BASMA ALSHARIF
Basma al-Sharif is an Artist/Filmmaker born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip. She has a BFA and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Basma developed her practice nomadically between Chicago, Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, the Gaza Strip and Paris. Working between cinema, photography and installation, her works have shown in the Whitney Biennial, les Rencontres d'Arles, les Module at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Al Riwaq Biennial Palestine, The Berlin Documentary Forum, the Sharjah Biennial, Videobrasil and Manifesta 8, and participated in international film festivals in Locarno, Rotterdam, Berlin, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata. She received a jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial 9, was shortlisted for the Abraaj Group Art Prize, and received the Marcelino Botin Visual Arts grant. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris, distributed by Video Data Bank and Arsenal. She is based in Cairo, Egypt.
THE KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE
The Karrabing Film Collective, based in Australia’s Indigenous Northern Territories that uses filmmaking and installation as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organization. The collective includes approximately 30 members—predominantly living in the Belyuen community—who together create films, art and installations using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatize and satirize the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place, and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, Karrabing exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation. The Karrabing Film Collective has presented its work at IMA Brisbane; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin; Jakarta Biennale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; e-flux, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Tate Modern, London; Documenta 14, Kassel; the Melbourne International Film Festival; Berlinale, Forum Expanded; and Biennale of Sydney; MoMA-PS1, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, among others.
SKY HOPINKA
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and is currently based out of Vancouver B.C. and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.
BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOS
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work arises out of long periods of observation and documentation, in which the camera is present as an object with social implications and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her films frequently start out through research into specific social structures, individuals, or events, which she transforms into moving image, at times supported by objects and texts. Santiago Muñoz’s recent work has been concerned with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements. Recent solo exhibitions include: Song, Strategy, Sign at the New Museum, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, MATRULLA, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, México City; Post-Military Cinema, Glasgow International; The Black Cave, Gasworks, London. Her work is included in public and private collections, such as the Whitney Museum, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and Kadist.
LIS RHODES
Lis Rhodes (born 1942) is a British artist and feminist filmmaker, known for her density, concentration, and articulate sense of poetry in her visual works. She has been active in the UK since the early 1970s. She was cinema curator at the London Film-Makers' Co-op from 1975–76. In 1979, Rhodes co-founded the feminist film distribution network, Circles. She was a member of the exhibition committee for the 1979 Arts Council Film on Filmevent, and international retrospective of Avante-Garde cinema. Rhodes was Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council from 1982 to 1985, and since 1978 has lectured part-time at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
PABLO DE OCAMPO
Pablo de Ocampo lives in Vancouver where he is Exhibitions Curator at Western Front. He has curated screenings, exhibitions, and performances at galleries, cinemas, and festivals internationally. From 2006 to 2014, de Ocampo was Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto, and in 2013, served as the programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What's Happening. He was a founding member of the collective screening series Cinema Project in Portland, OR.