Events from the year 1997 in art.
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
Kenneth Robert Lum, OC DFA is a dual citizen Canadian and American academic, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art ranges from conceptual in orientation to representational in character and is generally concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language, portraiture and spatial politics.
Sislej Xhafa is an Albanian contemporary artist, based in New York.
Vasif Kortun is a curator, writer and educator in the field of contemporary art, its institutions, and exhibition practices. Kortun served as the founding director of several international institutions, including SALT, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Proje4L, and the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. In 2006, he received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies for his "experimental approach and openness to new ideas to challenge the contemporary art world and push its parameters beyond national or international, local or global developments." Kortun has written extensively on contemporary art and visual culture in Turkey for publications and periodicals internationally. He currently lives in Ayvalık, a seaside town on the northwestern Aegean coast of Turkey.
Charles Esche is a museum director, curator and writer. His focus is on art and how it reflects, provokes and influences changes in society. He lives between Edinburgh and Eindhoven.
Sal Randolph is an American artist and theorist who works with issues of gift-giving, money, alternate economies, and social architecture. She founded the non-curated sound-exchange web project Opsound, which functions through the use of music released exclusively under a copyleft license, and has been cited by Lawrence Lessig as an example of how Creative Commons works to enable artists to collaborate more freely and build on each other's work. Other large-scale, collaborative projects created and implemented by Randolph include Free Manifesta and The Free Biennial, in which several hundred artists presented their work in free and open shows in New York's and Frankfurt am Main's public spaces. Artists participating in those projects included Christophe Bruno, Aram Saroyan, Swoon (artist), and Michael Cunningham, among many others.
Shezad Dawood is an artist born and based in London.
Urban Jealousy, the 1st International Roaming Biennial of Tehran was an itinerant multimedia art exhibition presented in Istanbul, Berlin and Belgrade. The Biennial was curated and organised by Amir Ali Ghassemi and Serhat Köksal.
Susan Kleinberg is a New York and Los Angeles-based artist. Her work has been shown at five Venice Biennales: In 1995, 2001, 2011, 2015 and 2017; as well as during the 2005 Venice Biennale, sponsored by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti; the 2009 Biennale, sponsored by Telecom Italia; and 2013, sponsored by the Alliance Francaise in Venice.
Ahmet Öğüt is a conceptual artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, drawing and printed media.
Gabriel Lester is an inventor, visual artist and film director living and working in Amsterdam.
Petra Cortright is an American artist working in video, painting, and digital media.
Genco Gulan (Turkish pronunciation: [dʒendʒo ˈɟylan] is a contemporary conceptual artist and theorist, who lives and works in Istanbul. His transmedia contextual work involves painting, found objects, new media, drawings, sculpture, photography, performance and video. His work often carries political, social and/or cultural messages. He describes his work as idea art.
Liu Ding is a Chinese artist and curator based in Beijing. Liu’s artistic practices range from installation, painting, photography, and theatre set design and production, whereas his professional skills vary from magazine editorial, television production, and curatorial work.
Marcus Graf, is an art curator, writer and artist based in Istanbul, Turkey.
Cindy Bernard is a Los-Angeles based artist whose artistic practice comprises photography, video, performance, and activism. In 2002, Cindy Bernard founded the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound, which presents site-relational experimental music. Her numerous Hitchcock references have been discussed in Dan Auiler's Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998), essays by Douglas Cunningham and Christine Spengler in The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage and Commemoration (2012) and Spengler's Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014).
Defne Ayas is a curator, educator, and publisher in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. Ayas directed and advised many institutions and collaborative platforms across the world, including in China, South Korea, United States, Netherlands, Russia, Lithuania and Italy. She is known for conceiving exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Until June 2021, Ayas was the Artistic Director of 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.
Servet Kocyigit is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Andra Ursuța is a Romanian-American sculptor who has lived and worked in New York since 2000. Ursuța is known for her nihilistic portrayal of the human condition, confronting issues such as patriotism, violence against women, and the “expulsion of ethnic groups.” Ursuța's work is held in public collections worldwide.
