(Venice, Italy, 1965; lives and works in Berlin, Germany)

Monica Bonvicini's works investigate the relationships between space, gender and power. Utilizing different media, including drawing, collage, video and sculpture, her individual artworks are also steps in the process toward creating large-scale installations. An outstanding aspect of Bonvicini's work is her conceptual and formal exploration of environmental sculpture. Her critique of minimalism focuses on the incorporation of its forms in the bourgeois aesthetic of everyday structures. Through a reflection on gender issues, often reinforced by biting humor, her work addresses the problem of "building", both architectural and social.

Her work has been shown at prestigious institutions including the National Gallery of Island, Art against Architecture, Reykjavik, 2008), Pinakothek der Moderne, (Female Trouble, The camera as mirror and stage of female projection in photography and video art, Munich, 2008), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2007), Kunstraum, Innsbruck; Galerie für Zeitgenössiche Kunst, Leipzig; Kunstmuseum, St Gallen; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; San Paolo Biennale, Brazil (2006); Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005); Migros Museum, Zürich; Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2004); New Museum, New York ; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Tramway Glasgow; Secession, Wien (2003); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Aahrus (2002); Magasin, Grenoble (2001); Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2000); Venice Biennial, Venice (1999, 2005); GAM, Turin (1999)

Monica Bonvicini was assigned in 2007 the public commission for HUN LIGGER (SHE LIES), a site-specific sculpture floating in the water in front of the New Opera House in Oslo. She also has won in 2005 the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst in Berlin. She teaches at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna since 2003.

(Germiston, South Africa, 1968; lives and works in Brussels, Belgium)

Kendell Geers is an artist, performance artist, musician and film-maker. In 1993, at the Venice Biennial, Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to May 1968. He has exhibited globally since 1993 and participated in numerous exhibitions including Documenta, the Carnegie International, Havana Biennial, Kwang Ju Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Lyon Biennial as well as presented solo exhibitions in the CCA Cincinnati, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst Gent, Baltic Centre for Contemporary ARte, Aspen Art Museum and the CAC in Lyon.

Over the years, Geers has consistently explored life, contemporary history and the implications of the abuse of power, violence, oppression, control as well as the collapse of belief systems and ideologies, using all possible media. A project by Geers is an attack. It is instinctual, direct and matches the brutality encountered in contemporary society. He proposes to the viewer an interrogation and asks for a definition of positions, thus creating a decisive discomfort.

In 1988 Kendell Geers was one of 143 young men that publicly refused to enter serve in the South African Defence Force and faced either a life in exile or 6 years imprisonment in a civilian jail. In 1989 he left South Africa and lived for a brief period in exile in the United Kingdom and New York where he worked as an assistant to artist Richard Prince. In 1990, once Nelson Mandela had been released from jail and Apartheid officially dismantled, Geers returned to Johannesburg where he worked as an artist, and art critic, curator and performance artist. The first work of art created back on South African soil was ‘Bloody Hell', a ritual washing of his white Afrikaaner Boer body with the artists own fresh blood. From 1999 until 2004 he worked as the curator and art consult for Gencor which was later bought out by BHP Billiton. The collection focused on artists and works of art that were central to the Anti-Apartheid Movement spirit. In 1997 Geers edited and published Contemporary South African Art with essays by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Colin Richards, Elizabeth Rankin and Julia Charlton.

(Culiacán, Mexico, 1963; lives and works in Mexico D.F.)

For 15 years Margolles has been dealing with what she calls ‘the follow up of the body after life, and the appropriation of human inert elements to understand death in its social dimension'. She has pursued such an aim by investigating the ‘life of the corpse', that is, the physical and social transformation of what we could call the after-body and its metaphoric power. Her work is always based on a peculiar artistic use of vestiges from dead human bodies or associated with them. As Klaus Görner and Udo Kittelmann have said, ‘death and its accompanying circumstances are not represented, but presented'. Yet death is not her end but the instrument for a moving social contestation: Margolles' main goal is neither anthropological nor macabre: it is political. Her work is a reaction to the increasing violence all over the world, and its daily presence in the media. On a more specific stance, it delves into the effects of growing criminality in Third World cities, and particularly in Mexico, often associated with drug and human traffics.

In this sense, Margolles' art deals with the stories behind dead bodies, not with death in abstract, or with ‘neutral' corpses. These are stories of violence and poverty, full of social overtones. Her systematic investigation took her from a direct, baroque, gruesome approach at the beginning of her career to a more conceptual, sober, even minimal poetics characteristic of her personal work today. She wants to make us aware of how death and violence are part of our daily life. Her current installations, videos and sound pieces are beautiful, neat, elegant. Her art is increasingly based on the contrast between beauty and terror, white-cube stylishness and dread.

(Madrid, Spain, 1970; lives and works in Madrid)

Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Madrid, 1970) holds MfA in Philosophy and Aesthetics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Estudied at ENSBA, Paris and resided at Rijksakademie of Beeldende Kunsten inAmsterdam. He has given important solo exhibitions both in Spain and abroad, most notably Anamnesis, La Casa Encendida cultural centre (2003); ‘Ieder het Zijne / To Each His Own' at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Rótterdam, Santa Monica art centre, Barcelona (2006); ‘Manu Militari', at the Santa Monica art centre, Barcelona (2006); ‘Intelligence Down', Musac, Spain (2007), Wanas Foundation Sweden (2007), and ‘Parti de la Peur', Centre Dárt Contemporain (2007) and ‘The Unresolved...', Vleeshal, Middleburg .Nl (2008). He has also participated in group exhibitions, such as ‘Abracadabra', Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London (1999); ‘Appartement, Deichtorhallen', Hamburg, Germany, (2001); ‘The Real Royal Trip' (travelling exhibition), P.S.1. MOMA, New York (2003); NMAC foundation, Spain, and ‘Registros contra el tiempo' (Registers Against Time), Marcelino Botín Foundation, Santander (2006); 26th São Paulo Biennial (2004); ‘Mercury Retrograde' at the De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam,10th Istanbul Biennale.TK (2007); ‘La Cuadratura del Cono - Borders Jam', Montevideo.UR (2007). During 2008 most significants shows were ‘Borders', Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rótterdam; ‘Geographic cross-overs in art', MART, Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporánea di Trento e Rovereto; ‘Lost Paradise - Der Blick des Engels', Zentrum Paul Klee, Berna; ‘Sonsbeek 2008: grandeur Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition, Arnhem; ‘Pasiones privadas, visiones públicas', MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo; ‘Tiefenrausch O.K', Centrum Für Gegenwartskunst, Linz.

Fernando Sanchez Castillo works with the image of the public and, just like this one, his works are submitted to the same rhythm than the city or the medium where they are transmitted. Image consumption makes that many of these images cannot be perfectly digested. The art process acts as a ruminant's stomach. It takes the most sterile and unnoticed, regurgitates it and gets it ready for a new digestion process; not the last one though. The anecdotal, the lateral thing becomes an icon. A number of images have not been emphasized by the prevailing historical discourse, but now they are powerful magnets and questions for contemporary art's sensibility. Another line of work are the ideas of progress and the concept of a linear history, the way that, while they have disappeared of the perspective of contemporary thought, they still work as tools of control and "masses" restriction. The use of these flash-backs in his work aims to dislocate - in the later generation to that of the referred historical moment or situation - the truths passed on and consolidated. He uses contemporary art as a neuroconductor among the different social fields and thoughts, by walking along the cracks of the systems and driving them to conclusions that never before could they have imagined or recreated.