The Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) is an international platform for contemporary art and public discourse in Cologne. The Academy members - a global collective of artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners - shape the ADKDW and its program through their interdisciplinary perspectives and artistic practices.

Through its program, ADKDW promotes a critical understanding of the arts and aims to reveal and rethink the contemporary conditions of cultural history and cultural production. With this in mind, ADKDW organizes events and exhibitions, produces publications, and initiates research and study projects.

The ADKDW Studio regularly hosts events of various artistic and discursive disciplines. In addition, the ADKDW organizes concerts, readings, lectures and workshops with various partners at different locations in the city. In this way, the ADKDW creates a laboratory of artistic and political questions in Cologne and makes the potential of an transcultural urban society visible.

The institution's formation resulted from the proposal of an initiative group of Navid Kermani, Manos Tsangaris and other cultural practitioners from Cologne. In 2012, a search committee comprising Ralph Christoph, Amelie Deuflhard, Kasper König, Jan Krauthäuser, Louwrens Langevoort and Regina Wyrwoll appointed the 14 founding members of the Academy, who would henceforth be responsible for shaping the artistic program and in the course of time were joined by other members.

2012 – 2014
From October 2012 to June 2013, writer and curator Galit Eilat (Israel-Netherlands) was President of the ADKDW. Subsequently, an interim team of Ekaterina Degot, Liza Lim and Tom Holert worked on the ADKDW's program concept until March 2014. During this period, the program largely centered around a series of Salon events. At the regularly held Salons, members, fellows and invited artists and experts presented their current projects and discussed them with the Cologne audience. Furthermore, the ADKDW set up a fellowship program for contemporary artists, theoreticians and curators from non-European countries that was intended to lay the foundations for exchange between international and Cologne art scenes.

2014 - 2017
Under the artistic direction of Ekaterina Degot, PLURIVERSALE took place twice a year from 2014 to 2017, each time for a period of two months. It consisted of site-specific projects, exhibitions, concerts, discussions, film screenings and performative symposia, and proposed an alternative to the usual rhythms of biennials and their narratives – which too often turned out to be universalist and relativist at once.

2018 - 2021
Since 2018, the artistic program of the ADKDW under the direction of Madhusree Dutta was structured around four thematic axes: found:erased:palimpsest, Sites at Stake, Original Fakes and Hybrid Transactions. By crossing the four thematic axes and different spatial dimensions, the ADKDW seeked to create links between theory and practice, between memory and speculation, between lived-in experiences and artistic forms.

The Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) is a non-profit cultural institution founded in 2012 by the City of Cologne. Here you will find the rules of procedure of the ADKDW as well as annual accounts and status reports.

Financial Report 2020 (German only)

Status Report 2021 (German only)

Corporate Governance Statement 2021 (German only)

Financial Report 2020 (German only)

Status Report 2020 (German only)

Corporate Governance Statement 2020 (German only)

Financial report 2019 (German only)

Status Report 2019 (German only)

Financial report 2018 (German only)

Status Report 2018 (German only)

Articles of Incorporation for the Akademie der Künste der Welt/Köln, a non-profit GmbH

Bylaws for the Supervisory Board (German only)

Bylaws for the Managing Direction (German only)

Welcome to the ADKDW!

Here you will find information in plain language about the Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW for short.

ADKDW is short for Akademie der Künste der Welt.
The English name is Academy of the Arts of the World.
The Academy was founded in Cologne in 2012.
From the start, the ADKDW dealt
with important topics in art and culture.
The ADKDW is still a special place today:
Artists and academics work and do research here.
The Academy also has a network of members from all over the world,
who work together.

The Academy's tasks are:
• to promote art and culture.
• to offer an independent place for discussion and exchange.
• • to promote contact between people
of different nationalities, cultures, and religious beliefs.

The members of the ADKDW are artists, scientists
and people who are active in the field of culture.
The members offer different ideas,
artistic skills, and work experience.
They come from many different countries.

The members have different tasks:
• They develop the Academy's program.
• They decide who leads the Academy.
• They select the artists for the Artists-in-Residence program.
Artists from all over the world can come to Cologne
[gesprochen: A tist-in-Residenz-Programm].
and work at the Academy.

You can find more information about the ADKDW members here:
https://www.adkdw.org/en/about#mitglieder.

The ADKDW works with many institutions and organizations
around the world.

For example, the German Goethe Institutes in different countries,
and also universities and museums.
This cooperation leads to many events, research projects,
and publications.

The input of Academy members in the design of the program
and the international residency program
always gives the ADKDW new ideas for its work.

An important topic of the ADKDW is German colonial history
and how Germany deals with it today.
During colonialism, countries in Europe
conquered and exploited territories in other parts of the world.
The consequences can still be seen all over the world today.

You can find the current ADKDW program here:
https://www.adkdw.org/en/.

The Academy has a studio in Cologne, at Herwarthstraße 3.
In the studio, the Academy shows exhibitions and films, for example.
There are also discussion rounds, workshops, and lectures.

The Academy has close partners in Cologne.
Together they organize concerts, readings and much more
at different locations in the city.

At the events, artists and participants can discuss
current issues in art and politics.

Scholarship for art and research

The Academy has a scholarship program.
People can get a scholarship to do art and research.
A scholarship means they get money to do this.
It usually lasts 2 months.
The Academy invites international artists, actors, and thinkers
to Cologne for the scholarships.
During the scholarship
• they get to know the city and the region,
• they meet with artists from Cologne and around
• and they can do research and get new ideas for their work.

Participatory residency program

The participatory residency program is another scholarship in Cologne.
Artists and activists can apply,
• if they enjoy working with other people.
• if they make interactive art.
With interactive art, people do not just watch,
they participate and are part of the art themselves.
• if they want to develop a program
for the communities in Cologne.
For example, workshops, films, readings, and exhibitions.
The program is for people
who often face disadvantages and exclusion.
For example, because of their origin and culture
or because of their sexual orientation.

You can find more information about the ADKDW Residency here:
https://www.adkdw.org/en/program/topics/3484adkdwresidency.

Admission

Admission to ADKDW events is usually free of charge.

Guided tours during the exhibitions

The ADKDW regularly organizes exhibitions.
You can take part in a guided tour
to learn more about a current exhibition.
You will receive explanations
to help you better understand the exhibition.
The guided tours are in German or English
and take place in groups.

If you want to register yourself or your group,
or if you have any questions about the guided tours,
please send an e-mail to: info@adkdw.org.

Addresses and directions

The address of our studio is:

ADKDW Studio
Herwarthstraße 3
50672 Cologne

Phone number: 0049 221 337 74 80
E-mail address: info@adkdw.org

Directions
• Stadtbahn number 12 or 15 to Christophstraße/Mediapark
• Stadtbahn number 3, 4, 5 or 15 to Friesenplatz

Accessibility
The ADKDW studio has no steps or stairs.
You can get in with a wheelchair.
But there is no barrier-free toilet.


Please send us an e-mail,
• if you have any questions about accessibility,
• if you have suggestions on how accessibility can be better
• or if you have a special support need during your visit
or would like to bring an assistance dog or an assistant with you.

Our office address is:

ADKDW Office
Im Mediapark 7
50670 Cologne

Phone number: 0049 221 337 74 80
E-mail address: info@adkdw.org

Directions
• S-Bahn numbers 6, 11, 12 or 13 to Hansaring
• Stadtbahn number 12 or 15 to Christophstraße/Mediapark

Accessibility
The room is widely accessible.
Please call if you have any questions:
Phone number: 0049 221 337 74 80
Or send us an e-mail to: info@adkdw.org

Link to the open call:

https://www.adkdw.org/en/service#joboffersandopencalls/participatoryresidencyprogram_4424

Link to the financial plan:
BudgetTemplate.pdf

Do you have any questions,
or would you like to tell us something?
You can reach us by phone or e-mail.

Phone number: 0049 221 337 74 80
E-mail address: info@adkdw.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

The text in plain language is from capito Graz.
X people from different target groups
checked the text for comprehensibility.

The Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) is carried by a global collective that brings its diverse perspectives and artistic practices to the work of the Academy. The Academy members - national and international artists, curators, authors, scholars, and cultural practitioners - function as an interdisciplinary think tank. In addition to advising on the direction and program of the ADKDW, the Academy members are responsible for electing new members and selecting Artists-in-Residence. The current Artistic Director of the ADKDW acts as the spokesperson for the Academy members.

INKE ARNS, PhD, is director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany. She has worked internationally as an independent curator and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She has curated many exhibitions – at the bauhaus dessau, MG+MSUM Ljubljana, Gallery EXIT Pejë, KW Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MMOMA Moscow a.o. She is the author of many articles on contemporary art, media art and net culture, and has edited numerous exhibition catalogues and books. In 2021–2022 she is Visiting Professor at the Münster Art Academy. 2022 she is curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri), 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

UTE META BAUER is a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound that connect artistic work with other disciplines. Since 2013, she is Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and a professor in the School of Art, Design and Media. From 2012 to 2013, she served as Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, where she was the Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) (2009–2012) and Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program (2005–2009). In 2015, she co-curated with MIT List Center for Visual Art Director Paul Ha, presenting eminent artist Joan Jonas, the US Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale that received Honorary Mention for best National Pavilion by their International Jury.

At the NTU CCA Singapore, she curated and co-curated Allan Sekula: Fish Story, to be continued (2015), Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History (2017), The Oceanic (2017/2018), Tarek Atoui The Ground: From the Land to the Sea (2018), Trees of Life: Knowledge in Material (2018), Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz (2018), Siah Armajani: Spaces for the Public. Spaces for Democracy (2019) and most recently, The Posthuman City: Climates. Habitats. Environments (2019/2020).

Bauer was Artistic Director of the 3rd berlin biennale for contemporary art, Berlin (2004) and Co-Curator of documenta11, Kassel (2001-2002) with the late Okwui Enwezor as Artistic Director. Bauer has edited numerous publications in the field of contemporary art, most recently South East Asia. Spaces of the Curatorial (with Brigitte Oetker, Sternberg Press 2016), Thomas Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions (with Anca Rujoiu, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore 2017), Place.Labour.Capital (with Anca Rujoiu, Mousse Publishing 2018) and The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban) Asia (with Khim Ong and Roger Nelson, World Scientific 2020). Bauer serves as a member of various advisory boards, including International Boards of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, Bergen Assembly, Bergen and documenta commission, Kassel.

BINNA CHOI practices the curatorial in an expanded sense, by situating art in relation to practices of social change, and by working on art institutions as exemplary institutional sites. Since 2008, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons has been Binna’s primary site for this curatorial practice. There she has curated a number of long-term, collaborative/cross-disciplinary artistic research projects and programs, such as Grand Domestic Revolution, co-curated with Maiko Tanaka (2010–13), Composing the Commons (2013–16), and Site of Unlearning (Art Organizations), with Annette Krauss and the Casco team (2014–18). Each of these involves commissions, exhibitions, co-research situations, and publications.

In 2018, Binna and the Casco team initiated the organizational restructuring; the institutional name change from ‘Casco – Office for Art Design and Theory’ to ’Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons’ marks the restructure. Casco Art Institute is dedicated to collective study of the commons through the practice of art, as it is dedicated to practicing art through the collective study of the commons. Beyond binaries such as the private and public, the intellectual and manual, the urban and rural, and the institutional and the self-organizational, Casco proposes the commons as an ongoing movement for non-binary futures of equality and multiplicity. Its artistic program is organized around several study lines on the commons, while the organization itself is practiced as a site of commoning. One of the study lines is Unmapping Eurasia, a multi-year inquiry Binna has been pursuing with You Mi. By considering Eurasia as terrain where geopolitics, geo-philosophy, and geo-poetics intersect, they open up a trans-cultural context for commoning across the Europe-Asian divide.

Binna teaches at the Dutch Art Institute masters program, and works for and with the trans-local network Arts Collaboratory. She is also one of the co-founding members of Cluster, a European network of art organizations closely engaging with their surroundings. She worked on the curatorial team of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale titled The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do) and, in that context, co-organized with Maria Lind the global forum and fellowship of experimental art organizations called All the Contributing Factors. Together with Yollótl Alvarado and Brigitta Isabella, she organized an experimental exhibition introducing Arts Collaboratory working principles at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju. Binna also regularly delivers public lectures around institutional change and other modes of curatorial practice, and plays advisory roles.

MADHUSREE DUTTA is a filmmaker, author and cultural producer living in India and Germany. She is the founder and former director (1998-2016) of Majlis, a center for rights discourse and interdisciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai; and former artistic director (2018-2021) of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, Germany. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urbanology, inter-disciplinary archiving practices, and urban public culture.

Dutta's films are shown widely at international film festivals and art events, and are taught in several university departments and study centres. In 2019 she has received Lifetime Achievement Award at International Documentary & Short Film Festival of Kerala and Cultural Manager of the Year prize from Cologne Cultural Council. She has initiated several large scale projects on urban public cultures including Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices (2009-2014) – a cross-disciplinary endeavor on cinema as a public culture in Mumbai, and Memory Stations (2018-2019): a public history project in the post-industrial towns of North Rhine and Westphalia in Germany.

Her publications include dates.sites: Bombay / Mumbai – a textual and graphic timeline of the urban public culture in the 20th century; Project Cinema City – an anthology of essays on cinema producing cities; fake hybrid sites palimpsest: Essays on Leakages – on porosity in cultural practices.

From 2018 until 2021 Madhusree Dutta has been Artistic Director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW). Currently she works as a freelance artist and curator.
www.madhusreedutta.net

(2022)

Photo: Dörthe Boxberg

NTONE EDJABE is a journalist and DJ. He is the founder of Chimurenga, a pan African platform of arts and politics. Chimurenga initiatives include The Chronic, Pan African Space Station and the Chimurenga Library.

MERV ESPINA is an artist and curator based in Las Piñas, Metro Manila. In 2014 he co-initiated the Kalampag Tracking Agency and in 2016 Kamuning Public Radio. He helps run WSK Festival of the Recently Possible as well as the Nusasonic collaborative music platform and contributes to Radio alHara Palestine. His artistic explorations result in installations and film screenings, seminars and magazines, music mixes and comix anthologies, pirate radio hacks, choreographies, and perfume productions. His art projects have been featured in the 2015 Jakarta Biennale and the 2020 Yokohama Triennale.

Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986 in Kostërrc, Kosovo) understands exhibitions as a way to alter the course of personal and collective histories, creating complex worlds that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity. His work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a starting point for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, the projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, text, and performance. Often incorporating materials from Kosovo and manifesting as ambitious spatial installations, his work transposes personal relationships, places and people into sculptural forms. Halilaj's practice can be seen as a playful and, at times, irreverent attempt to resist oppressive politics and social norms towards an untamed celebration of all forms of connectedness and freedom.

Halilaj held solo exhibitions at Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; Tate St. Ives, UK; Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; New Museum, New York; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Paul Klee Zentrum, Bern; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Fondation d'Entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris; Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, among others.

Halilaj studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan. He received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) in 2018 and completed the MAK-Schindler Scholarship Program at the Mackey Apartments, Los Angeles, as well as residencies at the Villa Romana, Florence and Fürstenberg Contemporary, Heiligenberg. He is currently a professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, France, together with his partner and frequent artistic collaborator, Álvaro Urbano. He lives and works between Germany, Kosovo and Italy.

NANNA HEIDENREICH (*1970) is professor for Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is a media & cultural studies scholar as well as a curator for film, video as well as political & theoretical interventions. Curatorial works include Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (2008-2017), HKW (2016/17), Hotspots. Migration and the Sea, ADKDW, 2019. Her most recent project was Auslaufende Umwelten, developed together with Marcus Held for Kunstverein D21 in Leipzig. Her research areas include postcolonial media theory, critical migration studies, image politics, art & activism, queer cinema, oceanic perspectives and most recently, the discourse on the so-called invasive species. She lives in Vienna & Berlin.
nannaheidenreich.net

(2022)

MAX JORGE HINDERER CRUZ is a Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher. From March 2019 to June 2020 he was Director of the National Museum of Art (MNA) in La Paz, where he founded the museum's Program for Decolonial Studies in Art (PED) and was responsible for generating a historical change of the institutional profile. His work at the museum has been recognized by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), being considered a reference in the international museum community for its developments in the fields of social inclusion and education.

As curator and cultural programmer (selection): from 2008 to 2011 he was curator of the exhibition and publication project Principio Potosí (Museo Reina Sofía Madrid/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin/MNA and MUSEF La Paz - with Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann). From 2014 to 2016 he was coordinator of P.A.C.A. (Program of Autonomous Cultural Actions) and Seminário Público Micropolíticas in São Paulo (with Suely Rolnik, Amilcar Packer and Tatiana Roque). With Paul B. Preciado, Margarita Tsomou and Nelli Kambouri he organized the Apatride Society as part of the Documenta14 public program in Athens and Kassel between 2016 and 2017. In 2017 he was invited by Chimurenga’s Pan African Space Station, to co-program a section of their project Angazi, but I’m sure. at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

Hinderer Cruz is author of the book Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa - program in progress (Afterall Books/MIT Press, 2013 - with Sabeth Buchmann) and, amongst others, editor of Art and Ideology Critique After 1989 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König/Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2013 – with E. Birkenstock, et al.).

His texts and cultural critique have been published in Spanish, German, English, Portuguese and French, in various formats in catalogues, magazines, and international newspapers in Europe, Africa, the USA and Latin America. Hinderer Cruz regularly publishes essays in the Bolivian newspaper La Razón.

Hinderer Cruz was a fellow of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) in 2016 and has been an ADKDW member since 2018. From 2021-2023 he was the artistic director of the ADKDW.

KIM SOYOUNG (JEONG) is a Professor of Cinema Studies at the Korea National University of Arts, Director of the Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, and Visiting Professor at Duke University, UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. She is the editor of the ten-volume History of Korean Cinema, National Research Foundation of Korea, co-editor of Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space with Chris Berry and Lynn Spiegel, and Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene with Shiuhhuah Serena Chou and Rob Wilson. Soyoung Kim's Exile Trilogy (2014-2017) includes three documentaries about Koreans in Central Asia, Russia, and Korea. Kim Soyoung also directed Women’s History Trilogy, a trilogy of documentaries (Koryu: Southern Women South Korea, I’ll Be Seeing Her, and New Women: Her First Song) realised between 2000 and 2004 and was Guest of Honor at the Guanajuato International Film Festival.
(2022)

LAWRENCE LIANG is a legal scholar and writer based at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. His work lies at the intersection of law and cultural politics, and is looking at questions of media piracy, copyright, popular culture and legal questions. He has been working closely with the independent research initiative Sarai, New Delhi on the joint research project Intellectual Property and the Knowledge/Culture Commons. Liang is the author of Free/Open Source Software. Open Content (2007) and The Public is Watching: Sex, Laws and Videotape (2007). In 2016 he co-authored Invisible Libraries, speculative fiction on libraries and the future of reading.

MAHA MAAMOUN is a Cairo-based artist, curator and independent publisher. Her work examines the form, function and currency of common cultural visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are woven into. She also works collaboratively on independent publishing and curatorial projects. She is a founding member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), an independent non-profit space for art and culture founded in Cairo in 2004, and co-founder of the independent publishing platform Kayfa ta. Her work has been widely exhibited.

OLIVIER MARBOEUF is a writer, performer and independent curator. He founded the independent art centre Espace Khiasma, which he has been running from 2004 to 2018 in Les Lilas, on the outskirts of Paris. At Khiasma, he has developed a programme addressing minority representations through exhibitions, screenings, debates, performances and collaborative projects. Interested in the different modalities of transmission of knowledge, Olivier Marboeuf imagines permanent or ephemeral structures based on conversations and speculative narratives. He is a member of the film and performing art collective The Living and The Dead Ensemble. He is currently film producer at Spectre productions. A large part of his critical texts are assembled on his blog Toujours Debout.
www.olivier-marboeuf.com
www.khiasma.net
www.spectre-productions.com

(2022)

NANA OFORIATTA AYIM worked for the UN in New York and is now active worldwide primarily as an art educator and curator, but also as a filmmaker. Nana Oforiatta Ayim is the curator of the Ghanaian Pavilion at the 2019 and 2022 Venice Biennale and the founder and director of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge. The ANO works to establish pan-African perspectives through exhibitions, grants, institution building, and collaborations with local communities and governments from around the world. She is a board member of the Association of Museums and Heritage Sites of Ghana. In 2019, she published her debut novel, The God Child.

ADRIANA SCHNEIDER ALCURE is an artist, theater director, actress and playwright, having been responsible for several stage productions. She is a member of Coletivo Bonobando, Grupo Pedras de Teatro and Muda Other Economies. Currently she is a Professor in the Arts of the Scene Graduate Program and in the undergraduate Theater Directing Course at the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Capes-Humboldt Stiftung Research Fellowship at the Universität Bonn (2018/2019) with a research project on art and fascism titled Artistic, Political and Pedagogical Strategies in the Uses of Popular Forms of Puppet Theatre: On the Kaspertheater. Adriana Schneider Alcure holds a PhD in Anthropology from PPGSA/UFRJ (2007), with a doctoral internship at LAI/FU-Berlin, including a DAAD/CNPq scholarship (2005/2006).

(2022)

MARC SIEGEL is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His research focuses mainly on issues in queer studies and experimental film. His book A Gossip of Images is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Publications include the co-edited volumes, Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin (Spector Books, 2018), Synchronisierung der Künste (Fink, 2013), Outside. Die Politik queerer Räume (b_books, 2005) and a 2014 special issue of the journal Criticism on underground artist Jack Smith. He has also been active as a freelance curator. He curated numerous film series and programs for film and performance festivals, as well as museums und galleries, including the Berlin Biennial; the Berlinale; Tate Modern (London); CCCB (Barcelona), Bunkier Sztuki (Cracow) and the Goethe Institute (Kolkata). He also co-curated the festivals "EDIT FILM CULTURE!" (Berlin, 2018); "Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life" (Berlin, Frankfurt, 2012); and "LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World" (Berlin, 2009). He is on the advisory board of the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale and one of the co-founders of the Berlin-based artists' collective CHEAP.

NANETTE SNOEP, born in Utrecht in 1971, is a Dutch anthropologist and cultural manager who worked at various European museums after studying in Paris. Before her appointment as director of the Rautenstrauch Joest-Museum in Cologne in 2019, she was involved in the development of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, among other projects. Most recently, she was the director the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony in Leipzig, Dresden, and Herrnhut.

MI YOU is a Beijing-born curator, researcher, and academic staff at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She has worked as curator of artistic research projects that were shown in Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2007), Istanbul Design Biennale (2012), Lisbon Triennale and Athens Biennale (2013), v2_lab for the unstable media (2015), SAVVY Contemporary (2016), among others. Her long-term research and curatorial project takes the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space, de-centralized and nomadic imageries. Under this rubric she has curated a series of performative programs at Asian Culture Center Theater in Gwangju, South Korea and the inaugural Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016). Her transcultural curatorial work has concretised in exhibitions like "Around Ai Weiwei: Photograph 1983-2016" at CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia and "Qiu Zhijie: Journeys without Arrivals" at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2017).

She has lectured internationally, including at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Vera List Center for Arts and Politics (New York), Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), Global Art Forum (Dubai), and has taught at Dutch Art Institute, Berlin University of the Arts, among others. Her academic interests are in performance philosophy, science and technology studies, and philosophy of immanence in Eastern and Western traditions. Her writings appear in Performance Research, PARSE, MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research, Yishu, LEAP, Southeast of Now, among others.

She is fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland) and Independent Curators International (USA) and serves as director of Arthub (Shanghai) advisor to The Institute for Provocation (Beijing).

Artist and curator ALA YOUNIS works with film and publishing projects and is research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta. Founded in 2012, Kayfa ta uses the popular form of how-to manuals to respond to some of today’s perceived needs. The project published over 20 publications and organized four shows on the efforts of independent publishers. Younis is also co-section head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded since 2021. The section utilizes film programs and exhibition formats to create a diverse, innovative space to look into topics of today tackled through contemporary and historical, analogue and digital film, installation art, performance and music. Younis was also the co-Artistic Director of Natasha, the Singapore Biennale 2022. For this, she collaborated on exhibitions in Singapore that offered encounters with art that would encourage the audience's self-interpretation of the artworks. Since 2018, Younis has been a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World / Cologne, where she co-curated the 2021 exhibition HANDS: an art campaign. Amid the pandemic, her exhibition project succeeded in bringing tactile sensations, playfulness and interaction back into public life and presented new commissions shown for five months at Academyspace Cologne.

Since 2023, Ala Younis is Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World and spokesperson of the ADKDW members.

(2023)

Gary Zhexi Zhang explores connections between cosmology, technology and economy. He is editor of Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press), a book of fictions, essays and interviews, which was released in September 2023. Dead Cat Bounce, an oratorio he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022. His last solo exhibition, Cycle 25, documented events that blur the boundaries between speculative belief and the material world, like natural disasters, scam nations and cosmic economies. In 2023, Zhang will present new works at the Art Gallery of York University and Sea Art Festival, Busan; he will also be artist-in-residence at EPFL, Lausanne and R&D fellow at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, where he is developing a new interdisciplinary platform.

Zhang is a Lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths MFA and taught previously at Parsons School of Design. His writing on art and culture, technology and economy have appeared in Frieze, ArtReview, Leap, Verge Journal of Global Asias, Journal of Cultural Economy, MIT Journal of Design and Science. Recent/upcoming book publications include Against Reduction (chapter, MIT Press, 2021), Incomputable Earth (chapter, Bloomsbury, upcoming), Platforms: Around, In Between and Through (Singapore Biennale, 2023); Future Art Ecosystems III (co-author with Victoria Ivanova; Serpentine, 2022). Recent group shows include Katabasis, Totalab, Shanghai; Liquid Ground, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe & Para Site, Hong Kong; The Principle of Hope, Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing. He was born in Suzhou and works in London, where he is a resident of Somerset House Studios.

PERCY ZVOMUYA is a Harare-based writer, journalist, critic and football fan. He is also a co-founder and former co-editor of the Con Magazine, a Johannesburg based writing collective. For close to a decade, he worked at the Mail & Guardian (South Africa) until the end of 2013. In 2014, he was on the judging panel of the Caine Prize of African Writing; it was the same year he was a recipient of the Miles Morland Fellowship for a book on Robert Mugabe. He has written for several publications, including Africa is a Country, Chimurenga, Jacobin, the London Review of Books blog, Moto (Zimbabwe), and Sunday Times (South Africa).

Former Members

ALI SAMADI AHADI

KADER ATTIA

EKATERINA DEGOT

GALIT EILAT

MONIKA GINTERSDORFER

INTI GUERRERO

TOM HOLERT

LIZA LIM

FAUSTIN LINYEKULA

TIENCHI MARTIN-LIAO

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

LEMI PONIFASIO

WALID RAAD

DAVID RIFF

TERRE THAEMLITZ

MARK TERKESSIDIS

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL

STEFAN WEIDNER

LIAO YIWU

TOM ZÉ

Artist and curator ALA YOUNIS works with film and publishing projects and is research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta. Founded in 2012, Kayfa ta uses the popular form of how-to manuals to respond to some of today’s perceived needs. The project published over 20 publications and organized four shows on the efforts of independent publishers. Younis is also co-section head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded since 2021. The section utilizes film programs and exhibition formats to create a diverse, innovative space to look into topics of today tackled through contemporary and historical, analogue and digital film, installation art, performance and music. Younis was also the co-Artistic Director of Natasha, the Singapore Biennale 2022. For this, she collaborated on exhibitions in Singapore that offered encounters with art that would encourage the audience's self-interpretation of the artworks. Since 2018, Younis has been a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World / Cologne, where she co-curated the 2021 exhibition HANDS: an art campaign. Amid the pandemic, her exhibition project succeeded in bringing tactile sensations, playfulness and interaction back into public life and presented new commissions shown for five months at the ADKDW Studio.

Since 2023, Ala Younis is Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World and spokesperson of the ADKDW members.

younis(@)adkdw.org

SARAH FATIMA SCHÜTZ joined the artistic direction team at the Akademie der Küste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) in January 2022. She studied art history and ethnology as an undergraduate at the University of Hamburg and as a master at the University of Cologne.

From 2016 to 2018, she worked at the Central Office for Scientific Collections at the University of Hamburg, most recently she has been working at the Stadtmuseum Köln and as Live Speaker in the exhibition RESIST! - The Art of Resistance at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne. In her political practice, she engages academically and through the media of film and performance with theories and practices of decolonizing bodies of knowledge, museum ethnology, colonial photography, and anti-discrimination work.

schuetz(@)adkdw.org

Monika Kerkmann studied art history, archaeology and philosophy at the University of Cologne. Between 2006-2015, she was working as the assistant curator and researcher at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf. The collection is one of the leading private collections focused on the public presentation, promotion, preservation and research of media- and performance art in the world. In 2015, she took over directorship of the two locations in Berlin and Düsseldorf, working with artists such as Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Cao Fei, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa and STURTEVANT. In 2020, Kerkmann changed to the art platform LAS art foundation in Berlin, a non-profit working between the intersection of art, technology and science, for project- and partnership management. There, she has accompanied exhibition projects with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Libby Heaney, Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Robert Irwin, among other. Between 2022-2023, she was the co-director of the non-profit artist estate of Michel Majerus (1967-2002) in Berlin. The Michel Majerus Estate is located in the former studio of the artist and is dedicated to the scientific and artist research, presentation and contextualization of Michel Majerus’ works. One focal point of the estate is the preservation of Michel Majerus’ extensive œuvre, all which was created in a short timespan starting the 1980ies. The estate is also housing regular exhibitions and events. During her time at the estate, Kerkmann has organized the exhibition Fuck together with the curator Fabian Schöneich, in which – among other – the artists Jana Euler, Isa Genzken, Lauren Halsey and Martine Syms where exhibited, and has worked on the preparations of the archival project Let’s Play Majerus G3 with Cory Arcangel.

kerkmann(@)adkdw.org

ULRIKE TRAUB has been working for the Academy since March 2013 in the administration department and as assistant to the Managing Director. She studied Theatre Studies, Modern German Literature, and English at the Ruhr University in Bochum and completed her doctorate thesis on the topic “Theatre of Nakedness” in 2010.

traub(@)adkdw.org

JANNA DITTMEYER has been working for the Akademie der Künste der Welt (ADKDW) since October 2021, having previously worked at Schauspiel Köln, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Theater Dortmund and Impulse Theater Festival in the fields of marketing, dramaturgy and production management. Most recently, she worked as a project manager responsible for marketing at the Ruhrtriennale – Festival of the Arts.

dittmeyer(@)adkdw.org

SOPHIE DETTMAR has been working for the Academy of the Arts of the World (ADKDW) since September 2024. She previously worked in public relations and cultural and film education for the Filmhaus Köln, the SK Stiftung Kultur and medica mondiale e.V., among others, and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, specialising in documentary film and media arts.

dettmar@adkdw.org

HANITRA WAGNER has been a freelancer for the Participatory Residency Program of the Academy of World Arts (ADKDW) between 2021 and 2022. Since end of 2022, she has been Co-Head of the ADKDW Residency. She studied Romance Languages-French and Musicology in her Bachelor's degree at the University of Cologne and is currently completing her Master's degree in Pop Music at the Folkwang University of the Arts Bochum/Essen. Hanitra Wagner is a freelance musician, artist and organizer in and around Cologne. Further, she is working as an actress and moderator and has been leading the ADKDW-program series Learning to Listen since 2024. She is interested in the cross-section between pop culture and politics, queer feminist literature, mental health, and holds an honorary seat on the Pop Culture Advisory Board of the City of Cologne.

wagner(@)adkdw.org

JAN KRYSZONS started working with the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW) in September 2014, and supports the ADKDW and its artists in the production of events, exhibitions, performances, and concerts. Kryszons studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and has realized, as co-curator and project manager among other capacities, various national and international cultural projects for the art space Noordkaap in the Netherlands.

kryszons(@)adkdw.org

Our sincere thanks to the partners, supporters and sponsors of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World, ADKDW).
Without them, the program of the ADKDW could not be realized. With their support, they make it possible for international thinkers and creatives to connect with local actors and thus make the potential of an transcultural urban society in Cologne visible.

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