Nina Chanel Abney was born in Chicago and currently lives and works in New Jersey. Her paintings combine abstraction with representation to capture the frenetic pace of contemporary life. She broaches subjects as diverse as race, celebrity, religion, politics, sex, and art history. The effect is information overload, balanced with a kind of spontaneous order where time and space are compressed and identity is interchangeable. Her distinctively bold style harnesses the flux and simultaneity that has come to define life in the 21st century. Her work is included in collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubell Family Collection, Bronx Museum, and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong. Her first solo museum show in 2017 travelled around the United States.

Playful and plaintive, sincere and satiric, Darren Bader’s (b. 1978, Bridgeport, Connecticut) take on sculpture has been called “immodestly heterodox” and “dead-end Modernist deadpan.” Some people find his work funny. He less frequently does but can take a compliment. Bader has gained recognition for food sculpture, selling money, found-object fetish, mismanaged fauna, and failing to launch sculptures into outer space. He has worked in augmented reality since 2019. Solo presentations include: Whitney Museum of American Art; Sadie Coles, London; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Museo Madre, Naples; Kölnischer Kunstverein; MoMA PS1, New York. Group exhibitions include: Mudam; Biennale di Venezia #58; Hammer Museum; Power Station; Kunsthalle Wien; Serralves; Palais de Tokyo; PS1; MoCA. He is the recipient of the 2013 Calder Prize. Bader is based in New York. Due to the pandemic, he’s been traveling less. He adores old master paintings and sleeping-enough.

Julie Curtiss (b. 1982) is a French artist based in Brooklyn working in painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints. She received her BA and MFA from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, France. She has had solo exhibitions at White Cube, London; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, as well as participated in group exhibitions at the Mass, Tokyo; the Nassau County Museum, New York; and Clearing New York among others. Her work is in the collection of a number of museums including the MCA Chicago, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, LACMA, and the Bronx Museum. She was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Residency program in 2019, and she and her work have been reviewed and featured in the Financial Times’s “How to Spend It,” Vogue, Artnet, Artsy, the Times (London), W, and the Los Angeles Times, to mention a few. Curtiss is represented by Anton Kern Gallery and White Cube.

The works of artist Olafur Eliasson explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows–featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film–have appeared in major museums around the globe. In 2003, he represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale, and later that year he installed The weather project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London. Eliasson’s projects in public space include The New York City Waterfalls (2008); Fjordenhus, Vejle (2018); and Ice Watch (2014). In 2012, Eliasson founded the social business Little Sun, and in 2014, he and Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture. In Berlin in 1995, Eliasson founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians, and specialized technicians.

Cao Fei (b. 1978) lives and works in Berlin. Predominantly working in film and installation, Cao Fei mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions to reflect the chaotic changes that are occurring in Chinese society today. Cao Fei’s works have been exhibited at a number of international biennials and triennials, including Shanghai Biennale (2004), Moscow Biennale (2005), Taipei Biennale (2006), the 15th and 17th Biennales of Sydney (2006 and 2010), Istanbul Biennial (2007), Yokohama Triennale (2008), and the 50th, 52nd, and 56th Venice Biennales (2003, 2007 and 2015). Exhibitions and screenings of her work have taken place at Serpentine Gallery (2006 and 2008) and Tate Modern in London (2002, 2013 and 2014); New Museum (2009), Guggenheim Museum (2011 and 2018), and MoMA in New York (2016 and 2015); Fondation Louis Vuitton (2016), Palais de Tokyo (2005 and 2017), and Centre Pompidou in Paris (2019, 2014, 2003).

KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, street art, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two decades, KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies.

Since the early 1990s, Koo Jeong A has made works that are seemingly casual and commonplace, yet at the same time remarkably precise, deliberate, and considered. Her reflections on the senses and the body incorporate objects, still and moving images, audio elements, and aromas. Many of her works are conceived within site-specific environments that question the limits of fact and fiction, the imaginary and actuality of our world. Koo Jeong A considers the connection of energies between a place and people, relying on chance to drive her encounters. Koo Jeong A was named 2016 Artist of the Year by the Korean Cultural Centre UK. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions of her work include: ajeongkoo, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2017); Enigma of Beginnings, Yuz Project Room at Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2016); Koo Jeong A x Wheelscape: Evertro, Everton Park, Liverpool (2015); and Oussser, Fondazione La Raia, Novi Ligure (2014).

Alicja Kwade lives and works in Berlin. Her work investigates and questions the structures of our reality and society and reflects on our perceptual habits in our everyday lives. Her diverse practice is based around concepts of space, time, science, and philosophy, and takes shape in sculptural objects, public installations, video, and even photography. Her work has been exhibited in multiple solo shows in museums and institutions such as the Langen Foundation, Neuss; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré – CCCOD, Tours; the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; the YUZ Museum, Shanghai; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan; the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Public Art Fund, New York City. In 2019, she was commissioned to create a site-specific work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden. Kwade has also taken part in international events all around the world: Desert X, Coachella in 2021, the NGV Triennial 2020, the Setouchi Triennale 2019, the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016. Her work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions in major institutions such as the Hayward Gallery, London; the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC), Nice; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT); and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna, among others. Kwade is among the artists featured at the Helsinki Biennial, which will take place from June 12 to September 26, 2021.

Bjarne Melgaard (b. 1967) was born in Sydney, Australia to Norwegian parents. In installations that include paintings, videos, and mixed-media works, the artist explores themes of substance addiction, sexuality, and self-destruction. Melgaard has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (2012), and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2010). He has also participated in the Venice (2011), Lyon (2013), and Whitney (2014) Biennials. In addition to his visual art practice, Melgaard is a prolific curator, writer, film producer, and fashion designer. Melgaard lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

Precious Okoyomon is a poet, chef, and artist living in New York City. They make portals into new worlds. Okoyomon has had institutional solo exhibitions at the Luma Westbau in Zurich (2018) and at the MMK in Frankfurt (2020), major performances commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2019), and was an artist-in-residence at Luma Arles (2020). Okoyomon’s second book, But Did U Die?, is forthcoming from the Serpentine Galleries/Wonder Press in 2021.

Tomás Saraceno’s (b. 1973) work envisions ethical relationships with the terrestrial, atmospheric, and cosmic realms, deepening our understanding of environmental justice and interspecies cohabitation, carried out through floating sculptures, immersive installations, and the artist-initiated projects Aerocene and Arachnophilia. Arachnophilia is a not-for-profit, interdisciplinary spider/web research community that builds on innovations arising from Saraceno’s collaborative research into spider/web architectures, materials, modes of vibrational signalling, and behavior. Through this community, Arachnophilia explores concepts and ideas related to spiders and webs across multiple artistic, scientific, and theoretical disciplines, including vibrational communication, biomateriomics, architecture and engineering, animal ethology, nonhuman philosophy, anthropology, biodiversity/conservation, sound studies, and music.