Field Research: A Progress Report

Koyo Kouoh is an exhibition maker and the founding artistic director of RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge and society in Dakar. She is the curator of the education program at 1:54, Contemporary African Art Fair in London. She served as curatorial advisor for documenta 12 (2007) and 13 (2012). Her most recent project includes Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the work of Six African Women Artists, (WIELS, Lunds Konsthal, 49N6E - FRAC Lorraine), 2015. Besides a sustained theoretical and exhibition program at RAW Material Company, she maintains a dynamic international curatorial, advisory and judging activity. Kouoh lives and works in Dakar and Basel.

Rasha Salti is a curator and writer. She is presently an international programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival. From 2004 to 2010 she was the film programmer and creative director of ArteEast in New York. Salti’s essays have appeared in publications such as Afterall, The London Review of Books, and Naqd and she edited the book Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Filmmakers (2006). Salti lives in Beirut and works between Paris and Toronto.

Taryn Simon was born in 1975 in New York, USA, where she lives and works. Recent exhibitions include: Taryn Simon: Rear Views, A Star-forming Nebula, and the Office of Foreign Propaganda, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015); A Polite Fiction, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris (2014), There Are Some Who Are in Darkness, Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (2013), A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012), A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, Tate Modern, London and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011). She is a Guggenheim fellow (2001). Simon has been selected for the exhibition All the World’s Futures at the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015).

Anton Vidokle is an artist, born in Moscow and living in New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at Documenta 13, Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial and at Tate Modern among other. As a founder of e-flux he has produced Do it, Utopia Station poster project, and organized An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life, as well as Martha Rosler Library and Unitednationsplaza. Other works include e-flux video rental and Time/Bank, co-organized with Julieta Aranda. Vidokle is co-editor of e-flux journal along with Julieta Aranda and Brian Kuan Wood. Vidokle was resident professor at Home Workspace Program (2013-14), an educational program organized by Ashkal Alwan in Beirut where he initiated the exhibition, A Museum of Immortality. Most recently, Vidokle has exhibited films in the Montreal Biennale (2084: a science fiction show with Pelin Tan) as well as This is Cosmos (2014) at the Berlinale International Film Festival, the Shanghai Biennale, and Witte de With in Rotterdam.

The Museum of American Art in Berlin is an educational institution dedicated to assembling, preserving and exhibiting memories of modern American art shown in Europe during the 1950s and early 1960s. Since 2004 it has hosted a permanent exhibit in Berlin, with copy paintings of Abstract Expressionism, and organises temporary exhibitions about American art exhibitions, as well as housing several other collections. As Walter Benjamin—the museum’s self-appointed spokesman—explains, "Not only is the timeline closed [from 1920 to 1960] but the institution is not an art museum. In fact, by not being an art museum it is a “real museum of art”, a place where art, art history, and the art museum are being remembered."