Biographies

• aqui

  aqui, who founded Sister Library, is a Thangmi woman of the Kiratimma first peoples of the Himalayas. She creates social exchanges and safe spaces to position art as a medium for community healing. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses ceremonial interventions, performances, drawings, zine-making, flyposting and public interventions, bolstered by participant involvement. Most of her work is collaborative and self-funded. She founded Sister Library, a continuously evolving artwork that offers an in-depth reflection on the visual and reading culture of our times. It is also the first traveling, community-owned and community-run feminist library in South Asia. aqui also runs bombay underground, the artist collective that organised bombay zine fest, the first festival of its kind in South Asia. She has become household name in the underground publishing scene and is one of the driving forces behind the Dharavi art room, a creative space for children and women in Mumbai’s eponymous slum.  

  
  

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• Özge Akarsu

  is a visual artist, filmmaker and researcher who explores subjects like identity, migration and memory. Akarsu’s work engages with communities to question socio-political structures and cultural narratives, reflecting on themes of displacement and belonging. 

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• Juan Duque

  is an artist, researcher and curator whose practice comprises sculpture, performance and video. His work investigates themes of territory, migration and memory, often using found objects and collaborative processes to explore personal and collective histories within shifting social landscapes. He is also the co-founder of the Brussels art centre The Green Corridor.

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• Marina Kalleny

  is a photographer and filmmaker whose work explores the recesses of personal and collective memory. Her lens captures the intangible, such as dreams and the elusive nature of time, creating narratives that transcend documentation and weave together past, present and future. 

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• Mirra Markhaeva

  is an artist and activist who is committed to indigenous rights, environmental issues and cultural preservation. Her work highlights marginalised voices and addresses the impact of colonization, advocating for sustainable futures in her local community and beyond.  

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• Phoebe Preuss

  is a writer, curator and researcher whose work probes the connections between literature, politics and art. She explores the potential of experimental forms of storytelling for cultural critique, frequently collaborating with artists and institutions to reimagine archives and historical narratives.

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• Pradnya Sindhi

  is an artist and curator whose installations, photography and video work tackle themes like diaspora, identity and memory. Her projects often engage with feminist and postcolonial discourses, creating spaces for dialogue and reflection on the complexities of our cultural heritage and sense of community. 

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• Ariane Sutthavong

  is a curator and cultural mediator working on intercultural exchange, collective practices, identity and cultural heritage. Her work spans a diverse range of cultural contexts, emphasising inclusivity and collaboration to foster a creative dialogue between artists, communities and institutions. 

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• Kayfa ta

  Kayfa ta is a non-profit publishing initiative that uses the popular format of how-to guides or manuals (how=kayfa, to=ta) to develop skills, tools, thoughts, or sensibilities in response to some of today’s perceived needs. The Kayfa ta books situate themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, the factual and the fictional, and between the needs of today and tomorrow. Kayfa ta was founded in 2012 by artists and curators Maha Maamoun (Egypt) and Ala Younis (Jordan), who continue to shape its course. 

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• Anastasia Sosunova

  Anastasia Sosunova is a Vilnius-based artist who holds a BA in Graphic Art and an MA in Sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her multidisciplinary practice comprises video, installation, sculpture and graphic art. It explores the connections between signs and faith in contemporary society, as well as manifestations of magical thinking and the mobilisation of communities. Sosunova follows personal stories and material gestures as they become entangled in larger narratives: tales of rising and falling communities and identities, shaped by innumerable contexts and interactions. Her work has been exhibited at leading art venues around the world, as well as major biennials, including Gwangju, Kaunas and Lyon. More recently, Sosunova presented solo and duo exhibitions at KOHTA in Helsinki, the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, eastcontemporary in Milan, and the Cell project space in London.

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• Olivier Marboeuf

  Olivier Marboeuf is an author-storyteller, artist, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the early 1990s, he and author Yvan Alagbé founded éditions Amok (now Frémok), a research-based comics publisher that launched the legendary Parisian literary café Autarcic Comix. From 2004 to 2018, he was the artistic director of Espace Khiasma in Paris, a visual arts and living literature centre dedicated to minority representations, which helped introduce postcolonial theories to the French art scene. From 2013 to 2024, he was also a film producer at Spectre Productions, producing some sixty artists’ films and documentaries. He currently divides his time between writing, drawing and supporting collaborative art practices. Marboeuf is a founding member of the Réseau Indépendant des Travailleur-euses et Acteur-ices de l’Art (RITAA) in Guadeloupe; a member of RAYO, an experimental pedagogy programme in the Greater Caribbean; and a member of the international board of the Akademie der Künste der Welt de Cologne. His publications include the essay Suites Décoloniales : s’enfuir de la plantation, the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, (Éditions du Commun, 2022) and the theatrical text La Nuit juste avant le feu (Editions Atlantiques déchaînés, 2025).

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• Shannon Mattern

  Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of Creative Research and Practice at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial data, and she’s written books on libraries, maps and urban intelligence. You can find her at wordsinspace.net

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• Banu Cennetoğlu & Philippine Hoegen

  Banu Cennetoğlu and Philippine Hoegen initiated BAS in 2006, an artist(s)-run non-profit space in Istanbul, dedicated to the collection, exhibition, production and distribution of artists’ publications and printed matter.

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• Karol Radziszewski

  Karol Radziszewski, Brussels Ass Book Fair guest artist, founded the Queer Archives Institute, an artist-run non-profit dedicated to the research, collection, digitisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with a keen focus on Central and Eastern Europe.

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