Ali Akbar Mehta (b.1983, Mumbai) is a Transmedia artist, curator, researcher, and writer. He examines narratives drawn from zones of conflict and dominant power structures, creating immersive, interactive archival projects that foreground overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies. His projects investigate and offer countermeasures to forms of violence and conflict generated as everyday collateral. By experimenting with new archival rules that depart from institutional and coloniality-driven legacy archiving, he generates new knowledge systems of how narratives of history, memory, and identity may be mapped to make visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. Such archival mappings – drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, theoretical texts, and performances both of bodies and networks – seek to create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.
His work as performances, installations, talks, and curatorial interventions have been recognised by Helsinki Biennale (2023), documenta fifteen (2022), Tampere Art Museum (2023), Taide Museo ARTSI (2021), Gallen-Kallela Museum (2021), Ainola Museum (2021), Visavuori Museum (2021), Mänttä Art Festival (2021), ONOMA Summer Exhibition-Fiskars (2020), Galleria Saskia (2023), Myymälä2 (2020), Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (2017), Venice Biennale Research Pavilion (2017), Third Space (2016), TAO Art Gallery (2011-2018), Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke (2010), Art Heritage (2010), among others; and awarded the State Art Prize by the Ministry of Art and Culture, Finland (2020) and the Tutkijaliitto-palkinto award by the Finnish Association of Researchers (2019). His work is supported by grants from the Kone Foundation, Arts Promotion Center Finland, Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Finnish Cultural Foundation, and Helsinki City.
Currently invited as a co-curator for the Haihatus summer exhibition in Joutsa, Finland, he was a co-curator of the Helsinki Biennale 2023: New Directions May Emerge, and curatorial advisor to Party Office b2b Fadescha for documenta fifteen. He is a co-founder of the Museum of Impossible Forms and was its co-artistic director from August 2018 to December 2020. He has held positions of accountability in several artist-led associations and institutional spaces in Helsinki. He holds an MA in ‘Visual Cultures, Curating, and
Contemporary Art’, from Aalto University, Helsinki, and a BFA from Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai.
Jernej Čuček Gerbec (b.1985, Slovenia) is a media-agnostic artist working across photography, video, text and sculpture. His artistic practice actively centres observation-making of the common, conventional and widespread, over medium-specificity or conceptual frameworks. He finds poetics in the simple acts of life, recurring conversations, pictures of random passersby and quotidian struggles. The result is never a simple act of documentation but playful mediations with his audience to highlight things that otherwise go
unnoticed, while at the same time making the end message ambiguous and unclear, to retain its former allure. His works have been exhibited internationally, as installation, photography, video, text and sculpture, most notably at DobraVaga, Ljubljana (2024); MeetFactory, Prague (2023); Stekleni Atrij Town Hall, Ljubljana (2023); Mahlerca (2023); Pori Biennale (2020); One Thoresby Street, Nottingham (2019); Carinarnica, Nova Gorica (2018); Roman Susan, Chicago (2017); Aksioma, Ljubljana (2015); Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki (2017); Research Pavillion, Venice Biennale (2017); Galerija Kibla, Maribor (2014); Galerija Photon, Ljubljana (2010-2014); Galerija Škuc (2013-2019). Additionally, He is interested in exhibiting work using alternate physical and online spaces that subvert everyday places as sites of art, and has exhibited works through ‘6 pm your local time, a network distributed one-night contemporary art event’, ‘M/S Illusia’ a boat, and a Recycle Center, Otaniemi, ran a pirate radio called ‘Radio Izolat’ in 2020, and started the first, at the time the only podcast, on contemporary art in Slovenia. His works ‘I Will Be Forgotten, But Hopefully Something Grows Out’ and ‘Sauna Karolina’ are permanently installed at the Aalto University Campus, in Otaniemi, Espoo and at MeetFactory, Prague, respectively.
He currently works as chief editor and writer at ‘Koridor - križišća umetnosti’, a Slovenian online magazine dedicated to art reviews. He holds an MA in ‘Visual Culture and Contemporary Art’ from Aalto University, FI, and a BA in Photography from VIST, SI.
