2025 OKAYAMA ART SUMMIT

Philippe Parreno was born in France in 1964 and is currently engaged in creative activities in Paris. He is highly acclaimed for his works spanning various media such as films, drawings, and texts.
He has attempted to radically redefine the exhibition experience by viewing the exhibition as a medium and placing its construction at the center of process.
In Japan,his solo exhibition "Places and Spaces" was held in Pola Museum of Art (in Hakone)in 2024. The major exhibitions held in recent years are as below.
"Haus Der Kunst" in Munich, 2025
"VOICES" in Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul,2024
"Marilyn" in Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich,2024
"Echo2: a Carte Blanche to Philippe Parreno" in Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, 2022
"La Quinta del Sordo" in Museo del Prado, Madrid, 2022
"A Manifestation of Objects" in Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2019-2020
"Synchronicity" in Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai,2017
"Anywhen, Hyundai Commission 2016" in Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2016
"H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS" in Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2015
"The Illusion Of Light" in Fondation d'Entreprise Pinault,Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2014
"Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World" in Palais de Tokyo,Paris,2013
"Philippe Parreno" in Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2012, etc.
He has exhibited in lots of major museums and galleries in Europe, the United States, and Asia including Japan and Korea.

His achievements as an artist in Okayama as follows.
"Imagineering OKAYAMA ART PROJECT",a contemporary art exhibition held as part of "Social Experiment in historical town planning and circulation", 2014 "Okayama Art Summit 2016"

Abdelilah Parreno is an art director and creative consultant based in Paris. Having graduated in 2004 from the renowned ESAG Penninghen school for the applied arts, she began her career in the field of visual communication for movie studios in Los Angeles. She subsequently lived and worked in Shanghai and Bahrain, before returning to Paris. She has spent twenty years at the crossroads of fashion and luxury, moving between 2-D and 3-D design, advising creative masters in both fields developing a unique talent for pattern recognition, memorisation of spaces, proportions and drawing up projections. Moving away from public space, interior design and fashion, Abdelilah Parreno was drawn to a deeper understanding of human experience and of its environment and started to explore the realm of the ultimate human fabric – skin. In 2018, she embarked on an exploration of the effects of human connective tissue as a space. Passionate about new technologies and their impacts on living things, she focused on the beneficial virtues of microcurrent, used, among others by NASA and leading specialists in facial reconstruction. A rigorous apprenticeship in London and Paris marked the starting point for the creation of Momo Skin Studio in central Paris, a pioneering entity focusing on the epidermal/ psychological link between peace of mind and the face as its landscape. Abdelilah Parreno continues to collaborate with and inspire some of the most celebrated names in fashion and art.

Working across sculpture, video, photography, drawing and installation, Angeletti's freewheeling practice responds to the accidents and contingencies of everyday experience. Her works play with space, time, movement, and the human body in a visceral manner. Angeletti's projects typically resist the certainty of a final, resolved state, and sometimes continue to evolve across exhibitions. Her works embrace the vulnerability of their own making, and in this way stay close to life and death.

Okayama Art Summit 2025 Curator. Martine d’Anglejan-Chatillon is a London-based creative producer working at the confluence between art, cinema, fashion and technology. She has been involved in some of the most ambitious and radical projects undertaken in culture, including the social experiment-cum- film epic, DAU, the inaugural U2 show at the Sphere in Las Vegas and large scale fashion shows for Louis Vuitton. She was a founding partner of Thomas Dane Gallery in London in 2004, where she specialised in film, video and digital simulation. She founded MDAC Productions in 2021 to expand the representation of internationally renowned artists into art-adjacent industries. She was appointed by Philippe Parreno as curator of his edition of the Okayama Art Summit and is currently producing his next feature film currently in production. D'Anglejan-Chatillon is on the board of Somerset House, London and Art Institutions of the 21st Century (AI21C), a foundation supporting research around the role, meaning and functioning of art institutions in the age of AI.

Arca’s transcendent, transgressive body of work has collapsed long-standing barriers that once seemed impermeable: between artist and art, between human and technology, between avant-garde and pop, and between the many disciplines—from music to visual art to fashion and beyond—where she’s made her indelible mark. Her 2021 KICK series initiated a new phase in Arca’s career, elevating her from an icon of the experimental fringe into a full-blown global, cultural phenomenon and a vanguard in Latin American music. Since then, Arca’s been nominated for two Latin GRAMMY’s and one GRAMMY. She’s appeared and composed for labels including Jean Paul Gaultier, Loewe, Acne Studios, Dior, Proenza Schouler, Reebok, Byredo, Ray-ban, Bottega Veneta and Mugler. She remixed tracks for Lady Gaga, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Laurie Anderson and joined Beyonce in Barcelona and Paris to celebrate Renaissance and Madonna at Barcelona and most recently at LadyLand in NYC. She performed her fall 2023 Park Avenue Armory residency Mutant;Destrudo, followed by her March 2024 performance piece The Light Comes in the Name of the Voice at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, and she performed her first headline show in her hometown of Caracas, Venezuela, followed by a remarkable Boiler Room live set with her Venezuelan friends and DJs. In 2019 Arca began her exploration with Bronze, using the innovative AI software to generate her auto-poetic system piece for the new MoMA lobby in collaboration with Philippe Parreno and Nicolas Becker.

Novelist. Debuted in 2009 with Ryuuseki (Traces of Flow). In 2010, became the youngest recipient of the 20th Bunkamura Deux Magots Literary Prize for the same work. In 2011, awarded the 144th Akutagawa Prize for Kikotowa.
Between 2012 and 2014, presented the Kunisaki Peninsula Art Project Tour Irikuchi Dekuchi, a collaboration with Norimizu Ameya. In 2022, created the installation Swimming Town together with painter Kanji Yumisashi for the Reborn-Art Festival 2021-22.

Anirban Bandyopadhyay is Principal Research Scientist in the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, Japan. He received his PhD from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata 2004-2005, where he worked on supramolecular electronics and multi-level switching. Bandyopadhyay has developed a revolutionary resonance chain-based complete human brain model, developing an alternate human brain map where filling gaps in the resonance chain is the key. His group has designed and synthesized several forms of organic brain jelly that learns, programs and solves problems by itself for futuristic robots, as well as several software simulators that write complex codes by themselves. He is the author of Nanobrain: The Making of an Artificial Brain from a Time Crystal , 2020

Nicolas Becker is a polymath in the world of cinematic sound as a sound engineer and designer, foley artist and composer. He is highly sought-after on the global film stage, having worked on award-winning films such as Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013), Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), and Alejandro Innaritu’s Bardo (2022). Becker won his own Oscar for Best Sound with Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal (2019). He is an avid collector of sounds, amassing a vast library of auditory samples that serve as a rich reservoir of his work. In his approach to sound design, Becker crafts unique sonic architectures, a method that brings him close contact with the realm of contemporary art.

James Chinlund is an award winning American production designer best known for building worlds for feature film and television. He is best known for The Batman (2022), The Lion King (2019), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). He has also designed videos, print advertisements and fashion shows for the likes of Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Nike, Apple and many more. He is currently in production on The Batman 2 as well as feature films directed by Benny Safdie and Philippe Parreno.

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working with moving image, sound, sculpture, and photography. With a background in experimental cinema, her work frequently combines montage and essay forms to challenge distinctions made between human and animal, artifice and nature, and sense and nonsense. Recent exhibitions include “Conveyor” at Bridget Donahue, New York (2023); “Neighboring Animals” at Cushion Works, San Francisco (2023); “A Green Shade” at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2019); "Unboxing: Doublespeak," Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019), "A Casual Pincer," AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles (2019), and "Audible Bacillus," Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University (2019). Her films have screened at festivals including Sundance, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Cinema du Reel, and in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Frida Escobedo established her eponymous architectural studio in Mexico City in 2006. The studio’s reputation, initially built on the strength of a series of competition-winning projects in her native country has achieved global scope since 2018, when she received the prestigious appointment to design the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens. Her practice defies the traditional boundaries of the discipline, operating at a wide array of scales and mediums, from buildings and experimental conservation projects to temporary installations and public sculpture, limited edition objects, publications, and exhibition design. In 2021, Escobedo was appointed as the architect to design the new Modern & Contemporary Wing by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, becoming the youngest and first woman to design a building for the institution. Her Studio has been selected as an associate designer to Moreau Kusunoki Studio to lead the Centre Pompidou 2030 renovation. Escobedo is the recipient of numerous architectural accolades and in addition to her practice, she has taught at graduate level at some of the most prestigious universities in the US.

FABRYX is a decentralized mineral arts guild with a mission to commune with minerals the way Amazonian shamans do with plants. Its membership includes artists, engineers, designers, curators, musicians, scientists, lawyers, and lineage holders in various wisdom traditions. Its products combine knowledge of the megalithic and nanolithic arts—ancient architecture and contemporary computing—to heal through stimulating creative insight. The guild lodge is located at Les Roseaux, a former copper smelt in rural France, an hour west of Paris. There, members participate in residency and retreat programs to develop the “mineral dieta,” a novel protocol for merging perspectives with the mineral realm. It consists of ritualized detoxification and remineralization activated by long sessions in Argo, a custom float tank in biofeedback with AI.

The data generated on dieta is used to train foundation AI models that power consumer products enabling users to work with altered states and dream experiences. Much of the guild work is open source and supports an experimental French school for children aged 3-12, which it partners with on educational ventures. It also produces exhibitions derived from its protocols and products.

Sou Fujimoto was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1971.After graduating from the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, he established Sou Fujimoto Architects in 2000. In 2014, he was awarded first prize in the international design competition for L'Arbre Blanc in Montpellier, France, followed by further first prizes in international competitions across Europe in 2015, 2017, and 2018. In Japan, he was appointed Venue Design Producer for Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. In 2024, he was selected as the basic design architect for the (tentative name) North District Complex Facility of International Center Station.His major works include the House of Music in Budapest (2021), the Maruhon Maki Art Terrace - Ishinomaki Cultural Complex (2021), the Shiraiwa Hotel (2020), L'Arbre Blanc (2019), the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London (2013), House NA (2011), the Musashino Art University Museum & Library (2010), and House N (2008).

Cyprien Gaillard is an artist living and working in Berlin and Paris. Selected solo exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2022), Fondation LUMA, Arles (2022), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2021), TANK Shanghai (2019), Accelerator Konsthall, Stockholm (2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2019), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2016), Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2015), MoMA PS1, New York (2013), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2012), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2012), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011) and Kunsthalle Basel (2010). Significant group exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland (2024), Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (2022), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021), Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021), GAMeC, Bergamo (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020), 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles (2019), Cleveland Triennial (2018), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018), Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018), ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017), The Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2017), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2017), Hayward Gallery, London (2016), 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Gwangju Biennal (2010) and 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).

Born in Chester. Lives and works in London, Suffolk.Elected as Royal Academician in the category of Sculpture in 2022.Awarded the Pommery Prize at the Armory Show in 2019, the Order of the British Empire in 2017, and the Zurich Art Prize in 2009.Gander, a practitioner of the new generation of conceptual art, is known for his diverse artistic style. His works, inspired by everyday objects around him, language, and cultural differences, span a wide range of themes. However, at the core of his oeuvre is always the presentation of art's energy and its potential as a portal that opens up new perceptions and awareness. Gander exhibited a work shaped like a "crashed meteorite" at the Okayama Art Summit 2016: Development, which attracted attention not only from art fans but also from the general public.Major exhibitions include: 'Ryan Gander: YOU COMPLETE ME', Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, 2025; 'Together, but not the same', Fukuoka Shoyu Gallery, Okayama, 2025; 'Grunts, hoots, whimpers, barks and screams', Helga de Alvear Museum, Caceres, 2024; 'Ryan Gander: The Markers of Our Time', Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 2022; 'The 500 Million Year Collaboration', Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 2019; 'Ryan Gander ? These wings aren't for flying', National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2017.Gander has also participated in numerous international exhibitions, such as the 10th Liverpool Biennial in 2018, the 12th Havana Biennial in 2015, the 9th Shanghai Biennale and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel in 2012, and the 54th Vienna Biennale in 2011.

Born 1964, Aylesbury, U.K. Currently lives and works in New York.
Liam Gillick is an artist based in New York working across diverse forms, including installation, video and sound. A theorist, curator and educator as well as an artist, his wider body of work includes published essays and texts, lectures, curatorial and collaborative projects. Gillick’s work reflects upon conditions of production in a post-industrial landscape including the aesthetics of economy, labour and social organization. His work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo-liberal consensus, and extends into structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form. He has produced a number of short films since the late 2000s which address the construction of the creative persona in light of the enduring mutability of the contemporary artist as a cultural figure. Margin Time (2012) The Heavenly Lagoon (2013) and Hamilton: A Film by Liam Gillick (2014). The book Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 was published by Columbia University Press in March 2016.

Gillick’s work has been included in numerous important exhibitions including documenta and the Venice, Berlin, Shanghai and Istanbul Biennales - representing Germany in 2009 in Venice. Solo museum exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate in London. Gillick’s work is held in many important public collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Over the last twenty five years Gillick has also been a prolific writer and critic of contemporary art – contributing to Artforum, October, Frieze and e-flux Journal. He is the author of a number of books including a volume of his selected critical writing. High profile public works include the British Government Home Office (Interior Ministry) building in London and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt. Throughout this time Gillick has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative projects with artists including Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Lawler, Adam Pendleton and the band New Order, in a series of concerts in Manchester, Turin and Vienna.

Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst are artists renowned for their pioneering work in machine learning, software and music. They develop their own technology, and systems for living with the technology of others, often with a focus on the ownership and augmentation of digital identity and voice. These technical protocols not only facilitate expansive artworks across media, but are proposed as artworks unto themselves. In 2024 they presented the solo exhibition “The Call” at Serpentine Gallery and took part in the Whitney Biennial. They co-founded Spawning, an organization building public domain AI models and data infrastructure. Their critically acclaimed musical works are released through 4AD and RVNG Intl. Holly holds a Ph.D in Computer Music from Stanford CCRMA, Mathew is largely self-taught. They have held faculty positions at NYU, the European Graduate School and the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute. They were awarded the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize for digital art, and Austria’s first Digital Human Rights Award in 2024. Holly Herndon is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Programme 2024/25.

Yuriko Ishida made her acting debut in 1988 in the NHK drama, Umi no Gunsei (Sea's Constellation). In 1993, she landed her first leading role in a television series with Kanojo no Kirai na Kanojo on Nippon TV. In 1997, she provided the voice-over for the heroine San in Princess Mononoke, the Studio Ghibli film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Since her debut, she has appeared in numerous films and television dramas while also engaging in writing and music, showcasing her versatile talents.Her recent major works include the TBS Sunday Theater's drama, Sayonara Maestro: Chichi to Watashi no Appassionato (2024), the NHK Morning Drama Serial, Tora ni Tsubasa (The Tiger and Her Wings) (2024), and the film, Tokyo MER: Mobile Emergency Room Nankai Mission, scheduled for release on August 1.

ISOLARII is a media company based in New York and London. Since its inception it has built a reputation for challenging the conventions of literature–its aesthetics, distribution, and purpose. ISOLARII’s books comprise a map of many of today’s most radical groups and figures. Its authors include Can Xue, Scholastique Mukasonga, Robert Coover, Art Spiegelman and Édouard Glissant. Since late 2020, the company has catalysed an environmental initiative (Salmon: a Red Herring), distributed what became a symbol for feminist protests across Europe (F-Letter), and produced internationally-syndicated reportage from Kyiv (War Diary). For For Okayama Art Summit 2025, ISOLARII is releasing Decreation, the first ever compilation of Simone Weil's entire notebooks, ranging from 1933 up until her death in 1943.

Alexandre Khondji is a conceptual artist living and working in Paris, France. He holds a BA from Bard College in New York and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. His work has been shown at ’Air de Repos (Breathwork)’, Capc, Bordeaux (2024), Maureen Paley, London (2024); Shivers Only, Paris (2023); LUMA, Arles (2021); among others. An upcoming solo exhibition will be presented at Sweetwater, Berlin (2025).

Mire Lee is an artist, best known for creating kinetic sculptural installations that appear shabby, ridiculous, and precarious. Lee’s work challenges notions of selfhood, social acceptability, and cleanliness; obliterating societal conventions of aesthetics and desire in the face of her orgasmic, transgressive, and kinetic technologies. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Black Sun’, New Museum, New York City, 2023; ‘Carriers’, Tina Kim Gallery, New York City, 2022; ‘Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love’, ZOLLAMT MMK, Frankfurt, 2022; and ‘Carriers’, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020. She has also been selected as the artist for the Turbine Hall Commission 2024, which will open at Tate Modern in October 2024

Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Most notable amongst these are the Do It series (1993–), Take Me (I'm Yours) in London (1995), Paris (2015) New York (2016), and Milan (2017); and the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice (2014). Obrist has also co-curated the Cities on the Move series (1996–2000), Laboratorium (1999); the operatic group exhibition Il Tempo del Postino in Manchester (2007) and Basel (2009), and The 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Rooms series (2011–2015). Obrist's recent exhibitions include Enzo Mari at Triennale Milano (2020) and WORLDBUILDING at Centre Pompidou Metz (2023) and Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf (2022). In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize. Most recently he was honoured by the Appraisers Association of America with the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth (2021), Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023) Remember to Dream! (2023), Une vie in progress (2023).

Precious Okoyomon is a Nigerian-American poet and artist. Their work considers the natural world histories of migration and racialization and the pure pleasures of everyday life. They have had one-person exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau Zurich Switzerland the Museum Für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt Germany Performance Space New York New York New York the Aspen Art Museum Aspen Colorado The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid Foundation Madrid Spain. They were included in the Baltic Triennial 13 Tallinn Estonia the 58th Belgrade Biennial Belgrade Serbia the 59th Venice Biennale Venice Italy the 2022 Okayama Art Summit Okayama Japan the 11th Sequences Biennial Reykjavik Iceland the 2023 Thailand Biennial Chiang Rai Thailand as well as in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London UK LUMA Westbau Zurich Switzerland Schinkel Pavillon Berlin Germany LUMA Arles Arles France Palais de Tokyo Paris Nigerian Pavillion 60th Venice Biennale Venice Italy Fondation Beyeler Basel Switzerland. Okoyomon’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt Germany and LUMA Arles Arles France. Okoyomon was the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award as well as the 2021 Chanel Next Art Prize. In 2024 But Did You Die? their second book of poetry was co-published by the Serpentine and Wonder Press.

Verena Paravel is a filmmaker, artist, and visual anthropologist. Her work combines art's negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life and a commitment to the urgent ecological and political challenges of our time. Since 2006, she has collaborated with Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab, developing a singular approach to documentary cinema that rethinks the boundaries between contemporary art and anthropological research.

Her major works include Foreign Parts (portrait of a New York junkyard on the verge of disappearance), Leviathan(2012, visceral film about humanity and our plundering of marine resources), Somniloquies (2013, film-essay created from recordings of the world's most prolific sleeptalker's dreams), Ah Humanity! (2015, reflection on Fukushima and human fragility in the Anthropocene era), Caniba (2017, meditation on human cannibalism), and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2023, unprecedented portrait blending anatomical, medical, and political bodies).Her films have been screened at international festivals—Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Toronto, Venice—and are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her works have been presented at the Venice Biennale, documenta 14, Centre Pompidou, Tate, Whitney Museum, Barbican, Kunsthalle Berlin, and MoMA PS1. A visiting professor at Harvard and faculty member at Sciences Po Paris's School of Political Arts, she was artist-in-residence at Le Fresnoy - National Studio for Contemporary Arts in 2023-24.

Rachel Rose (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. The work of Rachel Rose explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, the artist directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Solo exhibitions include: GL STRAND (2023); SITE Santa Fe (2023); Gladstone Gallery (2023); CC Strombeek (2022); Pond Society, Shanghai (2020); Lafayette Anticipations (2020); Fridericianum (2019); LUMA Foundation (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2017); Museu Serralves, Porto (2016); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art (2015); Serpentine Gallery (2015); Castello di Rivoli (2015).

Dimitar Sasselov studies stars and planets at Harvard University, where he is the Phillips Professor of Astronomy, and founding director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. His research explores modes of interaction between light and matter - from the emergence of the cosmic microwave background in the early universe to laboratory experiments in photochemistry for life’s origins on Earth. More than 20 years ago, he and his team discovered several planets orbiting other stars with novel techniques he later put to work as a co-investigator on NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions to find planets like Earth. His book, “The Life of Super-Earths” (Basic Books, 2012) describes the renewed search for life on other planets. In 1988 Dimitar Sasselov acquired his PhD in Physics from Sofia University (Bulgaria), followed by his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1990. In 1999 Sasselov became an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He has numerous awards (two NASA Achievement awards, doctor honoris causa (Sofia Univ.), Oxford’s Astor Lectureship, etc.) and has lectured at DLD, TED, and Davos. Professor Sasselov is the founding director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, a cross-disciplinary research effort bridging the physical and life sciences. He is the founding co-director of the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and in 2023 he helped create the international Origins Federation, whose board he now chairs. He was a Senior Science Advisor for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a member of the Global Agenda Council on space security at the World Economic Forum.

Widely regarded as one of the most significant artists of his generation, Sehgal's critical acclaim derives from his radical artistic practice that takes the form of "constructed situations": live encounters between visitors and those enacting the work. Their ephemeral beauty rests in the fleeting specificity of the encounter, where players often engage the visitors with their active participation in constructing the piece. He has a long history of collaboration with Philippe Parreno. Sehgal studied Berlin’s political economy and dance at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally most notable at Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); Desert X AlUla (2024), Saudi Arabia; Centro Botín, Santander, (2023); Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2022); Odawara Art Foundation, Japan (2019); Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Turin (2018); V-A-C Foundation, Moscow, Russia (2017); Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland (2017); Jemaa el-Fna, Marrakesh; Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2015); Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo and CCBB, Rio de Janeiro (2014); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); Tate Modern, London (2012); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010) and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2006), among others.

Shimabuku is a Japanese conceptual artist currently living in Naha, Okinawa and working internationally. Since the early 1990s, he has travelled to many places, both in Japan and abroad, and his site-specific works are related to the places, lives and cultures of the people living there. He produces performances, films, sculpture and installation works related to new forms of communication. His work sometimes extends to the relationship between creatures and humans. His style, which is full of poetic sentiment and humour, provokes in a metaphorical way, and has been gaining international acclaim. Shimabuku has participated in major international exhibitions, including the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), 14th Lyon Biennale (2017), 12th Havana Biennale (2015), 9th Taipei Biennale (2014), 11th Sharjah Biennial (2013), the 27th São Paulo Biennial (2006), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the 11th Biennial of Sydney (1998). Major recent solo exhibitions include Centro Botín, Santander, Spain (2024); Museion: Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Bolzano, Italy (2023); Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium (2022); National New Museum of Monaco, Monaco (2021); Crédac - Contemporary Art Centre of Ivry, France (2018), Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2014) and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, U.K. (2013). Shima acts as the 'artistic translator' for the Okayama Art Summit.

Soundwalk Collective is the contemporary sonic arts platform of founder and artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli. Working with a rotating constellation of artists and musicians, they develop site- and context-specific sound projects through which to examine conceptual, literary or artistic themes. Evolving along multi-disciplinary lines, Soundwalk Collective has cultivated long-term creative collaborations with musician Patti Smith, late director Jean-Luc Goddard, photographer Nan Goldin, choreographer Sasha Waltz, and actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others. In doing so, their practice engages in the narrative potential of sound across mediums such as art installations, dance, music and film. Their latest original score for ‘All The Beauty and the Bloodshed’ (dir. Laura Poitras) won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. In 2024, they are showing ‘Correspondences’, a new exhibition and performance with Patti Smith at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, the BAM in New York, and the MAMM Museum of Contemporary Art in Medellin. Soundwalk Collective have performed and exhibited at a diverse range of arts and music institutions, such as BAM, CCB Lisbon, Centre Pompidou, CTM Festival, documenta, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Manifesta, Mobile Art Pavillion by Zaha Hadid, New Museum, Reethaus, TPMM Tbilisi and Volksbühne Berlin.

- Designer of Human Experience
Ramdane Touhami is a Paris-based French-Moroccan designer and creative entrepreneur whose work explores the intersection of space, culture, and human interaction. Beyond building brands, he creates ecosystems where aesthetics, narrative, and spatial design come together as one.
In the early 2000s, he founded L'?picerie, one of France's first hybrid gallery-concept stores. He later revived Cire Trudon, the world's oldest candle maker, and co-founded Officine Universelle Buly, transforming heritage into immersive, multisensory spaces.Through his agency Art Recherche et Industrie, Ramdane develops all projects entirely in-house-designing objects, interiors, films, typography, packaging, and tools with a multidisciplinary team. His work dissolves the boundaries between commerce and culture, retail and ritual, creating spaces that are both emotionally resonant and visually refined.He is also the co-founder of Permanent, a gallery and publishing imprint established with L?onard Vernhet to support emerging artists and experimental formats.In 2023, he opened Hotel Drei Berge in the Swiss Alps. In 2024-2025, he will further expand this vision with new projects that reimagine our relationship with nature-spanning retail, hospitality, publishing, and product design.He also explores sound as spatial experience through his audio platform Pseudo Radio and its 24/7 live stream Music for Hikers, reflecting the solitude and elevation of alpine environments.Whether through a store, a scent, or a sound, Ramdane's work continually re-enchants how we meet, move, and make meaning in the world.

Angharad Williams’ (Ynys Môn, Wales) work prompts introspection and critical reflection on the dynamics that govern our lives and environments. Her multifaceted art practice - painting, drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, installation, film and performance - attends to the forms that, hidden in plain sight, serve as projective screens or filters for our most subconscious desires and fears. These often equivocal expressions are rooted in writing, shaped by issues of authority, security and design, and are central to the subjectivation of individuals, their communities and the landscapes they inhabit. Williams’ artworks and exhibitions capture this process as an accumulation of desire, at once avenues of escape from barracks and confinement of all kinds, and candid observations of humankind’s unstable nature, its intrinsic wildness and its blanket violence and sensuality.