The steering committee meets regularly to take operational decisions about CAPIm’s vision, programming, and associations by consensus. The members’ respective research interests set the centre’s broad thematic lines; their networks and institutional collaborations form its foundation.
Dr. Axel Andersson is senior lecturer in Art History within the Text Area at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm as well as the institute’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research. He holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence.
Andersson is the author of five monographs as well as several anthologies on art, colonialism, criticism, critical theory, and the philosophy of technology. Previous research has moved around the question of colonialism and its links to Western concepts of nature, focusing on European exoticism and primitivism in the post-war period, the exchange of body techniques across colonial boundaries, violence and negotiations in colonial contact zones and the prehistory of Romanticism. The work has been informed by a keen interest in historiography and the formal potentials and limits of essayistic figurations in the field of history. He has also analyzed the aesthetics and philosophy of nuclear waste. Between 2016 and 2021, he led Kritiklabbet, a Swedish initiative to explore the conditions of criticism in the digital public sphere.
Andersson is working on collaborations with a number of artists engaging with off grid art practices that re-negotiate nature as a part of the “art-world”. He is also currently researching the aesthetics of association, tracing the difference between “reference” and “association” in the context of art, and investigating how associations in art can be conceptualized through linguistics, psychoanalysis, and gestalt therapy.
Natasha Marie Llorens is Professor of Art Theory and the History of Ideas at the Royal Institute of Art and co-chairs the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary. She holds an MA from the centre for Curatorial Practice at Bard College and a PhD in art history and comparative literature from Columbia University.
Llorens is Franco-American scholar, curator and arts writer focused on contemporary art and film from North Africa and the Middle East. She writes about feminist and queer politics, philosophies of violence, and decolonial curatorial practices. She is a regular contributor to e-flux Criticism and many exhibition catalogs, including monographs on Tatah, Vescovi, and Zénati most recently. She is working on a book about experimental films from 1960s and 1970s Algeria, a series of exhibitions about Algerian socialism in collaboration with artist Massinissa Selmani, and an anthology of writing by foundational Algerian art historian and semiotician, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouache.
Llorens’ ongoing research project, ‘Decolonial Curatorial Methodology,’ in collaboration with Myriam Amroun, takes curatorial practice as a form of artistic research capable of enacting ‘minor transnationalism’. The project aims to centre curatorial knowledge, experiment with supportive infrastructures and institutional scales, and engage with the Nordic region and North Africa from an embodied perspective.
Jyoti Mistry is a Professor in Film at HDK-Valand with a research focus on images in justice making and an artistic practice in film. She holds a PhD and MA in Cinema Studies with a Certificate in Culture and Media from New York University and an MFA and degree in Comparative Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Mistry’s recently completed archival trilogy We come In Peace, They Said (2014) premiered in its parts at the Locarno, Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festivals. She has exhibited at Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthalle Wien, Frankfurt Triennale amongst others. Mistry held an academic and research position at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) from 2002-2018 and has been visiting professor at New York University, Alle Arts School at University of Addis Ababa and DAAD researcher at Film University, Babelsberg.
Mistry has been Principle Investigator on several large research projects including Visual Methodologies that investigated image practices in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China South Africa). In 2023 she was awarded the Swedish Research Council exploratory labs grant to investigate the nature of images as evidence making in social justice. From September 2024 to October 2025, Mistry is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS (University of London).
Mick Wilson is Professor of Art, Director of Doctoral Studies at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, and co-chair of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary. Trained as an artist and as an art & design historian, with graduate degrees in art & design history, information technology and education, and visual culture, Mick has over three decades of experience in higher arts education, research development, and leadership. Wilson has held various significant roles, including Director of Valand Academy, Gothenburg and Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland.
His research at the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary delves into the construct ‘political imaginary’ as a framework for practice-based inquiries, with a focus on a range of themes including the question of political community between the living and the dead, the rhetorical frames of conflict, and research pedagogy.
Current projects where he is co-researcher include The Fountain, and Museum of the Commons (MoC). Previous projects include Our Many Europes (2018-2022), OPEN UP (2019-2023) and a series of co-edited volumes on curating and on socially engaged practices, the most recent of the latter being Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life (2023).
Susanne Jansson is the centre’s Research Coordinator, with the mandate to support coordination, administration, and communication. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of Gothenburg and a degree in Graphic Design from Yrkeshögskolan in Helsingborg. Additionally, she has pursued coursework in art, sustainability, and project management.
Jansson is dedicated to sustainable development and has been actively involved in organizing around this issue both personally and professionally. She has played a key role in promoting sustainability at her former workplaces and within the community through Erasmus+ projects and non-profit organizations. Her work has primarily focused on advocating for sustainable consumption and tackling the issues related to growing waste.
With a decade of experience, Jansson has focused on fostering effective collaboration, emphasizing dialogue, transparency, and co-creation. Her diverse professional background encompasses project management and coordination within marketing, communication, and translation. Most recently, Susanne transitioned from the private sector, where she managed, developed, and streamlined text-related workflows to unify internal and external processes. Her organizational expertise is an asset to the CAPIm partnership.
Valentina Desideri is a Provostial & CRACS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University and CAPIm’s Junior Researcher at the Royal Institute of Arts. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), an MA in Fine Art (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) and a BA in Dance-Theatre (Laban, London).
Desideri explores art making as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, and is one of the co-organisers of Performing Arts Forum in northern France. She speculates in writing with Stefano Harney, she engages in Poethical Readings, gathers Sensing Salons and Reading with Echo with Denise Ferreira da Silva, amongst many other collaborations.
She is currently rewriting her PhD dissertation “Studio Practice: Experiments in Objectless and Objectiveless Artmaking” for publication, as she continues to focus on study as a practice to (re)generate political imaginaries. In particular she is researching non-extractive infrastructures for study through the online platform EhChO.org.
Michele Masucci, is an artist, researcher and lecturer in writing and artistic research at the Royal Institute of Art. Masucci is a PhD candidate in Critical Theory from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (expected in 2025) and is pursuing a PhD in Medical Science at Karolinska Institutet (expected in 2025). They also include a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Södertörn University and a Master in Fine Arts and Post Master in Art&Architecture from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Masucci’s practice is deeply informed by performative art, collective organization, and care practices. They have held academic positions at Konstfack and the Royal Institute of Art, and recently curated “A Careful Strike*” at Mint Konsthall. Their contributions to conferences, publications, and exhibitions highlight an ongoing engagement with social issues, including “Ecologies of Care – The Social Centre as Self Organized Infrastructure for Art,” a lecture and seminar at Stockholm University of the Arts (2024).
Masucci is pursuing research entitled Territories of Imagination: “The Republic of Maschito”, which examines how artistic practices intersect with political movements. One focus is the 1943 revolt in Maschito, Italy, during which women led the resistance against fascism to briefly establish a partisan republic.
The advisory board meets four times annually to provide external perspective on the Centre’s thematic investments, strengthen its collaborations both nationally and internationally, and contribute with their own research through participation in CAPIm’s annual conference.
Maria Hlavajova is the founding artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht since 2000, and artistic director of FORMER WEST (2008–2016). She studied cultural studies at Comenius University in Bratislava. Hlavajova lives and works in Amsterdam and Utrecht.
Hlavajova has organized numerous projects at BAK and beyond, including the series Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–2024), Future Vocabularies (2014–2016), New World Academy with artist Jonas Staal (2013–2017), and the international research projects The Return of Religion and Other Myths (2008), On Knowledge Production: Practices in Contemporary Art (2006), Concerning War (2005), and Who if not we should at least imagine the future of all this? 7 episodes on (ex)changing Europe (2004), as well as exhibitions with artists such as Rabih Mroué, Marion von Osten, Josef Dabernig, Sanja Iveković, Aernout Mik, Artur Żmijewski, Lawrence Weiner, and many others.
Together with Kathrin Rhomberg, she is a founding director of the tranzit network, a foundation that supports cultural exchange and contemporary art practices in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.
Stefan Jonsson is the head of the REMESO department and a professor of ethnic studies at Linköping University. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1997.
From 1998 to 2000, Jonsson held a fellowship at the Getty Research Institute and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in 2006. Together with Peo Hansen, he has researched the impact of colonialism on European integration, which resulted in Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (Bloomsbury, 2014). Recently, in Where the story ends: Power, monsters and resistance in a divided world (Norstedts, 2020) Jonsson interrogates the colonial relation in different parts of the world through film, literature and art. The book was awarded the Albert Bonnier essay prize and the Samfundet De Nio Winter Prize. Unbridled Beauty: 5 things art knows about democracy (Norstedts, 2022), is a research-based essay about the role of art and imagination in the constitution of an equal, democratic society. Major works also include Subject Without Nation (Duke UP 2000), A Brief History of the Masses (Columbia UP 2008) and Crowds and Democracy (Columbia UP 2013).
Jonsson is currently involved in artistic research on Collective Agency in an Era of Authoritarian Automation (VR 2021), and is completing a book on the political aesthetics of 21st century protest movements.
Tania El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater & Performance and the Director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College in New York. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London.
El Khoury creates interactive installations and performances that explore collective memory and solidarity, utilizing tactile, auditory, and visual materials. Her work has addressed themes of displacement, border systems, privatization, and the politics of space. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, Bessies Award, and the Soros Art Fellowship, among others. El Khoury is co-founder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon, a live art and urban research collective in Beirut. At Bard Fisher Center, she co-curated Where No Wall Remains, a festival on borders and Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food. She also co-curated Tashweesh 2023, a festival on feminist practices in Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Europe, that took place across the three cities of Tunis, Brussels, and Vienna.
El Khoury’s latest edited volume is Talks on Human Rights & the Arts 2: The Lawlessness of Rights, based on talks by activists, scholars, and artists presented at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA). A reader about El Khoury’s practice was published this year by Amherst College Press, Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production, edited by Laurel V. Mclaughlin and Carrie Robbins.
chra.bard.edu/resource/lawlessness-of-rights/
Jay Pather is a choreographer, multi-media artist, curator, writer, and teacher. He is Professor at the University of Cape Town where he directs the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA). He is curator for the Infecting the City Public Art Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival and the Afrovibes Festival (The Netherlands).
Pather’s artistic work deploys site-specific, interdisciplinary, and intercultural strategies to frame postcolonial imaginaries, decolonization and matters of social justice. Works include Qaphela Caesar, a deconstruction of Julius Caesar, rite, a re-imagining of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, and Nadia Davids’ What Remains for which he won a Fleur du Cap award for Best Direction. A monograph on his work by Ketu Katrak, Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa was recently published. His publications include Restless Infections, Public Art in a Transforming City; Acts of Transgression, Live Art in South Africa (co-edited with Catherine Boulle); Decolonization and Dance, co-edited with Sigrid Gareis and articles in New Territories: Theatre, Drama, and Performance in Post-apartheid South Africa edited by Marc Meaufort and Rogue Urbanism edited by Edgar Pieterse and Abdul Malik Simone.
Current projects include a Live Art Series called the earth still shakes at the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art in Washington DC.
Kerry Guinan is an Irish conceptual artist working across a variety of media, including installation, performance, participatory art, and networked art, to critically reveal power relations in local and global systems. Her practice-based PhD at the Limerick School of Art and Design, the Technological University of Shannon Midwest, Ireland critically defined her artistic methodology of demystifying globalised systems of capitalist production, engaging the theoretical frameworks of Gothic Marxism, socially engaged art practice, and Brechtian theatre, among others.
Guinan is the author of The Impact and Instrumentalisation of Art in the Dublin Property Market, published with support from Fingal County Council in 2016. Guinan was awarded the Arts Council of Ireland’s prestigious ‘Next Generation Bursary Award’ to support her practice in 2018. Recent projects include ‘Cosmic Debris’, a residency and exhibition at the National Space Centre and Greywood Arts, Cork, Ireland (2024), curating ‘Apocalypse Anxieties’, a group exhibition responding to a Cold-War-era, government, nuclear bunker in Athlone, Ireland, and creating The Red Thread (2022), a live installation of sewing machines in the post-industrial setting of The Complex gallery, Dublin, which were operated remotely – and in real time – by garment workers in a factory in Bengaluru, India.
Guinan’s upcoming Postdoctoral project at CAPim, ‘Earth as an Uncanny Object,’ proposes to invoke Dark Ecology, the Eco-Gothic, Cosmic Horror, and the Environmental Uncanny to artistically represent anthropogenic transformations of the physical, celestial Earth.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo is an artist and researcher who lives and works between Oaxaca and Mexico City in Mexico. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from ENPEG La Esmeralda, Mexico, an MA in Education, Culture, Language, and Identity from Goldsmiths University of London, UK, and a PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.
Her work, from a decolonial-queer perspective, explores the creation of counter-worlds in neocolonial settings, integrating her interests in theater games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms, and queer of color critique. Her recent exhibitions include “Sonnet of Vermin” at Hayward Gallery, London (2024), “Tzitzimime Trilogy” at la Casa Encendida, Madrid (2023), and “Artes Mundi 10” at Chapter, Cardiff (2023).
Rincón Gallardo is starting a new project, The Spectral Patlache, which is a speculative fabulation about trans-historical patlache figures. Patlache is a Nahuatl word that the Spanish friars of the so-called New Spain (Mexico) used in confessional manuals to condemn female homosexuality, as it was considered an abominable sin against nature.