Shona Mei Findlay is the curator for Asia Programmes at KADIST, San Francisco. She is a curator and writer with over 8 years of experience working with non-profit art organizations in Asia, Europe, and the US. She specialises in contemporary art from Asia. Her exhibitions and writing have been featured in art publications including ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, and Mousse, amongst others.

KADIST believes contemporary artists make an important contribution to a progressive society, their work often addressing key issues of our time. KADIST, a non-profit organization dedicated to exhibiting the work of artists represented in its collection, encourages this engagement and affirms contemporary art’s relevance within social discourse. KADIST’s local hubs in Paris and San Francisco present exhibitions and events, and organize residencies and educational initiatives, as well as producing projects online and via social media. Concurrently, KADIST is actively establishing networks across five areas—North America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Asia and Latin America—inviting new artists into the collection and initiating collaborative programs, especially exhibitions with museums of each region. Together, they aim at facilitating new connections across cultures and creating vibrant conversations about contemporary art and ideas.

Jackie Karuti is an artist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her practice employs new media through drawings, video and performance art. Her work is founded on ideas around knowledge production, accessibility, and the depths of possibility enabled by radical imagination. Karuti is an alumnus of Àsìko, a roaming Pan African art school established by the late Bisi Silva. She has participated in several multidisciplinary projects such as In The Case of Books, Out Film Festival-Nairobi and her online workspace, beenworkingonsomemagic.com.

Basma Alsharif is an artist and filmmaker of Palestinian origin, born in Kuwait. Currently based in Berlin, her practice sits at the intersection of cinema and installation, focusing upon the human condition as it relates to various landscapes, environments, and geographies. Having been raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip, her practice and work reflects a deterritorializing of singular viewpoints, and a questioning of colonial legacies in the present.

Connie Zheng is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and budding field recordist based out of Oakland, California, in the United States. Her multidisciplinary practice examines diasporic memory, ecological elegy, and divergent articulations of hope from an environmental justice perspective, with particular attention to assemblage-based moving image practices and nonlinear temporalities. Her artistic process often begins with creative writing which she employs as a means to create the worlds and realms that later emerge in her work.

Sky Hopinka is a Native American visual artist and filmmaker whose work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable.

Elena Damiani is a Peruvian artist, whose work considers the significance of archives and the persistence of memory in a society fearful of forgetting. Damiani transforms found materials into collages, sculptures, videos, and installations, critically addressing an understanding of the present via the potentiality of images from the past. She is interested in revising subjects such as geology, archaeology, and cartography, as ways of staging fictions where multiple topographies and times unfold together, hovering between an indeterminate past and present.

Shona Mei Findlay is the curator for Asia Programmes at KADIST, San Francisco. She is a curator and writer with over 8 years of experience working with non-profit art organizations in Asia, Europe, and the US. She specialises in contemporary art from Asia. Her exhibitions and writing have been featured in art publications including ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, and Mousse, amongst others.

Marie Martraire is a curator and the Director of Collections & Special Programs of KADIST. She was the former Director of KADIST San Francisco, curator in residency at Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn, and program manager at the Asian Contemporary Arts Consortium in San Francisco and has worked and co/curated exhibitions at various institutions such as the Orsay Museum (Paris, France), Institut Lumiere (Lyon, France), and Para Site (Hong Kong). Her writings have been published in various journals. Martraire serves on the board of the San Francisco Film Cinematheque.

KADIST believes contemporary artists make an important contribution to a progressive society, their work often addressing key issues of our time. KADIST, a non-profit organization dedicated to exhibiting the work of artists represented in its collection, encourages this engagement and affirms contemporary art’s relevance within social discourse. KADIST’s local hubs in Paris and San Francisco present exhibitions and events, and organize residencies and educational initiatives, as well as producing projects online and via social media. Concurrently, KADIST is actively establishing networks across five areas—North America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Asia and Latin America—inviting new artists into the collection and initiating collaborative programs, especially exhibitions with museums of each region. Together, they aim at facilitating new connections across cultures and creating vibrant conversations about contemporary art and ideas.

Karrabing Film Collective is an award-winning group of filmmakers and artists, most of whom are Indigenous to the lands and coasts along northwestern Australia. They approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organization and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. Through the collective’s inventive artistic language, their work challenges historical and contemporary structures of settler power. Their films and installations have been exhibited at Contour Biennale, Mechelen, Belgium; Berlinale Forum Expanded; Hallucinations, documenta 14, Athens, among others.

Iván Argote is a Columbian artist and film director, exploring the relationship between history, politics, and the construction of subjectivity. His films, sculptures, collages, and public space installations attempt to generate questions about how we relate to others, to the state, to patrimony, and traditions. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour through which he suggests critical approaches to dominant historical narratives and attempts to decentralise them. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale installations and performances, Argote proposes new symbolic uses of public space.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is a film and video maker based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work stems from intensive research, observation, and documentation, and she is deeply concerned with the tension between the documentarian’s desire for truth and the artist’s aesthetic concerns. She invites participants in her work to reenact their own lives, or an aspect of their cultural history. Her work traces the contours of cultural memory and frames political and social issues, blurring together documentary record, indigenous historical memory, participatory inflections, chance discovery, and fictional explorations.