Start Up Lectures 2023-24

Agil Abdullayev is a cross-disciplinary artist from Azerbaijan, manifesting their practice through performance, critical discussions, paintings, video, and film. The semi-biographical practice of Agil examines queer identity and how socio-political domination has shaped it in Azerbaijan and other South Caucasian countries. Their films read the queer body as an archive that addresses queer anxieties; they refer to escapism and queer utopia with sci-fi aesthetics. Agil regards their childhood experiences as an archive of personal history, transhistorical memory, and space of hyper-possibility where representations of queer narratives can be disrupted, re-articulated, and reinvented.
Agil holds a BA of Fine Arts from Nottingham Trent University and took part in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have been awarded by the Prince Claus Foundation and SudKultur Fund and have exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial, The Wrong Biennial, South London Gallery, Photographers’ Gallery, Tate Modern, Asian Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Goethe Institut in Baku and Tbilisi, and MoMA Tbilisi.
https://agilabdullayev.info/

Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter is an artist, cultural worker, curator, and teacher from the Republic of Moldova. As an artist, she uses a wide variety of media, including drawing, painting, installation, photography, and performance art, makes artist books and realizes interdisciplinary projects. She works with participatory social practices to engage with and comment on contemporary political and social issues. Driven by her interest in social and political history, she focuses on the post-Soviet transition as well as issues of gender and post-Soviet identity, and engages with questions of colonialism and globalization. Positioning herself as a post-socialist subject, the artist relates to a critical discourse for understanding her identity through post-soviet experience in the frame of everyday global coloniality, understood as an integral feature of modernity. According to Fiodorova-Lefter, this subject is placed in a rapidly changing post-capitalist world that has been experiencing colossal, contradictory, and complex transformations for the past three decades. By critically assessing the situation of assigning each person a specific place in the existing world hierarchy, the artist questions her role in this new global world architecture. Since 2008, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and festivals across Europe. In 2023 she created the Nomad Bureau for Art Research – a platform and nomadic artist-run space in Chisinau.
www.tatianafiodorova.wordpress.com
https://www.instagram.com/tfiodorova_lefter/

Hori Izhaki is a multi-disciplinary artist from Tel Aviv-Jaffa who lives and works in Berlin. Her sculptural practice, performances, and participatory installations involve site-specific, context-based live interactions situated at the intersection between the natural, the technological, and the symbolic.
https://www.horiizhaki.com/

Jeanne Penjan Lassus is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. Her works draw from reflections on sensory perceptions and porosity of spaces and bodies. Enquiring how we – humans and other beings – sense and make sense of our environments, her practice focuses on how our perceptions shape our experiences, languages, and the way we move and extend into space.
Lassus’ notable projects include A Primordial Void, a solo show at Blind Space Bangkok, Eye your Ear at Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, and the House of Flowing Reflection, a pavilion for the Bangkok Biennial 2018. She participated in the Ocean Fellowship 2020, organized by TBA21 in Venice, and has received the Alserkal Art Foundation Research Grant 2020 and the Bangkok Art and Culture Center’ Early Years Projects Residency Grant 2019.
http://jeannepenjanlassus.com/

Shahana Rajani is an artist whose practice traces the landscapes and visualities of development, militarization, and ecological disturbance by using multidisciplinary methods and media. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her work. She is a co-founder of Karachi LaJamia (with Zahra Malkani), an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in Pakistan. Rajani’s solo and collaborative works have been presented in exhibitions at Centre A, Vancouver (2022), Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai (2022), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2022), Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden (2020), Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2019), and Gandhara Art Gallery, Karachi (2018) among others.
https://shahanarajani.com/