In his work, Rushdi Anwar (b 1971, Halabja, Kurdistan [Kurdistan-Iraq]) reflects on the sociopolitical issues that continue to mire the geopolitics of West Asia (historically known as “The Middle East”). Drawing on his personal experiences of displacement, conflict and trauma endured under Iraq’s colonial and ideological regimes, Anwar’s art references and generates discourse concerning the status of social equity – exploring its political, social and religious complexity via study of form and its materiality. Embracing installation, sculpture, painting, photography and video, his practice recalls the everyday plight of the thousands displaced currently suffering discrimination and persecution, while questioning the possibility of redemption and arguing for the collective necessity to attend with empathy as a social imperative.

Dr Omar Kholeif is an award-winning artist, author, curator and cultural historian who currently serves as Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. They are also the co-founding director of the not-for-profit cultural agency, artPost21. The author or co-author of over 30 books, which have been translated into 17 languages, their most recent volume, ‘Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs’ was recently published by Phaidon.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a visual artist and researcher currently living and working in Mexico. Her work explores identity, mythology, history, fiction, festivities, crafts, theatre games and popular music. Her exhibition at Chapter consists of films, drawings and animatronics that tell new stories of imagined worlds incorporating feminist and queer perspectives.

Nina Hoechtl is a visual artist, researcher, curator and teacher. Based in UNAM’s Center of Gender Research and Studies (CIEG), Hoechtl conceives and practice research as a transdisciplinary endeavor combining artistic, archival and analytical practices with the study of visual arts, in particular visual culture, and queer, post- and de(s)colon/ial/izing feminist theories and practices. In 2013 Hoechtl received a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London (EN). Then, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Aesthetic Research (IIE), UNAM. In 2018 her film ¡HAUNTINGS IN THE ARCHIVE! (2017) won the WOMEN’S VOICE NOW BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE AWARD. In her most recent project, “Delirio güero” (2016-2021) Hoechtl explored what she conceives as ‘delirio güero’ (white delusion) in Mexico. This project led, among other products, to the video Delirio güero. 2211, 2018, 1825 and back, and an essay entitled “A Visual Glossary: Delirio güero (White Delusion)”, which was published in 2020 in Sharpening the Haze (Ubiquity Press).

Nigel Prince became Director of Artes Mundi in 2019. Prior to that he was Executive Director at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), Vancouver, Canada, a position he had held since 2011. Prince began his career at Tate Liverpool, was Curator at Ikon, Birmingham (2004-10) and alongside curatorial work has held several academic and research posts including Course Director at Birmingham City University (1997 – 2002). His work with contemporary artists is extensive including Ryan Gander, Andrea Zittel, Donald Judd, Olafur Eliasson, Shahzia Sikander, Liz Magor, Steven Shearer and Ayşe Erkmen amongst many others, and includes a vital range of partnerships with museums and galleries world-wide, as well as institutions including Ballet BC and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. His exhibition with Cuban artist Carmen Herrera in 2009 was critically heralded as the “discovery of the decade” by The Guardian/ Observer and The New York Times. Prince continues to write about contemporary art for a wide range of publications and journals, most recently contributing essays to monographs on Lucy and Jorge Orta and Julia Dault.

Laura Gutiérrez is Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Public Practice in the College of Fine Arts, and Associate Professor in Latinx Studies in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research areas are Latinx and Mexican performance, visual culture, queer studies and feminisms. Gutiérrez is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (recipient of an MLA book award) and has published on Latinx performance, border art, Mexican video art, and Mexican political cabaret. She was a Scholars Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles during the autumn of 2022. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Binding Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art. Gutiérrez is on the programming team and serves as co-Artistic Director of OUTsider Festival in Austin, Texas.

Beatriz Lobo Britto (b. 1994, Brazil) is iniva’s curator since 2022, where she is responsible for the development and delivery of exhibitions and public programmes with a focus on artistic practices from Global Majority, working with artists and partners to implement artistic projects through research, radical art education, unlearning, and wellbeing practices. Beatriz is also a museologist, researcher and an enthusiast of non-hierarchical thinking, believing in the equality of ideas and non-linear ways of composing and organising them. Since the age of 17, Beatriz has been an advocate for climate justice, working with Indigenous communities in South America to develop community-led projects with a focus on education and social justice. Beatriz holds a BA (Hons) in Museum Studies from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and MA in Curatorial Practice with a focus in Contemporary Art from Glasgow School of Art. She has also worked at The NewBridge Project (Newcastle, UK), Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow, UK), Museu do Índio (Museum of Indigenous Peoples, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). At iniva, Beatriz has curated the exhibitions Village Letters (2022-2023) and Materials Speak (2024), co-curated Shifting the Centre – Anticolonial Ways of Seeing (2023), Can Publications be Porous? (2023), Dancing In The Ellipsis // A Cartographer’s Black Hole (2022), educational projects include Youth Rising, CoLab, and engagement activities around Future Collect projects.

Liv Brissach is Curator at the Northern Norwegian Art Museum / Davvi Norgga Dáiddamusea. They previously worked as Curator of Contemporary Art at MUNCH in Oslo, Norway, and as Project Officer at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Brissach was co-curator of the MUNCH Triennale – The Machine is Us (2022) and assistant curator for The Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022. They trained as an art historian at University College London and at the University of Oslo, and their texts can be found in publications by MUNCH, OCA and Fotogalleriet.

Barbara Santos is a visual artist and independent researcher. Her work focuses on making transformation processes visible using the conjunction between art and technology under the guidance of ancestral knowledge in the Amazon. She has significant experience in the jungles since 2005 in the Vaupés and Putumayo regions (Colombian Amazon) and is the author of the book ‘La curación como tecnología’ (Healing as Technology, idartes, 2019). Her long-term collective projects are interwoven with the intention of questioning traditional structures and contemporary art formats through the strengthening of aesthetic ruptures that can come from the encounters of complex cultures. Website: quiasma.co

Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt, Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, and co-curator of the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial in 2025. Here and in other contexts she has developed residencies, exhibitions, produced films, publications and collaborative research projects at the intersection of arts and social justice, grounded in an ongoing study of radical pedagogy.  Recent projects include Radio Ballads (2019-22) and Sensing the Planet (2021). She is a founding member of artist collective GCC, a trustee of Mophradat, Athens; not/nowhere, London and Art Night, London. In 2019 she curated Bahrain’s pavilion for Venice, in 2018 she co-curated an international arts and social justice conference called Rights to the City and in 2016 she co-directed the 10th edition of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai.  She has produced several artist films in the last decade, including RAFTS by Rory Pilgrim, currently nominated for the Turner Prize 2023.

Katya Garcia-Anton is Director, Northern Norway Art Museum-Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Norway/Sápmi. She was the commissioner and co-curatior of the transformation of the Nordic Pavilion into the Sámi Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022. Prior to that she was Director/Chief Curator of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway from 2014. She graduated as a biologist conducting field research in ecology and behaviour in the Amazon and Sierra Leone, and transitioned into the arts with an MA in 19th and 20th century art history from The Courtauld Institute of Arts, London. Thereafter she worked at The Courtauld Institute of Art, BBC World Service (Latin American Broadcasts), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía Madrid, ICA London, IKON Birmingham, and as Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain (CAC) Genève. She is responsible for more than seventy exhibitions of art, architecture, and design by practitioners worldwide. She was the lead curator of the Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennial in 2015; curated the Spanish Pavilions at São Paolo Biennial 2004 and Venice Biennial 2011; as well as co-curated the Prague Biennial 2005, and the flagship exhibition Gestures in Time, Qalandiya International Biennial 2012. In 2015 she launched Critical Writing Ensembles, an ongoing platform stimulating research, and publishing of art histories beyond the Western canon (so far, including South Asia and Indigenous worldviews).

May Adadol Ingawanij | เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is a writer, curator, and teacher, Professor of Cinematic Arts and Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster. She publishes in English, Thai, and in translation, across a wide range of academic and arts publications. Her recent and ongoing curatorial projects include Animistic Apparatus, Legacies, 69^th Flaherty Film Seminar – To Commune (co-curated with Julian Ross). Her works explore Southeast Asian contemporary art; de-westernised and decentred histories and genealogies of cinematic arts; avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia; forms of future-making in contemporary Global South artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’ moving image, art and independent films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia.