoring her own clothes from a young age, she returned to this passion and graduated from the KunstModeDesign Herbstrasse college. Now she uses it as a medium to express herself and share her love and thoughts.
She is currently part of the team in the coworking space Schnittbogen and is working on her collection for Vienna Fashion Week 2022.

Wolfmich
Founded by Wolfgang Lindenhofer and Michael Pascher in 2019, Wolfmich is a hybrid between an archival retail space and a vintage store. Stocking a curated selection of designer pieces, independent labels as well as unsigned vintage and accessories, we look for the value outside of conventional fashion channels. Our attraction is both in the garments quality and story alike, with a drive to create an eclectic variation not bound by season, but with a focus placed on the fabulous. The store houses a collection equal parts mens and womenswear, come by if you feel curious.

Denise Van De Cruze
Denise Van De Cruze is an artist, traveller, and entrepreneur who infuses social justice and queer liberation in all of her endeavors. She owns and runs the Villa Vida – queer community cafe in Vienna. She is the founder of Black People in Vienna – a social group dedicated to fostering joy and community. Her many projects include the The Queer Feminist Festival, Black Austria – a documentary project, and The Queer Truth podcast.

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe
Born in Kinshasa (DRC), Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe grew up in France and pursued artistic studies. In 1998, she obtained the “Diplôme National d’Expression Plastique”, for her work of sculpture, at the School of Fine Arts in Tourcoing, France. She has since developed a reflection on the transformation of spaces, time, bodies on stage and in exhibition spaces in the form of performance / installation / sculpture.
Her last performance installations tend to show the multiplicity of angles of view which imply different perceptions of the same reality. Because consciousness is like the visual field. This is not a framed image seen by a third external eye, it is captured without distance and, although limited (it is impossible for us to see what is happening behind us), it has no edges: limited and yet without « border ». The various scenographic devices used, then allow to scramble the cards, unmask conventions (especially repressed), caress ambiguities and thus stage the many incoherent postures that assail us.
In response to the rise of European populist parties, Elisabeth creates in 2017 a multidisciplinary Art Space: Château Rouge. In 2018 she sets up the concept of “Salon Souterrain”, a platform for discussions mixing different forms and artistic gestures.
Alongside this artistic direction, Tambwe continues her own choreographic creations, has collaborated and continues to collaborate with other choreographers, visuals artists or directors such as Esther Stocker, Markus Schinwald, Robyn Orlin, God’s Entertainment, Companie La Fleur, Theater die Combinate…among others she is present at the Autumn Festival, the LUXEMBOURG Theater, at the Donaufestival, Steirischerherbst, Wiener Festwochen, Impuls Tanz, brut Wien, WUK performing arts Wien and Kunstraum Niederoesterreich.
In 2022 Tambwe presented the pilot of her first Telenovela « The Mask of the Schwarzen-Löwenbergs » (2022) at Filmcasino, premiered her piece Speech of Love : Absence (2022) at WUK and showed her the solo exhibition Le Boudoir (2022) at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna.
More informations here

Indra Jäger
Indra Jäger born in Frankfurt/Main has been living in Vienna since 2000. After studying journalism and communication sciences she co-initiated and directed the art and culture association IM ERSTEN (2012-16). In her role as artistic director, she has conceived, accompanied and implemented over 100 projects at the interface of visual and performing arts. Through collaboration with artists from various disciplines, follow-up projects have developed in which she works as a freelance curator, dramaturge, production and cooperation partner.

Lena Fankhauser
Lena Fankhauser is a violist of Trinidadian-Swiss heritage born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She started playing the violin at the age of 4. She has received both her Bachelor and Master’s degree from the Julliard School of Music in New York City on a full scholarship.
Fankhauser has toured worldwide, across numerous genres, and played in many halls including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the Royal Albert Hall in London. As a passionate chamber musician, Lena Fankhauser founded a Chamber Music Festival in Bad Ischl and (CH)AMBER, an association for new chamber music. She is a founding member, contractor and manager of the film orchestra, Big Island Orchestra Vienna and a founding member and musical curator of Salon Souterrain.
https://www.lena-fankhauser.com

Eduardo Trivino Cely
Eduardo Trivino Cely was born in Bogota, Colombia in 1990. He lives and works between Colombia and Austria. Through experimental processes in sound, sculpture and digital media, he intervenes in public space with installations, performances and actions. He explores the value of failure, error, the invisible and the limits of perception. He thus seeks to propose new ways of looking at our natural environment and questioning cultural concepts. With a background in visual arts, he approaches sound in a self-taught way and moves in the experimental field involving materials, concepts, new technologies and parts of the body. His years of working in theatre have led to his artistic work being influenced by set design, acting, props and dialogue.