Contributors
Inke Arns is the director of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund and also a curator and author focusing on media art and theory, Internet cultures and Eastern Europe. She attained her doctorate in 2004 at the Humboldt University Berlin, writing about the paradigm shift in the reception of the historic avant-garde and the idea of utopia in (media) art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in ex-Yugoslavia and Russia. She has curated several exhibitions, most recently alien matter for the 2017 transmediale. Her publications include Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) (2002) and Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel (2004).
Robert Bird is Professor for Slavic Languages and Literatures as well as Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His primary area of interest is the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian/Soviet modernism, focusing on Russian film and video art. He is currently completing the manuscript for his book Soul Machine: How Soviet Film Modeled Socialism. He is the co-curator of Revolution Every Day (September 2017) on Soviet graphic art and moving images at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. His upcoming project Revolutionology examines intellectual revolution across a variety of media, spaces, and historical moments.
Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, and media theorist. Having taught in Philadelphia, Münster, and Los Angeles, he became in 1994 Professor of Art History, Philosophy and Media Theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. In 2009, he was appointed Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published widely on the subject of the Russian avant-garde and was co-curator of the exhibition Dream Factory Communism at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2003/04. In 2005, he and Michael Hagemeister published Die neue Menschheit (The New Mankind, 2005) in which the principal texts of the Russian Cosmists were made available in the German language.
Michael Hagemeister is a historian and Slavic scholar. He wrote his PhD thesis on the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and has published widely on Russian philosophy and the history of ideas, on Russian utopian and apocalyptic thought, and on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With Boris Groys he co-edited a book on biopolitical utopias in Russia in the early twentieth century: Die Neue Menschheit (The New Mankind, 2005). Hagemeister has been researching and teaching at various universities in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. In his current research at the Chair of East European History at the University of Bochum, he concentrates on anti-modern and anti-Western thinking in Russia.
Jörg Heiser is the managing director of the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin Universität der Künste. From 1998 until 2003 he was editor and from 2003 until 2016 co-editor-in-chief of the international art journal frieze, then from 2011 until 2016 editor of frieze d/e. He has been an art critic for Süddeutsche Zeitung since 1997. His most recent publication is Double Lives in Art and Pop Music (2017).
Alexei Penzin received his PhD from the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, where he remains as a Research Associate. He is currently teaching at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Penzin is a member of the collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?). His research has been published in the journals Rethinking Marxism, Mediations, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Manifesta Journal among others. He co-edited the English translation of the book Art and Production (2017) by Boris Arvatov, one of the key theorists of the Soviet avant-garde. Currently, he is preparing his book Against the Continuum: Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity for Bloomsbury Academic.
Anton Vidokle is an artist and editor of e-flux journal. He was born in Moscow and lives in New York and Berlin. Vidokle’s work has been exhibited internationally at Documenta 13 and at the 56th Venice Biennale. His films have been presented at Bergen Assembly; Shanghai Biennale; the 65th and 66th Berlinale International Film Festival Forum Expanded; Gwangju Biennale; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Garage Museum, Moscow; Istanbul Biennial, and others.
Arseny Zhilyaev is an artist based in Moscow. In recent works he has examined the legacy of Soviet museology and the museum in Russian Cosmism. Among others, he has published articles in e-flux journal. Zhilyaev is editor of Avant-Garde Museology (2015). His works have been shown at the Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennale, and at the Ljubljana Triennale as well as at exhibitions including at the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; De Appel, Amsterdam; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and San Francisco; and at the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow.