Serafina Appel
is a researcher in philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Born in Canada and based in Paris, she works in political and aesthetic philosophy and is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on how spatial aesthetics affect temporal experience and memory. She writes on settler colonialism in Canada and does so from the perspective of a settler, working through deconstructions of settler colonial attitudes and ontologies.
Stacy Boldrick
is Lecturer and Programme Director for the MA in Art Museum and Gallery Studies in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester (UK). She recently wrote about the removal of the confederate monuments in Memphis in Iconoclasm and the Museum (2020). Publications include Striking Images: Iconoclasms Past and Present (2013/2018; with Leslie Brubaker and Richard Clay) and Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (2007/2017; with Richard Clay). Curatorial collaborations include Wonder: Painted Sculpture from Medieval England (Henry Moore Institute, 2002; with David Park and Paul Williamson) and Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (Tate Britain, 2013; with Tabitha Barber).
Richard Clay
has published on a wide array of subjects, but they all tend to examine aspects of contested meaning making in public space. He often explores how changing technologies offer new opportunities to recode the meaning and value of the spaces that we share: from iconoclasm in revolutionary Paris to graffiti’s use in armed conflicts past and present; from contemporary jewelry as wearable art to watercolor’s role in the Birmingham Blitz. Over the years, Richard has led a range of major cross-disciplinary and cross-sector projects funded by the EU and by the AHRC. He has also written and presented seven 60-minute documentary films for BBC 4: Tearing Up History; A Brief History of Graffiti; Utopia: in Search of the Dream (parts, 1, 2, 3); How to Go Viral: The Art of the Meme; ‘C21st Century Mythologies.’ He also wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary Two Minutes to Midnight.
Rhea Dehn Tutosaus
is a PhD candidate and research assistant in the Department of Fashion and Aesthetics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Her doctoral thesis investigates the entanglements between corporeality and borders through
David Ehrenpreis
is Professor of Art History at James Madison University and founding Director of the Institute of Creative Inquiry, a center championing arts-integrative work and collaboration across disciplines. He has published widely in journals including the Zeitschrift for Kunstgeschichte, Woman’s Art Journal and Art Book, and authored Picturing Harrisonburg, a book examining the shifting visions of place and community in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The curator of numerous exhibitions, including one surveying the work of Chinese artist Xu Bing, his current book project is entitled “Dying for the Nation: The Life of Monuments and the Burden of History.”
Nausikaä El-Mecky
is a tenure-track professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, specializing in historical and contemporary attacks on art, with a particular focus on their unexpected and self-contradictory aspects. She is dedicated to developing innovative and artistic approaches to teaching and science communication, leading the international platform Rebellious Teaching for boundary-pushing approaches to education. She also leads the interdisciplinary Taste of the Algorithm Working Group, which tackles algorithmic censorship. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph The Creation of Dangerous Images in Iconoclasm, Censorship and Vandalism (Routledge, 2025). Her writing has appeared in Culture, Theory, and Critique; Marginalia | Los Angeles Review of Books; Apollo; Transactions of the American Philosophical Society; and Image Journal.
Adrià Enríquez Àlvaro
obtained his BA in History with Honors from the Universitat de Barcelona and his MA in World History from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and is currently a PhD candidate at the European University Institute, writing on the nineteenth-century illegal Spanish slave trade in Upper Guinea related to Cuba. He works as a local guide in Catalonia and is an active member of different local and regional social movements. He has published on the Indianos phenomenon and worked on regional folklore and local memory programs about the Spanish Republicans sent to Nazi concentration camps. His interests include the Slave Trade, Social Movements and Local Memory.
is an independent writer based in the north-west of England. His research explores the artistic strategies used to amplify the potency of images of social trauma and conflict. “The Destroyed Body in the Work of Thomas Hirschhorn” appears in the anthology War and Art. The Portrayal of Destruction and Mass Violence (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020), the chapter “Somatic Signals: Nicole Jolicoeur’s Iconography of Hysteria” in Psychosomatic Photography (Palgrave Macmillan) is forthcoming, and “Testimony, Silence, Song,” a reflection on the role of the voice in the representation of atrocity, appeared in Espace #131 in Spring 2022. A concern with the representation of conflict has informed his teaching of art theory in a number of UK institutions, including Norwich University of the Arts and London College of Communication.
Gerard Llorens Decesaris
is a PhD candidate in History and Modern and Contemporary Studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. He is currently finishing his dissertation on US-Spanish relations related to Cuba during the nineteenth century. He was a Europaeum Scholar (2018–19) and an award recipient in the 12th competition for articles about the European Union organized by the European Commission in Barcelona (2019). He has also worked as a local guide in Catalonia and published a number of pieces on local history. His research interests include Nineteenth-Century Atlantic History, Citizenship and Republicanism.
Tomas Macsotay
is a Senior Lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is an art historian and a cultural historian specialized in the history of sculpture and Enlightenment culture, working in recent years on community approaches to cultural co-production or installation in the eighteenth to twentieth century. His books include The Profession of Sculpture in the Paris Académie (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) and the edited collections The Hurt(ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600–1800 (Manchester University Press, 2017), Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016) and Recepción de Richard Wagner y Vanguardia en las Artes Españolas. Mitos y Materialidades (Dykinson, 2024). He was the PI of the Spanish research project Prehistories of the Installation: from ecclesiastical baroque to modern interiors. PGC2018-098348-A-100 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE). Between 2021 and 2023, he held an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers to carry out, in collaboration with the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig Maximilian Universität, München, his project Outline and the Visionary Paradigm in Late Enlightenment Rome.
is Associate Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History of the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dominic’s research focuses on the massive human exodus out of China to places like Taiwan and Hong Kong in the mid-twentieth century during and following the Nationalist collapse and the Chinese Communist Revolution. His published works deal with issues concerning collective trauma, social memory, diaspora, refugee studies, Cold War social history and transitional justice. He is the author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, which won the Memory Studies Association First Book Award in 2020.
Miriam Oesterreich
is a Professor of Art History, Design Theory and Gender Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is an associate researcher in the international project Worlding Public Culture – The Arts and Social Innovation, and leads the DFG-funded research project A Critical Art History of International and World Expositions: Decentering Fashion and Modernities. She is co-editor of the open-access academic journal Miradas and co-chair of the research group Art Production and Art Theory in the Era of Global Migrations. Her research interests span Mexican Modernism and Latin American Art History, Transculturality, Transversal Modernisms, the entanglements of high and low culture, Design and Fashion, Migration and Border Arts, and Gender, Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory.
Nikolas Orr
is a PhD candidate in History at the Centre for Studies of Violence, University of Newcastle, Australia. Since 2018, he has held various teaching and research roles in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Science and the Newcastle Law School of the same institution. Nikolas graduated with first-class honors and distinction respectively from a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at University of Sydney and a Masters in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research explores contemporary anti-colonial iconoclasm from a transnational perspective.
Ada Pinkston
is a multimedia artist, educator and cultural worker living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been mounted at a variety of spaces including The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Walters Art Museum, The Peale Museum, Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore and the streets of Berlin, Baltimore and Orlando. She is
Romy Rondeltap
is the head of the board of the Building the Baileo Foundation, which, in June 2020, in the wake of the BLM protests in the Netherlands, launched the campaign #wegmetjpCoen. This action aimed to remove the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, responsible for a campaign of torture and killing in the Banda Islands in 1621, resulting in the extermination of almost all Banda people. As a historical figure and through his statue, he symbolizes Dutch Nationalism, wealth and the notion of the ‘Golden Age’ of imperialism. Building the Baileo has set in motion a series of projects involving art creation, community care and activism, raising consciousness about the colonial past, educating about the shadow side of Dutch Colonial History and seeking to uplift Indigenous Moluccan culture and recover its hidden stories, history and voices in the shadow of its colonial experience. The objectives of Building the Baileo are explained in Errant Journal’s podcast interview with Romy Rondeltap (http://errantjournal.org/podcast/). See also its Linktree profile (Linktree.com/buildingthebaileo) and audiovisual records of its #wegmetjpCoen action on YouTube (https://youtu.be/sSyvEnCuiOY/).
Tami Sawyer
is a Shelby County Commissioner and Chair of Education in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. She is a social justice activist who is Chair of the Memphis NAACP Legal Defense Fund, leader of #Takeemdown901 and recipient of the Ebony Power 100 Award. She has written on racial justice for CNN and Huffington Post and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. and the Links, Inc. Sawyer is currently pursuing an MA in Communication at her alma mater, University of Memphis, with a focus on race & gender rhetorical studies.
Ruth Somalo
is a Spanish filmmaker, curator and researcher based in NY. She is a senior programmer at DOC NYC, the Architecture and Design Film Festival, and often curates independent nonfiction programs like “Holy Fluids and Absent
Ursula Ströbele
is currently a research associate at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (Head of the Study Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art). In 2021–22, she was a visiting professor at HBK Braunschweig. In 2019, she acted as artistic director of Kunstverein Arnsberg. From 2012 to 2018, she worked as a research associate at UdK Berlin and co-founded the scientific network Theory of Sculpture. She holds a PhD from HHU Düsseldorf (The Reception Pieces of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture 1700–1730). In 2020, she received her postdoctoral qualification in the sculptural aesthetic of living since the 1960s. Her current focus is on digital, time-based sculptures, art and ecology, twentieth-century female sculptors and ephemeral images.
Ernst van Alphen
has been a Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University since 2000. In his research as well as in his teaching he is particularly interested in issues that are central in modern and post-modern literature and in the relation between literature and the visual arts. The literary texts and artworks on which Van Alphen focuses are usually part of the movements of the historical avant-gardes, modernism or postmodernism. He has, for a number of years, had a particular interest in literature and art representing the Holocaust, and has published several books on this topic. Theoretically, he is still interested in problems related to trauma and memory and their role in literary and artistic representation, but no longer only in the context of the Holocaust. A perspective that is usually part of his research is that of gender studies, especially in relation to masculinity. Before he went to Leiden University, he worked at Utrecht University and the University of Nijmegen. At Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, he held the post of Director of Communication and Education. Van Alphen has also been appointed as Queen Beatrix Professor of Dutch Studies, as well as Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cory Wayman
holds an Honors Bachelors of Arts in Art History and a Bachelor’s of Science in Sociology and is currently completing his Masters of Arts in Contemporary
Krzysztof Wodiczko
is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 90 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. Since the late 1980s, his projections have involved the active participation of marginalized and estranged city residents. Since 1985, he has held many major retrospectives at such institutions as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum Sztuki, Lodz; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford CT; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw; the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; DOX contemporart Art Center, Prague; Bunkier Sztuki Art Center, Krakow, Poland; List Visual Arts Center MIT, Boston, USA; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, Poland; and in FACT in Liverpool, as a part of the Liverpool Biennale opening in June 2016. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work has been exhibited in Documenta (twice), Paris Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Lyon Biennale, Venice Biennale (twice), Architectural Venice Biennale (International Pavillion), Whitney Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, International Center for Photography Triennale in New York, Montreal Biennale (2014), Magiciens de la Terre and in many other international art festivals and exhibitions. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize “for his contribution as an international artist to the world peace” and represented Poland and Canada in the Venice Biennale (Canadian Pavillion and Polish Pavilions).