ARANI
BOSE
Dr. Bose has held faculty positions at Yale University and New York University School of Medicine. He is currently Director of Stroke Research at Lenox Hill Hospital, New York. Dr Bose’s research interests are in the development of novel, minimally invasive devices for the treatment and prevention of stroke. He was Founder and Chairman of Smart Therapeutics, a start up medical device company that developed the first intra-cranial stent for the treatment of aneurysms and subsequently the first stent designed for the prevention of ischemic stroke. In 2002, Smart Therapeutics merged with Boston Scientific Corporation. He is currently Founder and Chairman of Penumbra Inc., a startup medical device company focused on the emergent treatment of acute ischemic stroke. In 1994 Dr. Bose co-founded Bose Pacia Gallery in New York with Ms. Shumita Bose and Dr. Steven Pacia. Bose Pacia was the first gallery in the West specializing in contemporary art from South Asia. During the past decade Bose Pacia has held over 50 exhibitions and is internationally regarded as one of the preeminent galleries promoting the South Asian avant-garde. Visual artists from South Asia work within a wholly unique space - one that is informed by a multitude of cultures, races and religions and shaped by a complex past and dynamic present. Bose Pacia strives to foster an active discourse between these artists and the international art community by featuring exhibitions that contextualize contemporary art from the region within its rich artistic traditions and current social tensions.
BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French and German. Among his most recent publications in English are: Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition(London: Routledge, 1995), Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation (London : Butterworths, 2002), Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (ed.) (London: Verso, 2005), Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (ed.) (London: Verso, 2006), Law and Counter-hegemonic Globalization: Toward a Cosmopolitan Legality (co-edited with Cezar Rodriguez-Gavarito) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Fórum Social Mundial: Manual de Uso. São Paulo: Cortez Editora - also published in Portugal, Porto: Afrontamento, 2005, El milenio huérfano. Ensayos para una nueva cultura política. Madrid: Trotta, 2005. He has published in several journals, such as Journal of Legal Pluralism; Law and Society Review; Droit et Société; Revista de Ciência Política; Journal of Law and Society; Latin American Perspectives; Finisterra; Novos Desafios; Studies in Law; Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais; Politics and Society; Sociologia del Diritto; Luso-Brazilian Revue, Lua Nova, Law and Society Institute; Anales de la Cátedra Francisco Suárez; European Journal of Social Theory; Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies; Identities; Revista do Instituto de Estudos Avançados, etc. His research intersests and areas of focus are: epistemology, sociology of law, globalization and alternative globalization, post-colonial theory, multicultural democracy, legal pluralism, use of law in progressive social movements, democratic theory, translation and interculturality, university reform, and administration of justice in Portugal, Mozambique and Angola. Dr. de Sousa Santos has been an active participant in and organizer for the World Social Forum since its inception in 2001.
DALIDA MARIA BENFIELD is a filmmaker, activist, educator and scholar. She works in and across the contexts of NGOs, social movements, contemporary art and institutionalized and non-institutionalized education. Her videos have screened internationally in film festivals, galleries, museums and community centers. She co-founded a popular education and media arts center in Chicago focused on youth and community issues, Video Machete, in which she worked as a media educator/activist from 1994 - 2006. Benfield is currently based in Oakland, California, where she is completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. Her research centers on Latina cinematic praxis, Women of Color epistemologies and ‘Third Cinema’. Formerly, she taught media and performance art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art and Design, and visual culture and media education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was also Chair of the Department of Art Education. Benfield has written on media activism, women’s international independent media, media education and U.S. Latina/o and Latin American independent film. Benfield has also worked as an educator and organizer with the Escuela Popular Norteña (co-founded by María Lugones and Geoff Bryce, Valdez, NM), Women in the Director’s Chair (Chicago), Beyond Media Education (Chicago), International Women’s Information Project (Chicago), and Third World Majority (Oakland, CA). In addition, she is a past Board member of The Crossroads Fund, a community foundation that funds social change projects, and The Center for Public Intellectuals (Chicago).
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN is Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He founded and led the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University from 1976-2005. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia, and has been on the faculty of Columbia University, McGill, and Binghamton University. He was President of the International Sociological Association from 1994-1998. He chaired the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences from 1993-1995. He has honorary degrees from 14 universities. He has been a visiting professor in a dozen universities across the world and has been an annual recurrent resident researcher at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris for over 30 years. He received the Career of Distinguished Scholarship award from the American Sociological Association. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the editor of Review from 1977-2005. His academic career started in African studies. He was president of the African Studies Association from 1973-1974. Among his writings then were Africa: The Politics of Independence and Africa: The Politics of Unity. Since the early 1970's, Wallerstein has been writing in the field of world-systems analysis. There are three different, but interconnected, foci of this work. First, he writes about the historical construction and evolution of the modern world-system from its beginnings in the sixteenth century to today. The major work in this domain is The Modern World-System, of which the first three of multiple volumes have appeared. Secondly, he writes about the contemporary structural crisis of this system and its possible development in the near future. The major works in this domain include Utopistics, or Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century and Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. Thirdly, he writes about epistemological debates linked to this structural crisis. In addition to the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission, Open the Social Sciences, he has written Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms and The Uncertainties of Knowledge. He has written over 40 books and edited or coordinated some 20 more. They have been translated into more than 30 languages.He has been an active participant in the World Social Forum.
OKWUI ENWEZOR is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute. He has held positions as Visiting Professor in Art History at University of Pittsburgh; Columbia University, New York; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Umea, Sweden. He is founder and editor of the critical art journal Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art published by the Africana Study Center, Cornell University. As a writer, critic, and editor, Enwezor has been a regular contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and journals. Enwezor was Artistic Director of Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (1998–2002) and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996–1997). He has curated numerous exhibitions in some of the most distinguished museums around the world, including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and P.S.1 and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Century City, Tate Modern, London; Mirror’s Edge, Bildmuseet, Umea, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Tramway, Glasgow, Castello di Rivoli, Torino; In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present, Guggenheim Museum; Global Conceptualism, Queens Museum, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, List Gallery at MIT, Cambridge; David Goldblatt: Fifty One Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, AXA Gallery, New York, Palais des Beaux Art, Brussels, Lenbach Haus, Munich, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Witte de With, Rotterdam; co-curator of Echigo-Tsumari Sculpture Biennale in Japan; co-curator of Cinco Continente: Biennale of Painting, Mexico City; Stan Douglas: Le Detroit, Art Institute of Chicago. His writings have appeared in numerous journals, catalogues, books, and magazines including: Third Text, Documents, Texte zur Kunst, Grand Street, Parkett, Artforum, Frieze, Art Journal, Research in African Literatures, Index on Censorship, Engage, and Atlantica. Among his books are Reading the Contemporary: African Art, from Theory to the Marketplace (MIT Press, Cambridge and INIVA, London) and Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich) and the four volume publication of Documenta 11 Platforms: Democracy Unrealized; Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation; Creolité and Creolization; Under Seige: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johanneburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (Hatje Cantz, Verlag, Stuttgart), which Enwezor edited.??He has served on numerous juries, advisory bodies, and curatorial teams including: the advisory team of Carnegie International in 1999; Venice Biennale; Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum; Foto Press, Barcelona; Carnegie Prize; International Center for Photography Infinity Awards; Young Palestinian Artist Award, Ramallah; and the Cairo, Istanbul, Sharjah, and Shanghai Biennales.??Enwezor is a recipient of awards and grants from Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, International Art Critics Association, and Peter Norton Curatorial Award. He is currently completing two books, The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transitions and Archaeology of the Present: The Postcolonial Archive, Photography and African Modernity; and two exhibition projects, Snap Judgments: Recent Positions in Contemporary African Photography and On Governmentality: Techniques and Technologies of Critique, Dissent, Resistance and Solidarity in Contemporary Art. In 2004 he co-convened a major international conference: Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and Culture after 20th Century at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museum. Enwezor is the Artistic Director of Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla, in Seville, Spain. He lives in New York and San Francisco.
RAVI SUNDARAM is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His work deals with the intersection of the city and contemporary electronic cultures, issues of legality and non legality, and new conflicts around property and the electronic commodity. Sundaram has spoken and presented on these issues in India and around the world; his essays have been translated into 14 languages. In Sarai, he works with the research project Publics and Practices in the History of the Present, which examines the emerging inter-media junctions in Indian cities. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed series: the Sarai Readers: The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), and the new Crisis Media (2004). He is the author of After Media: Urbanism and Pirate culture in Delhi, (Routledge London 2006 (Forthcoming). Sundaram has taught in universities in India and the United States.
SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA is a media practitioner, artist and writer with the Raqs Media Collective and a co-initiator of the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Sengupta lives and works in Delhi, India. He works in new media, installations, video, sound, photography and text. Sengupta works at the Sarai Media Lab and is member of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader Series. Raqs Media Collective's work includes “A dying man sings of that which felled him”, “A Measure of Anacoustic Reason”, “Lost New Shoes”, “The Impostor in the Waiting Room”, “With Respect to Residue: Tablemaps for Liverpool”, “The Wherehouse”, “5 Pieces of Evidence”, “Utopia is a Hearing Aid”, “OPUS”, “Co-Ordinates of Everyday Life - 28.28N/77.15E::2001/2002”, “Location(n)”, “A/S/L”, “Temporary Autonomous Sarai” (in Collaboration with Atelier Bow Wow, Tokyo), and the recent curation “Building Sight”. Raqs has exhibited at Fondazione Sandretto (Turin, June 2006), Bose Pacia Gallery (New York), PM House Museum & Gallery (London), Kunstlerhaus (Stuttgart), the Taipei [2004], Liverpool [2004] and Venice [2003 + 2005] Biennales, Documenta 11 (Kassel), Palais de Beaux Arts (Brussels), Itau Cultural (Sao Paulo), Generali Foundation Gallery (Vienna), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Roomade Office for Contemporary Art (Brussels).
SVETLANA MINTCHEVA directs the Arts Program at the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 31 year old alliance of non-profit organizations, including artistic, religious, educational, labor, and civil liberties groups. NCAC Arts Program is the only national initiative devoted to the arts and free expression today. Since the creation of the Program in 2000, Mintcheva has been directly involved in many local arts controversies. Drawing on her singular perspective on the state of creative freedom in the U.S., she writes regularly on emerging trends in censorship, organizes public discussions and mobilizes support for individual artists. She initiated and supervises the online projects Art Now: Art After September 11, which evolved into The Patriotism of Dissent: Artists Responding to the Political Present; and Law, Art and Free Expression, a database of legal case summaries for the general public. She recently wrote and produced The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance, a video overview on art censorship in the 20th century, which premiered at the gallery of Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the co-editor of the collection Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, published in 2006, which seeks to expand the notion of censorship to include a system of subtle and pervasive speech regulations.??An academic turned activist, Mintcheva has taught at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and at Duke University, from which she received her Ph.D. in 1999. She has written numerous articles about postmodern art and literature.
KATHARINE WALLERSTEIN is the Executive Director and a founding member of the Global Commons Foundation. She was previously Director of Programs at the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo Arts Center, an international residency center for artists and thinkers in Saratoga, California that she was instrumental in launching and running. An interest in spaces of collective creative ferment and intellectual exchange brought Wallerstein to the world of artist residencies and cultural centers, in which she has worked in Europe and the United States since 2000. A longtime activist on a wide range of social justice and environmental issues, Wallerstein is committed to building global networks between activists and intellectuals; to supporting interventions by artists and media practioners that bring into sharp focus pressing ecological and social issues; and to expanding conversations yielding radical, concrete solutions to the extreme crises of today’s world. Wallerstein earned a Master’s degree and ABD status in History from Duke University for work on modern cultural history. She has lectured, researched, and published on modernism and visual culture; gender and sexuality; and oppositional identity, avant gardes, and commercial culture. |
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