Teresa Burga
Teresa Burga (*1953, Peru – 2021, Peru) was a pioneering Peruvian conceptual and multimedia artist whose work explored the intersections of gender, power, and postcolonial identity. As one of Latin America’s most forward-thinking of the late 20th century, Burga’s work anticipated many contemporary debates around the role of data, systems, and the state in shaping identity—especially female identity—in patriarchal and postcolonial contexts. Burga’s practice was vast and interdisciplinary, encompassing conceptual drawing, Pop-inflected painting, slide projections, environments, and cybernetic installations. Her work was less about aesthetic form than about exposing the invisible frameworks— administrative, political, technological—that govern everyday life. She was the first Peruvian artist to participate in the Venice Biennale in 2015 and the Istan- bul Biennale in 2011. Burga’s work is part of the permanent collections of major international institutions including Migros Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Pinault Collection, Museum Ludwig Cologne and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Con- temporary Collection among others.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (*1959, Cuba) works with performance, pain- ting, photography, video, music, and sculpture. Campos- Pons explores themes of identity, race, gender, diaspora, and spirituality in her work, impulsed by her transcultural African, Chinese, and Hispanic heritage. With an artistic career spanning over four decades, Campos-Pons draws from her personal experience to narrate the process of identity construction, from her own exile moving from Cuba to the United States, as well as her ancestors’, who arrived to the island from Africa and China. Campos-Pons’ works have been exhibited at the Mu- seum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Whitney Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery of Art, the Guggenheim Mu- seum, and Kunstmuseum Basel, among other venues worldwide. She has been part of multiple biennials, including the Venice Biennial, the Havana Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Diriyah Biennial, and the São Paulo Biennial. Her retrospective exhibition titled “Behold” has toured the United States bet- ween 2023 and 2025, presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Nasher Museum of Art, the Frist Museum and the J. Paul“Getty Museum. She has been awarded multiple recognitions, including the McArthur “Genius” Grant in 2023. Campos- Pons currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee, where she teaches at Vanderbilt University
Martin Damman
Martin Dammann’s (1965, Friedrichshafen, Germany ) work constantly oscilla- tes between historic and contemporary subjects and perspectives. Throughout his work, Dammann investigates how life leaves traces which then transcend into history and images. His work often addresses aspects of violence, identity, the relation between sexes and guilt. Dammann’s works may refer to an anterior reality, yet the works themselves become part of the world, thereby enabling a continual dialogue between that reality and its traces in photography, drawing and painting. Martin Dammann’s work is featured in many private and public collections in Europe, USA and Canada, including, amongst others, the Sammlung des Deut- schen Bundestags, the Sammlung des Bundes, the Märkische Museum in Wit- ten, the Centre Pompidou, the Guerlain collection, the Burger collection, the Sigg collection and the Musee de Dole.
Elyla
Elyla (*1989, Nicaragua) is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist working with video, performances, sculpture sculpture and site-specific performance art interventions. They are informed by Mesoamerican indigenous cultures and current social issues. Their name comes from the terms “him-and-she” in Spa- nish (El-y-la), reflecting their interest in challenging the colonial gender binary system. Elyla also takes inspiration from cultural traditions such as dances, rituals, and carnivals and investigates the colonial traces embedded in them. Thus, the artist re-imagines new rituals and transmutes their meaning, often in conjunction with the exploration of queer politics and ethics within spirituality, collective consciousness, and the ancestral realm. Elyla’s work has been shown at the latest Venice Biennale, the 3rd Toronto Biennial, XII Biennial of Havana, Museo Reina Sofia, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Panamá among others. Elyla’s works are part of international collections such as the MoMA, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the Ortiz-Gurdián Art Foundation, KADIST video art collection, Museo Reina Sofia and MACBA (Barcelona). Elyla is currently pursu- ing a Master of Arts at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Switzer- land.
Gülbin Ünlü
With her constellations of colours, shapes and figures, Gülbin Ünlü opens up a field of associations with the seemingly familiar. Personal and collectively pre- served memories play a central role in her work. This makes her pictures ap- proachable and enables viewers to initiate a game with their own experiences and expectations. The artist combines different techniques such as painting, printing, drawing and digital medias to amalgamate content, contrasts or con- tradictions that are often considered incompatible. This technique is fundamen- tally conceptual, but also leaves the creation of the picture to chance at certain points. Gülbin Ünlü lives and works in Munich, Germany. In 2024, she held an interim professorship in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and received, among others, the City of Munich Art Prize (2022), the Bavarian Art Award (2023), and the Zeitsicht Award (2024).
Roméo Mivekannin
Roméo Mivekannin (*1986, Ivory Coast), is a multidisciplinary artist challen- ging the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation. Informed by his academic knowledge and his family‘s experience with colonization, he (re) creates compositions that challenge European iconography, taking classical paintings and photographs and substituting the subjects’ faces with self-port- raits. This substitution is both intentional and subversive, designed to invert the perspectives of the painted subjects and the viewers themselves. His canvases, bear various layers of content beyond the visual, as he uses old bedsheets and tablecloths and soaks them in elixir baths following voodoo practices, a spiritual belief born in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Roméo Mivaknnin’s works have been exhibited at the Musée du Louvre Lens, Collezione Maramotti, Musée du Quai Branly, Kunstmuseum Basel, Fondation H and Bozar among others.
Kaloki Nyamai
Kaloki Nyamai (*1985, Kenya) presents a distinctive fusion of traditional and contemporary perspectives in his artistic practice. Through his large-sca- le paintings and mixed media installations, Nyamai engages in complex visual storytelling that delves into the interpretation of historical narratives within a contemporary context. His work draws on ancestral stories of the Kamba people in Kenya, alongside reflections on daily life in Nairobi. He embeds the Kikamba language into the titles of his pieces, weaving traditional stories into his compo- sitions. By integrating historical and pre-colonial imagery, Nyamai foregrounds cultural narratives that bridge the past and present, offering a nuanced per- spective on African identity and heritage. Nyamai has shown his work internationally at the Sharjah Biennial (2025), the Michigan University Museum (2025), the Noval Foundation (2024), the Venice Biennale (2022) and the Dakar Biennale (2022) among other venues. Kaloki Nyamai lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya.
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems (*1953, USA) is a widely influential American artist whose work gives voice to people whose stories have been silenced or ignored. Inves- tigating history, identity, and power, she finds connections between personal experience and the larger structures and institutions that shape our lives. Over the course of forty years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photo- graphs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her expansive practice has often overlapped with activism and education; in addition to her solo work, she has led collective public art projects, multi-disciplinary per- formances, and taught at various universities in the United States. Weems has recently held solo exhibitions at Barbican Art Gallery in London, Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Kunstmuseum Basel, Fundación MAPFRE, and many more. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Hasselblad Award, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Tate Modern, among others. Weems lives in Syracuse, New York, and is current- ly the Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.
Antonio Paucar
Antonio Paucar (*1973, Huancayo, Peru) creates a unique artistic language through his performances, sculptures and video works. He reinvokes his origins in Andean culture through rituals and interventions. His practice addresses issues such as contemporary conflicts in indigenous societies, climate change and surveillance technology. Paucar is characterized by establishing dialogues with Andean and indigenous ancestral knowledge, often in critical tension with Western culture, enriching his work with a multifaceted perspective. Paucar studied at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He has exhibited in nu- merous institutions across Latin America, Europe, and beyond, including the Museum of Modern Art, ifa Galerie Stuttgart and Berlin, MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, MAC Lima, the Durrës International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and MOLAA Museum of Latin American Art, among others. His pieces are part of international collections, including the Mu- seum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo, the Mont- real Museum of Fine Arts and the Museo de Arte de Lima among others. Antonio Paucar has been awarded the Artis Mundi 11 Prize (2026). He lives and works between Berlin, Germany, and Huancayo, Peru.
Thomas Zipp
Thomas Zipp‘s (*1966, Heppenheim, Germany) work addresses the tensions between the individual and the collective. His artistic process spans across in- tricate installations, performances, as well as painting, drawing, and sculpture. His fascination with neuroscience and pharmaceutics, alongside his admira- tion for Dadaism, seamlessly integrates into his work, producing multilayered pieces that translate complex theoretical, aesthetic, and philosophical matters into compelling visual language. Zipp’s fascination with the human psyche and stages of consciousness drives his almost surreal and dream-like compositions, resulting in works that are often bizarre and uncanny, with underlying satirical and humorous elements. Zipp has taught at the University of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, the University of Ap- plied Arts in Vienna and has been a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2008.
Source: Galerie Barbara Thumm
