Art and Populism

Ana Dević is a curator, educator, and writer based in Zagreb. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar, where her research focuses on antifascist and partisan art. She is a member of the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, founded in Zagreb in 1999 by Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, Sabina Sabolović, and Dejan Kršić. WHW has developed projects across diverse geographical and cultural contexts and at multiple institutional scales, from the artistic directorship of Kunsthalle Wien to the forthcoming edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, drawing on queer-feminist, antifascist, and decolonial perspectives. From 2026, WHW will once again run the city-owned gallery space NovaNova in Zagreb.

Angela Dimitrakaki is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. Angela’s academic research focuses on feminism and Marxism in art history and the humanities; art and curating in relation to labour, production and social reproduction; art institutions; globalisation, imperialism and colonialism; participatory and socially engaged art paradigms, film and photography; contemporary democracy, class politics, and antifascism. Angela’s authored monographs include Feminism. Art. Capitalism, Pluto Press 2025 while she is also the co-editor of volumes such as Depression Era: A Collective Lens in the Age of Crisis, K8 2025, and ECONOMY, Liverpool University Press 2015. She serves on the editorial board of Third Text and is a Corresponding Editor for Historical Materialism. She is presently the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research how the idea of ‘family’ has functioned as metaphor in art and photography since the 1950s.

Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford, where he is also Director of Graduate Studies at the Ruskin School of Art and a Fellow of The Queen’s College. His publications include Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013); Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015); Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer, MIT Press, 2015); and Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (with Charles Green, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004. After adopting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often resembles the work of others. Working across neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art and life today. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to fashion herself as a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation.Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004. After adopting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often resembles the work of others. Working across neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art and life today. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to fashion herself as a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation.

Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society within UCL’s Faculty of the Arts and Humanities, and Professor in Practice at the British Film Institute. Nwonka’s scholarship broadly centres on race and the humanities. He is the author of the books Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film (2023), Black Arsenal (2024) co-author of the book Race and Racism in the Creative and Cultural Industries (2026) and the forthcoming book Amalgamations of Black Visuality (2027). He is UCL Academic-in-Residence for the V&A East Museum.

Dean Kissick is a writer and a contributing editor of Spike Art Magazine. He has published cultural criticism in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and the Drift, and short fiction in Civilization and Heavy Traffic. He has also given talks, read, and performed around the world. He lives in Paris and London, after a decade in New York.

Lars Bang Larsen is a writer, curator, and art historian. He has researched the histories of art and politics as they have played out in exhibition-making and between craft, technology and countercultures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lars’s PhD was on psychedelic concepts in neo-avant-garde art (2011), and he has (co-)curated exhibitions such as documenta: Politik und Kunst (2021) and Chronoplasticity (2019/20). His books include The Model (2010), Networks (2015) and Arte y Norma (2016). He has been affiliated with institutions such as Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Haute École d’Art et de Design – Genève, and the Bienal de São Paulo.

Luce deLire is a ship with eight sails and lies by the quay. She holds a PhD in philosophy and teaches and publishes on the metaphysics of infinity, political philosophy, art and culture, and trans and queer themes. She is currently preparing two books: Spinoza on Sex, Gender and Sexuality and EUPHORIA: A Treatise on Capitalism’s Techno Tyrants (Notably the BABY) and Hospitable Trans Lesbian Utopias. Her most recent publication is “Critique Is Over, Morality Is Dead and Surreal Utopias Are Where It’s At” (e-flux journal). For more information, see www.getaphilosopher.com and Instagram: @luce_delire.

Sarah Edith James is Professor of Visual Culture at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her monographs include Art & the Ends of Capitalism: Practising Politics (forthcoming, Manchester University Press); Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2022); and Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain (Yale University Press, 2013). She is founding editor of the book series Tomorrow’s Art School. Its first volume, Against Imperialism: Imagining a Post-Capitalist World (Sternberg/MIT, forthcoming 2027), is co-edited with Vera Mey. Her current research project, Art in an Age of Disaster, Adventures in Unworlding, explores Cold War and contemporary disasters through the lens of art and its chronopolitical journeys. For more than twenty years, she has written regularly for Art Monthly.

T. J. Demos is Professor and Chair in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes on contemporary art, social movement aesthetics, global politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013); and Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023). He is currently working on a new book for MIT Press, provisionally titled Art After Justice: Contemporary Artists Respond to Environmental Violence.

The Otolith Group was founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The collective has researched and produced densely textured moving-image works, installations, photographs, murals, and performances that frequently reference the trajectories of the Non-Aligned Movement and the transnational legacies of the global majority and its diasporas. Their works have been commissioned and presented by museums, galleries, biennials, and foundations worldwide.

As curators and theorists, The Otolith Collective operates as an NPO engaged in the conception, creation, and convening of platforms that make public the ongoing research informing its wider practice. Central to this work is a preoccupation with shifting the decolonial form of the essayistic toward an untimely institution, informed by a conception of temporality unbound by the political formations that determine the contemporary. From this aesthetico-political process emerges a practice of platforming that draws attention to the urgency of the present in all its provincial, provisional, prospective, and planetary dimensions.

Klara Kemp-Welch is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Head of Research Degrees (2025–28) at the Courtauld Institute. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art from Eastern Europe. She was educated at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and University College London. She is the author of Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989 (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981 (MIT Press, 2019), and co-editor, with Beata Hock and Jonathan Owen, of A Reader in East-Central European Modernism, 1918–1956 (Courtauld Books Online, 2019). She is currently completing a monograph titled Free Movement? Documenting Migration and Mobility in Eastern Europe.

Sarah Wilson is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. She co-curated Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968 (Royal Academy, London, 2002) and published The Visual World of French Theory, vol. 1: Figurations (2010; French edition, 2018) and Picasso, Marx and Socialist Realism in France (2013). She received the international AICA Prize for Art Criticism in 2015. In 2011, she launched the MA special option “Global Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginnings?,” and supervises research on conceptual and post-conceptual art from the Cold War period to the present. She gave a keynote lecture on ‘Crowds Power and the Rape of the Masses’ at the University of Vienna in 2017 and published  on ‘Crowds and Power’ focussing on artists Marcyn Dudek and  Eva Axelrad for the AICA Congress, Berlin, 2019

Diva Gujral’s research focuses on lens-based media in postcolonial India in dialogue with the country’s transnational political coordinates. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow in the History of Art at Queen’s College at the University of Oxford. There, she has begun a new project on Indian contemporary art and its historiographical interventions into how the early postcolonial state is archived and memorialised. Prior to this she was a Fellow in Twentieth-Century Indian and Global Imperial History at the LSE, and she completed her PhD at UCL.

Marko Ilić is an Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford. His first book, A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, was published by the MIT Press in 2021. Alongside Sofia Gotti, he is currently working on a project that examines the intersections between art and populism.

Sofia Gotti is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art with a focus on South America. Her work broadly examines the intersections of radical politics, art, and popular culture. has worked on exhibitions at institutions of varying scales, and in commercial galleries internationally. In 2024 she was part of the curatorial team of Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. She currently co-leads the MA Curating at the Courtauld Institute and previously was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her first monograph Pop Countercultures is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.