new media center_kuda.org

Verica Barac
Verica Barac, born in 1955 in Cacak. Graduated from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade. She worked as a lawyer in the economy sector and participated in the supervision and elaboration of by-laws for the local self-management. Public Attorney of the Municipality of Cacak between 1997 and 2001. She was one of the leaders of the Civil Parliament of Cacak during the NATO bombing in 1999, and later one of the founders of the Civil Parliament of Serbia and its President since the foundation till May 2003 when she was appointed President of the Anti-Corruption Council of Serbia. She has prepared the Civil Parliament's book «Pravac promena» (Belgrade, 2000), as well as two publications of the reports and initiatives by the Anti-Corruption Council, «Corruption, power and state - starting point and the results by the Anti-Corruption Council (2001-2004)», («Res publica», Belgrade, 2004), and «Corruption, power, state - second part» («Res publica», Belgrade, 2005). Together with Zoran Lutovac, co-editor of the book «Fight Against Corruption in Serbia between the National Strategy and the Action Plan» («Friedrich Ebert Stiftung», Belgrade, 2006) is the chairwoman of the Anti-Corruption Committee of Serbia.

Hans Bernhard
Hans Bernhard (A/CH/USA, *1973) is a Vienna and St. Moritz-based artist working in the fields of digital and fine art. Using technology, computers and the internet as a medium since 1994, he exhibited and performed in venues like the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Japan), the Ars Electronica (Austria), the Konsthall Malmoe (Sweden) or the SFMOMA (USA). He is a founding member of the legendary etoy.CORPORATION and of UBERMORGEN.COM. He studied visual communication, digital art, art history and aesthetics in Vienna, San Diego, Pasadena and Wuppertal. Hans is a professional artist and creative thinker, working on art projects, researching digital networks, exhibiting and traveling the world lecturing at conferences and Universities. www.ubermorgen.com - www.hansbernhard.com

Muha Blackstazy (Muhamed Eljsani), 33 years old, born and raised in Novi Sad (in Vojvodina, the northern province of Serbia), in predominantly Roma neighborhood "Adice", earns for living working as a construction worker, without permanent employment. For more than 10 years, Muha writes lyrics that are very much connected with the everyday life of the Roma community and turns them into hip-hop-style songs. He made his first recordings in 2003: local radio (Multiradio) released the song "Crni smo mi" ("We are Black"), which attracted lots of attention of Vojvodina audience, due to its messages to fight against racial and ethnic discrimination. In July 2005. he took part in an international workshop "Petrovaradin Tribe"– an art project supported by the European Cultural Foundation, that joined together young musicians and film students from Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, working together on explorations of the newly established bonds and energies of the young generation that does not want to live in the shadow of the past war, judgments and feelings of guilt. In April 2006. he took part in 3 months long film workshop, a part of an international art project "Kuba: Journey Against the Current" (produced by Austrian foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary). As part of activities in the workshop, "Cokoladni reper" (Chocolate Rapper) was recorded and the video clip was made by project fellow participants. During the summer of 2006, on the joint initiative of the team from Citizens Pact for SEEurope and EXIT festival, he was given a chance to make a video for the song he made about EXIT festival last year, and the executive producer was assigned to Kino Klub from Novi Sad. In 2007. thanks to Open Society Institutes' support (by a grant awarded within The Roma Cultural Participation Project / Roma Music Initiative), he made his first professional studio recordings; the album “Crni smo mi” (“We are Black”) was released in July and promoted within EXIT Festival (MTV Movement campaign), followed by series of live acts in Novi Sad club CK 13.

Slavko Bogdanovic
Slavko Bogdanovic is a lawyer and conceptual artist from Novi Sad.

Thomas Campbell
Thomas Campbell is a resident of Saint Petersburg and a graduate student/teacher at Yale University. His research interests include postwar and contemporary Russian art, Soviet and Russian cinema, and Petersburg counterculture. As a union activist, he has participated in three strikes and numerous actions by GESO (Graduate Employees and Students Organization) and HERE-UNITE Locals 34 and 35 (Yale University/New Haven). In Petersburg, he has been involved, as a translator, writer, and organizer, in dozens of collaborations with such art groups as the Free Culture Foundation and Chto Delat? (What Is To Be Done). He has published articles on Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Herzen and Tom Stoppard, Yevgeny Yufit, neo-academism and necro-realism, Jacques Rancière, the Russian blockbuster "Day Watch," and, most recently, the catastrophic redevelopment of Petersburg. He is also the co-author (with Igor Khadikov) of Kniga vecherinok (The Party Book, 1996, 2007).

Jovan Divjak
Jovan Divjak was a general in the Bosnian army during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. He was the highest-ranking ethnic Serb in the army and one of its most educated and experienced officers. On April 8th, 1992, Divjak became Deputy Commander of BiH's Territorial Defense forces and a month later oversaw the defense of Sarajevo from a major JNA attack. Between 1993-1997 General Divjak was Deputy Commander of the BiH Army's Headquarters, charged with the cooperation with civilian institutions and organizations (administration, economy, health, education). Today, Divjak is the executive director of the association OGBH, "OBRAZOVANJE GRADI BIH" (Education builds Bosnia and Herzegovina). He was one of the founders of OGBH in 1994. The association’s goals are to help children who’s family were victims of the war, by providing them financial and material support.

Bojan Djordjev
Bojan Djordjev is born 1977, in Belgrade. He is the theatre director, co-founder of TkH (Walking Theory) platform and TkH journal for performing arts theory. Artist in residence Akademie Schloss Solitude – 2004 and 2005/6. Selected theatre and performance pieces: Woman-bomb, I. Sajko, Belgrade 2008; Europa and Rio bar, I. Sajko, Belgrade, 2007; L’Anné dèrniere à Solitude, with S. Ilić and S. Đorović, 2006 Opera (of the female gender) Belgrade, 2005; Psychosis and Death of the Author (TkH), Belgrade and www, 2004; Actress (Work) in Progress, with S. Ilić and Sena Đorović, Stuttgart, 2004; FRIDA KAHLO una pierna y tres corazones, with S. Ilić and S. Đorović, Belgrade, 2002; The Dracula Project, Vienna/Lyon, 2002/3; DreamOpera, (TkH), Piran, 2001.

Volker Eick
Volker Eick is political scientist at the Freie Universität Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute, Department of Politics, Germany. He is currently finishing his PhD on "Neue Sicherheitskonzepte im sich wandelnden Wohlfahrtsstaat. Kommunale Kriminalpolitik zwischen Kommerzialisierung und Community" (New security concepts within the changing welfare state. Communal crime policy between commercialization and community). Most recent publications: "Neoliberalism and Urban Space: Activism, Atavism, and Aspiration". In: Estonian Architectural Review Ehituskunst", forthcoming (2008) "Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik" (Ed., with J. Sambale/Eric Töpfer), Bielefeld (2007); "Preventive Urban Discipline: Rent-a-cops and the Neoliberal Glocalization in Germany". In: Social Justice, 33/3 (2006).

Galit Eilat
Galit Eilat is a Curator and the Founding Director of the Digital Art Lab or The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. She is Co-Editor in Chief of Maarav – an online arts and culture magazine, as well as a teacher at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Film Studies.

Albert Heta
Albert Heta (b.1974), works as an artist, designer and culture producer. His works can be often simple acts of intervention in an existing social condition, situation, or object. While the intervention is always, in turn, an insurgence of an “unofficial” existing reality, which the official condition/object/situation hides, or has simply dismissed. His works “It's time to go visiting: No visa required”, public intervention on British Airways billboards in Prishtina (2003), 'Embassy of the Republic of Kosova in Cetinje' (2004) or his 'Kosovar Pavilion' in the Venice Biennial (2005), are not merely the installation and acts of appropriation itself, or the information spread via e-flux for the Pavilion, but also and just as much the conditions under which the works were accepted by the curators, media, politicians, the discussions that were and are being held in relation to the works and the whole mechanism and discourse which is started off, sentiments and discussions that are rekindled revitalized as the result of the “disseminating” of these works. Heta's work was exhibited in a wide international context including Apexart, New York (2007), MARCO, Vigo (2007), Insa ArtSpace, Seoul (2005/06), and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2003). Albert Heta is co-founder of Stacion Center for Contemporary Arts, Prishtina.

IRWIN
The IRWIN group was founded in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Its members are Dušan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik.IRWIN, along with the music group "Laibach" (*1980), the performance group "Gledališce Sester Scipion Nasice" (* 1983), later known as the "Kozmokineticni Kabinet Noordung", and the design department Novi Kolektivizem, comprises one of the core groups within the artists’ collective "Neue Slowenische Kunst" (NSK), established in 1984 in the Slovenian republic of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. As with the other groups within NSK, IRWIN is committed to the so-called ‘retro principle. This retro principle is "not a style or an art trend but a principle of thought, a way of behaving and acting".(IRWIN) This means, to be more specific, that the visual language developed by IRWIN in the 1980s consists almost exclusively of visual elements quoted from Western and Eastern European art of the 19th and 20th centuries. IRWIN employs motifs from Socialist Realism and the art of the "Third Reich", from the various politically engaged European avant-garde movements including German Dadaism – in particular, the artist John Heartfield –, Italian Futurism and Soviet-Russian Constructivism, as well as from religious art and Slovenian art of the 19th century. These elements are then combined with the Laibach "leitmotifs": eagle, stag, sower, little drummer, and the black cross of the Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich. IRWIN assembles these motifs from such varied origins in complex and multi-layered oil paintings in heavy frames. Since its inception, the group IRWIN has been involving itself extensively with the art history of Eastern Europe in its artistic projects, in particular with the ambivalent inheritance of the historical Russian, but also southern Slavic avant-garde and its totalitarian successors, and thus with the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism. Following the creation of an individual visual language in their appropriation projects of the 1980s, the group has been concentrating since the 1990s on a critical examination of the art history of "Western Modernism", countering it with the "retro-avant-garde" of a fictive "Eastern Modernism" which, in its own obvious artificiality, points to the artificiality of Western art historical structures that continue to exclude contemporary Eastern European art to this day.

Vesna Kesic
Vesna Kesic is a journalist, feminist, pacifist. Graduated from the University of Zagreb in psychology and sociology. Received her MA at The New School for Social Research with the thesis on changes in international law regarding wartime rapes, after wars in Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. During the war in Croatia, she was working on the deconstruction of daily political rhetoric and popular culture. Today she is a freelance journalist and social researcher.

Erden Kosova
Erden Kosova is a critic and curator based in Istanbul. He contributes to two independent Istanbul-based magazines, Siyahi (post-anarchist politics) and art-ist (contemporary art) as an editor. He is also a lecturer at the Kadir Has University Istanbul.

Andreja Kuluncic
Andreja Kuluncic (b.1968., lives in Zagreb Croatia) is an artist and she has participated in international exhibitions such as the"World factory" San Francisco Art Institute (Walter and McBean Galleries, SAD, 2007.),“Day labor” exhibition in P.S.1 (New York, 2005), Tirana Biennial 3 (Tirana, Albania, 2005), the Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2004), the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (Turkey, 2003), "The American Effect" (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003), on-line exhibition Translocations (The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2003), Documenta 11 (Kassel, Germany, 2002), Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt/Main, 2002) and others. She has participated in artist's residencies at the Art in General in New York (2005), at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2003), at Artspace in Sydney, Australia (2002), aipur (India, 2001.) and others. Web site: www.andreja.org

Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink (NL/AUS) is a media theorist, net critic and author of Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks, My First Recession and Zero Comments. He is the co-founder of projects such as The Digital City, Next Five Minutes, Nettime and Fibreculture. Since 2004 he is reseach professor at Interactive Media (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) where he leads the Institute of Network Cultures and is associate professor at the Media & Culture department, University of Amsterdam.

Jean Matthee
Jean Mathee is London based theorist, artist and filmmaker.

Sebastian Meissner
Klimek and Ghetto Ambient are two of the many aliases of German sound and media artist Sebastian Meissner (b. 1969), who has explored various terrains under several guises throughout his career, including Open Source, Bizz Circuits, aUTOkoNTRasT and others. Meissner has recorded for numerous, highly regarded labels – Mille Plateaux, Kompakt, Sub Rosa, and many others – and exhibited his work in several formats and venues. Meissner is known for his collaborations with Ekkehard Ehlers as Autopoiesis, with Ran Slavin and Eran Sachs as Random Inc. and many other Israeli artists in the Intifada Offspring project and with Lia as Tiny Little Elements. Sebastian Meissner produces delicate drone scapes, which are carefully constructed from acoustic source materials such as guitar and sons trouvé (found sounds). His dreamy, evocative slow-motion compositions show a striking sense of beauty and bittersweet melancholia while boasting dark, haunting and ghostly undertones. Clear points of reference would be purveyors of mesmerizing, floating but tense music such as Bohren und der Club of Gore, Tim Hecker, Earth with their recent album or Angelo Badalamenti’s groundbreaking atmospheric scores for the film works of David Lynch. As an artist who consciously left behind the still so common division of either visual artist or musician, Meissner’s performances are a combination of acoustic and visual material (video projections). He focuses on intermediate states and interstices that result from transformation processes, altering definitions, changing architectures and other small shifts and cracks that appear in or can be induced into otherwise tendentiously rigid structures.

Metahaven
Metahaven is a design research collective based in Amsterdam and Brussels consisting of Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden and Gon Zifroni. Their work connects graphic design and architecture and is concerned with their political and ideological connections. Forthcoming publications include the pamphlet White Night (Before A Manifesto) and the hardcover book Uncorporate Identity. Besides designing and writing, members of Metahaven teach at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and Yale University in New Haven. http://www.metahaven.net

Suzana Milevska
Suzana Milevska (1961, Bitola, Macedonia) is a curator and visual culture theorist based in Skopje, currently working as a Lecturer in Visual Culture and the Director of the Visual and Cultural Research Centre – “Euro-Balkan” Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in 2006 from the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College – the University of London where she was teaching (2003-2005). In 2004 she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. In 2001 she won the Getty Curatorial Research Grant. In 1999 she was a curator in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (ArtsLink Grant). Her research and curatorial interests include participatory art, politically and socially engaged artists, postcolonial institutional critique, gender issues, and feminist art and culture. In 2007 she curated the regional workshop “Curatorial Translation,” the international conference “Translating the Self,” and the summer school “Integrating Cultures/Negotiating New Subjectivities .” In 2006 she curated Hristina Ivanoska’s “Naming of the Bridge Rosa Plaveva and Nakie Bajram,” at the Foundation of Women’s Art, London. In 2005 she curated the “Workers’ Club” - exhibition and conference, as one of the curators of the International Contemporary Art Biennial - National Gallery, Prague, and in 2004 she curated the Macedonian section of “Cosmopolis” – Microcosmos X Macrocosmos exhibition at State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2004 she co-curated (with Julia Schäfer) the “Unbalanced Allocation of Space,” at GFZK (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst), Leipzig, and in 2003 she curated a TV Leipzig talk-show program “Divided Sky/Re-unified Territories,” part of Introducing Sites II, GFZK, Leipzig. She curated over 70 exhibitions in Skopje, Istanbul, Stockholm, Berlin, Bonn, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Prague, London, etc. She is a member of I.K.T. and A.I.C.A. and an International Correspondent for the Feminist Review –London, Contemporary, London, and springerin, Vienna.

Nebojsa Milikic
Nebojsa Milikic is an artist and cultural activist, Belgrade, Serbia. Organizational, artistic and curatorial practice in alternative culture; political and socially engaged art projects and actions; art projects and public campaigns targeting problems of urban micro-communities.

Gini Müller
Gini Müller (lives in Vienna), works as a dramaturg, performer and activist. January 2008: "Possen des Performativen, Theatre, Aktivismus und queere Praktiken", hrsg. Gerald Raunig/eipcp, Republicart 7, Wien, Turia+Kant. Since 2004 lectues on University of fine Arts and Department of theatre on the University of Vienna. From 2001-2005 Member of the PublixTheatreCaravan, no-racism.net since 2004: Performanceband: SV Damenkraft.

Teofil Pancic
Teofil Pancic is a journalist and a writer. He has been editor-in-chief of 'Vreme', a Serbian political magazine. He is a columnist that publishes his work in different newspapers and magazines. With his work, he tries to contribute to "complete, undisturbed freedom of public speech production, which is the most hygienic thing in the world!".

Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler is an artist working in video, photo-text, installation, and performance. She also writes criticism and lectures nationally and internationally. Her work on the public sphere ranges from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially housing. Her work often centers on women’s experiences. Rosler has long produced works on war and the “national security climate” that predisposes to war. Her photomontage series joining images of war and domesticity, first made in relation to the war in Vietnam, has been reprised in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan. Her works on systems of travel and their associated environments, including air travel, automobile travel and urban undergrounds, further consider the landscapes of everyday life.
In 2007, Rosler participated in the documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster exhibitions; her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in many other venues. A retrospective of her work was shown, in1999-2001, in five European cities and in two New York museums. In 2005, Rosler received the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, and a partial retrospective was held at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, in conjunction with this award. In 2006, Rosler received the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize, Austria’s highest fine arts award. In 2007, she received an Anonymous Was a Woman award. In 2008, she was honored by The Center for Book Arts in New York City. Rosler has published fourteen books, in several languages, and numerous essays. A book of her essays, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, was published by MIT in 2004. She Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Florian Schneider
Florian Schneider is a writer, filmmaker and net activist. He concentrates on how new communication and migration regimes are being attacked and undermined by critics of borders and networks. Schneider is one of the initiators of the No One is Illegal campaign and one of the founders of the noborder network and the Europe-wide internet platform, D-A-S-H. In 2001 he designed and directed the make world festival in Munich, and organized metabolics, a series of lectures on net art and net culture. He has also worked on several documentaries for the German-French television station, Arte, including What's to be done? which looks at contemporary activism. He also writes for major German newspapers, magazines, journals and handbooks.

Zelimir Zilnik
Zelimir Zilnik ((born 1942, based in Novi Sad, Serbia). From the late 60s, his socially engaged films and documentaries in former Yugoslavia and his unique visual style earned him critical accolade (The Unemployed, 1968, Best Documentary at the Oberhausen festival, 1968; Early Works,1969, Best Film at Berlin Film Festival), but also censorship in the 70s for his unflinching criticism of the government apparatus. Low-budget filmmaking and challenging political themes mark Zilnik’s prolific career that includes over 40 feature and documentary films and shorts. Since the 1980s, he has been developing his unique docu-drama language, which he used throughout the 1990s to reflect on political tensions, including EU sanctions, the NATO bombings, and Milosevic’s regime. His power to observe and unleash compelling narratives out of the lives of ordinary people is the common thread throughout his documentary and docu-drama work, including 1994’s Tito's Second Time Amongst the Serbs. More recently, his focus has shifted beyond the divided Balkans to question its relationship with the tightening controls of European borders, delving into the heart of issues of refugees and migrants in Fortress Europe (2000), Kenedi Goes back Home (2003), Kenedi: Lost and Found (2005) and Europe Next Door (2005). For more information, visit www.zelimirzilnik.net