Stan Douglas, 2024

Douglas’ lecture was entitled The Black Mirror or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Photography. In the keynote Stan Douglas explored the value of photography’s “unintelligent” automatism using examples from his own work. Once the notion of photographic objectivity is abandoned, and the alien, inhuman nature of the medium is acknowledged, it can become a powerful vehicle for human agency.

Douglas is an internationally renowned Canadian visual artist living and working in Vancouver and Los Angeles. His work often explores complex issues of identity, history and culture, particularly in relation to colonialism, politics and social structures. Douglas’ art is known for challenging its viewers to think more deeply about social and cultural issues, often offering ambiguous perspectives.

Emmanuelle Coccia, 2023

In 2023, a thought-provoking keynote lecture titled Don’t Call Me Gaia. Notes For a Planetary Art was held by distinguished Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia. Emanuele Coccia (born 1976) is particularly known for his advocacy for plants and speaks of “animalistic racism”, which excludes the plant kingdom from the rest of society.

Coccia has been involved in numerous art productions and is interested in the ontology of images and their defining power. According to him, people who reflect on nature are also able to recognise nature’s cultural character. Artists are therefore important creators of new landscapes. He participated in, for example, the “Trees” exhibition (Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, 2019), which gave a voice to artists, gardeners, and philosophers who, through their aesthetic or scientific journey, have cultivated a close connection with trees.

Sonia Boyce, 2022

Sonia Boyce (OBE RA) is a London-based artist and accomplished academic who, throughout her extensive career, has been a prominent advocate for the rights of black artists in Britain. Her works, which combine film, photography, printmaking and sound, are collaborative and participatory multimedia installations that challenge notions of artistic authorship and cultural difference. In 2022, Boyce represented Great Britain at the 59th Venice Biennale.

In her keynote lecture, Boyce explored play and improvisation, which takes her into the realm of disrupted expectations and unguarded reverie where one action encourages another without apparent purpose. The lecture also discussed the process of her social art practice and the resulting artworks.

Andrea Giunta, 2020

Argentinian Andrea Giunta is an art historian, researcher and professor who has published widely on Latin American and international art, memory and politics, the power of images – especially Picasso’s Guernica – and gender and feminism in art. Giunta was chief curator of the Mercosul Biennial 12, organised in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2020. The theme of the biennial was the relation between art, feminisms, and emancipation.

The Mercosul Biennial is one of the most important biennials of contemporary art in Latin America. In her lecture, Giunta dealt with areas left in the dark in the white and patriarchal canon of Latin American art. Art by women or artists of African or indigenous descent is too often excluded. With the rise of right-wing populism in Latin America, the question is ever more important. The lecture highlighted the works of Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino and of Mexican Totzil artist Maruch Sántiz Gómez, among others.

Martha Rosler, 2019

Martha Rosler (born 1943) is an artist and activist who has highlighted social issues through her art since the 1960s. She is particularly well-known for her photographs, photo montages and videos, often with anti-war, feminist or consumer-critical themes. She has used her montages to draw parallels between advertising materials in magazines and war imagery both in the 1970s and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. Nonetheless, Rosler’s production is also full of humour and parody, even satire. She carries on her fight against injustice, and in her latest work, she has singled out public figures such as Donald Trump for criticism. Rosler has also written extensively on photography in art.

Adam Szymczyk, 2018

Polish art critic and curator Adam Szymczyk (born 1970) is renowned for his role as artistic director of Documenta 14, curator of the 2008 Berlin Biennale, and director of the Kunsthalle Basel. He has been ranked as the fourth most influential person in the art world by the prestigious international art publication ArtReview. Watch the keynote lecture by Szymczyk on Youtube.

Elmgreen & Dragset, 2017

The artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset) embody a new form of multi-faceted artistic practice, as the artists also serve as curators and engage in collaborative work. The duo often works in public or semi-public spaces, and their works explore themes such as public space, identity, power, and geopolitics with a striking juxtaposition of tragedy and humour. Their recent public works include the monumental sculpture Van Gogh’s Ear, situated outside the Rockefeller Center in New York. The Elmgreen & Dragset artist duo’s lecture was particularly timely in 2017, as they were selected as curators for the 2017 Istanbul Biennial.

Okwui Enwezor, 2016

Nigerian-born Enwezor (1963–2019) was a widely-renowned art world figure, working as a curator, writer, poet, and educator. The “All the World’s Futures” exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale was one example of the numerous biennales and landmark museum exhibitions he curated. Known as a post-colonial thinker, Enwezor continued to enhance awareness of non-Western art since his first major curatorial projects in the 1990s. At the 56th Venice Biennale, he brought political art to the fore, highlighting numerous ongoing crises and new takes on the future of our world.