Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective's members (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) enjoy playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agents provocateurs. The collective makes contemporary art and films, curates exhibitions, edits books, stages events and collaborates with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors. Following its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures, Raqs remains closely involved with the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative that the collective cofounded in 2000. Exhibitions include solo shows at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA (2012); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2010); Tate Britain, London, UK (2009); Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2009); and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2004). The group curated Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, India (2012), and co-curated Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy (2008).

Hu Fang (Artistic Director, Vitamin Creative Space, China)

Hu Fang is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Vitamin Creative Space and the Pavilion in Beijing, China. He has been involved in various international art projects including co-curating the Yokohoma Triennale, Japan (2008), and serving as coordinating editor for the Documenta 12 magazines in Kassel, Germany (2007). Fang is also a fiction writer. His novel, Garden of Mirrored Flowers (2010), was co-published by Sternberg Press (Berlin, Germany) and Vitamin Creative Space.

Vitamin Creative Space

Vitamin Creative Space, based in Guangzhou, China, employs an alternative working model for contemporary arts and culture specifically geared towards the contemporary Chinese context. Founded in 2002, Vitamin Creative Space is inspired by the confrontation between contemporary life and ancient Chinese philosophy. In order to operate independently from institutional funding, this experimental contemporary institution is active both as an independent art space and as a ‘commercial’ gallery. Vitamin Creative Space challenges preconceptions by merging these two traditionally opposed strategies for supporting and presenting contemporary art, targeting the search for new Chinese contributions at both the artistic-practice and the institutional level within the larger global context.