Meet the advisory board members of Room to Bloom
We are glad to announce the six new advisory board members of Room to Bloom! Six experienced artists, curators and trainers of the art world have joined the Room to Bloom network. Their main task will be to accompany the whole process by giving advice on the strategy, mission and vision to our journey and participants.
By the end of this month we will be in touch with the selected 100 artists who have applied to participate in our mix of training, workshops and talks throughout the year, in the meantime, meet our new advisory board:
Sonal Jain
Sonal Jain works at the intersection of art, ecology, technology and activism. Her practice spans film, video, photography, digital media, public intervention, curation and writing. She is the co-founder of Desire Machine Collective (2004) and project Periferry. She has written a feature film script and is a published author. She has taught at premiere art and design schools of India like the National Institute of Design and shown her work at prominent venues of the world: Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Venice Biennale and locally in remote locations in Northeast India in numerous socially engaged art projects.
Beral Madra
Beral Madra, a critic and curator, directed Gallery BM (1984-1990) and directed BM Contemporary Art Centre (since 1990) www.beralmadra.net; artistic director of Kuad Gallery www.kuadgallery.com (2012-)Lives and works in Istanbul. She coordinated the 1st (1987) and the 2nd (1989) Istanbul Biennale, curated exhibitions of Turkish artists in 43rd, 45th, 49th, 50th and 51st Venice Biennale, co-curated the exhibition Modernities and Memories-Recent Works from the Islamic World in 47th Venice Biennale. Since 1984 she has organized more than 250 local and international artists in her art centres and in other official and private art spaces in Turkey, USA, EU, Russia, Middle-East and Caucasus. 2008- 2010 Visual Arts Director of İstanbul 2010 ECOC, conducted the major projects www.supremepolicy.blogspot.com. Mentored Istanbul Scholarship of Berlin Senate with 60 artists (1995-2013). Lectured in the Art Management Department of Design of Yıldız Technical University (1998-2002). Yeditepe University (2015). Founding member: Diyarbakır Art Centre (2002-2010) ; Foundation of Future Culture and Art (since 1994); honorary president of AICA, Turkey (established 2003) Publications: “Identity of Contemporary Art” (1987), “Post-peripheral Flux-A Decade of Contemporary Art in Istanbul” (1996); “İki Yılda Bir Sanat” (Essays on Biennale) (2003); “Neighbours in Dialogue” (2005); “Maidan” Essays on Contemporary Art in South Caucasus and Middle East, BM CAC Publications, 2007. “Home Affairs”, Essays on Contemporary Art in Turkey, BM CAC Publications, 2009. Currently advisory curator of Gate27 artist residency: https://www.gate-27.com/en/yenikoy.
Muna D. Lobé
Muna D. Lobé is a cultural anthropologist and comparative sociologist by training. She is also an educator, a senior international consultant, a skilled communicator and a contemporary art curator. Over the past fifteen years, she has honed significant competencies and experience in Consulting, Strategic Marketing and Communication, Content Creation and Branding for emerging and established businesses, international organizations and brands. She has lived and worked in many locales in the world: Europe, the United States, West and East Africa and the Caribbean. With her founding of AYA Consulting in 2013, Muna has focused on cultural trends but most importantly human insights and experience to create stand-out, resonant content & branding. Now based in Dakar, she has co-founded the creative design studio and strategic marketing agency: 2 Heads 221 with Ami Weickaane.
Ami Weickaane aka Bluu
Ami Weickaane is a curator and creative director. Born in Dakar, having studied and worked in Paris, Bluu has developed a sensory relationship with creativity over borders, both hers and that of others. She holds degrees in foreign languages and civilizations, corporate communication and strategic marketing. After two decades in the creative industries, Bluu has developed a remarkable sense for detecting the creative potential of an idea, a person or a place. Bluu acts as an energizer, an active substance, boosts creativity and both directs and develops this potential to its highest limits and beyond. She founded People Along Roads, a design studio specializing in telling engaging stories across borders based in Dakar, Paris and Malmö. Now based in Dakar, she has co-founded the creative design studio and strategic marketing agency: 2 Heads 221 with Muna Lobé.
Rosario Talevi
Rosario Talevi is a Berlin-based architec, curator, editor and educator interested in critical satial practice (Rendell), transformative pedagogies and feminist futures. Her work advances architecture as a form of agency -in its transformative sense and in its capacity of acting otherwise (Schneider) and as a form of care – one that provides the political stakes to repair our broken world (Tronto). She is co-director of the Floating University, research curator for Making Futures Bauhaus, long-term collaborator at raumlabor_berlin and a founding member of Sof Agency. She is a graduate of the School of Architecture, Design & Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of the Arts and the Technical University in Berlin and the University of Buenos Aires. She speaks about her practice, in both institutional and non-institutional contexts and her work and writing has been published and exhibited internationally.
Valentina Karga
Valentina Karga’s work operates between art, design, research, and architecture. It draws together elements of socially engaged practices and speculative experiments that question the existing social and physical infrastructures within the realms of energy, economy, and sustainability. She has been a fellow at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Science/Graduate school, University of the Arts Berlin, a Saari Fellow in Finland, an NTU-CCA resident in Singapore and a Vilém Flusser Resident in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Since 2018 she is a professor at Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK), Hamburg. valentinakarga.com
Sonya Dyer
Dr Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London, and is a Somerset House Studios Resident and most recently UK Associate Artist at the Delfina
Foundation. She is a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021, and an alum of Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program. Sonya Dyer’s practice explores how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities, creating possible futures. Recent projects include Art Night London (2021), Rewriting The Future, Site Gallery (2019) Or, Dark Fecundity, The Centre for Afrofuturist Studies, USA (2018), and The Claudia Jones Space Station (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, 2017). Dyer is also a writer and commentator on art and culture. Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO), her current body of work, combines social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.
