Senam Okudzeto considers herself a post-national artist as she lives and works in the USA, Europe and West Africa. Although drawing is central to her work, Okudzeto’s conceptual practice includes performance, sculpture, video installation and social sculpture. She is the founder and executive director of Art in Social Structures, a Ghana-based NGO that supports heritage and education in the arts. Her recent work has been focused towards investigating material culture and social history. Last autumn, her work has been included in the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Currently, Senam Okudzeto is the Edith Bloom/Jesse Howard, Jr. Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and will participate in the Academy's performative exhibition "Across the Board: Parts of a Whole", that will be opened on February 9.

In 2011, Okudzeto participated in our Global Art symposium. See her lecture below.

Melissa Gordon is a painter, printmaker and editor, whose work encompasses painted and silkscreened objects, installations, performances and feminist magazines. In her conceptual paintings, Melissa Gordon creates fascinating connections between the history, the political dimension, and the visual culture of the printed media and decisive moments in modern painting.
Her next solo show “Fallible Space” at Bluecoat in Liverpool has the play “Collision” (1916) by British artist, poet, playwright, novelist, feminist and actress Mina Loy as starting point. For the opening on Friday, 22 January, on 7 p.m., Gordon’s large-scale silkscreen panels will be activated by a physical theatre performance.

Melissa Gordon from FormerWest on Vimeo.

Here Gordon talks about the project “WE (Not I)“ she initiated together with Marina Vishmidt in 2015 to bring together a wide range of female artists, writers, curators and thinkers identifying with feminist practices to exchange and produce content addressing questions around the role of "we" in contemporary art practice.

The 2016 course programme is online and open for applications for courses and grants! Details of all the courses are given here. They deal in different ways with contemporary art praxis and theory, curating in theory and practice, and writing about art. Last summer, Sina Moser made a splendid video about the Summer Academy – well worth watching. We would be delighted to welcome you (back) in Salzburg next summer. Many thanks for your interest, keen participation and support. Our very best wishes for a restful holiday, full of inspiration, and a prosperous New Year.

Spanish jewellery maker Marc Monzó’s self-reflexive minimalistic jewellery is about material and about the nature of objects themselves. His intention is to search for essential forms and to invite people to complete his unpretentious jewellery through their individual use. The emphasis is on the process and the aesthetics of what is not yet finished.
"The craft provides a base. Jewels are the tool, the larger project lies in the attempt to understand. Pieces appear according to the most immediate needs, which turn the manipulated matter into a map of reality." (Marc Monzó)
Recently, Marc Monzó was awarded the Françoise van den Bosch award 2016. His work is currently on view in the group exhibitions at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle (DE) and at Gallery SO in London.

MARC MONZÓ from Olga SP on Vimeo.

French photographer and filmmaker Valérie Jouve is an observer of people in urban landscapes. Her images are constructed around the notion of encounters between bodies, whether they are individuals, architectures, or landscape components. In their combined portrayal of people in motion and buildings, her works explore physical presence in cities and ways of living in space.
A large selection of her comprehensive photographic and filmic work is currently on view at the Fundación Luis Seoane in A Coruña (ES) until 17 January 2016.

VALÉRIE JOUVE “Bodies, Resisting” (2015) from Jeu de Paume / magazine on Vimeo.

Valérie Jouve talking about her exhibition “Corps en résistance”, previously on view at Jeu de Paume in Paris