Liam Gillick, Pelin Tan

Liam Gillick is an artist based in New York. 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. 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. His book Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 was published by Columbia University Press in March 2016.

Pelin Tan is a Turkish art historian and sociologist based in Turkey. She is a researcher and writer working on methodology and in the fields of critical spatial practices, alternative pedagogies, and the commons. Currently, she is a professor and head of the film department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Batman University, a senior research fellow at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston, and a research fellow at the Architecture Faculty, University of Thessaly.

She was a postdoc fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011), DAAD Art History, Humboldt University of Berlin (2006), The Japan Foundation (2011), and Hong Kong Design Trust (2016). Tan is the lead author of the report “Urban Society” by ipsp (Cambridge Univ.Press 2018) and has contributed to several publications, including Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia University, 2017), Refugee Heritage (Art & Theory, 2021), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), Autonomous Archiving (dpr, 2017), The Silent University: Toward-Transversal Pedagogy (Sternberg Press, 2016), Designing Modernity: Architecure in the Arab World (Jovis, 2021), and From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023).