Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. She is a professor of art education at the HFBK Hamburg. From 2018 to 2020 she was documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. From 2012 to 2018 she was a Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at Aalto University in Helsinki. In addition, she is co-director of the /ecm – Master Program for Exhibition Theory and Practices at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the core team of schnittpunkt. austellungstheorie & praxis, co-founder and part of trafo.K, Office for Art, Education, and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna) and since 2011 part of freethought, Platform for Research, Education and Production (London). In this context she was also one of the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly 2016 and is since 2020 BAK Fellow, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht). She publishes on contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, politics of history and anti-racism.

Curatorial projects have been: Counter-Monuments and Para-Monuments: Contested Memory in Public Space, Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), The international conference at HFBK Hamburg on December 2-4, 2021 – jointly conceived by Nora Sternfeld and Michaela Melián – was dedicated to the history of artistic counter-monuments and forms of protest, discusses aesthetics of memory and historical manifestations in public space, and asks about para-monuments for the present. https://mediathek.hfbk.net/l2go/-/get/v/402

She is part of freethought, a collective formed in 2011 as a platform for research, pedagogy, and production. freethought aims to blur the boundaries between thought, creativity, and critique and meld them into a trans-language practice, working with and as artists and knowledge producers in a new way. Making radical combinations of critical work and practice in the arts freethought strives to place these new models in unexpected contexts. They are: Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Mao Mollona, Louis Moreno and Nora Sternfeld

https://www.on-curating.org/issue-46-reader/museum-of-burning-questions-negotiating-with-reality-at-the-2016-bergen-assembly.html

http://freethought-collective.net/index.html

She also takes part in trafo.K, an office based in Vienna working in the fields of art education and critical knowledge production. In their projects they question things perceived as simply given and they intervene in the existing relations and, more often than not, using unexpected strategies. They are interested in revealing the structures of media and institutions and in creating public awareness for alternative (hi)stories and images. By doing so, they are concerned with finding out what emerges when different forms of knowledge, artistic strategies and socially relevant themes converge. Their projects are based on collective, emancipatory processes, which allow different perspectives to come into contact and open up new spaces of agency. They are: Renate Höllwart, Simon Nagy, Elke Smodics, Nora Sternfeld

https://trafo-k.at/en/

Recent books published by her: Curating as Anti-Racist Practice, Editors:  Natalie BAYER, Belinda KAZEEM-KAMIŃSKI, Nora STERNFELD, University of Applied Arts and Aalto ARTS Books, Vienna and Helsinki 2018

https://www.academia.edu/45655545/Curating_as_Anti_Racist_Practice

Oliver Marchart is a political theorist and philosopher. He is currently a professor of political theory at the University of Vienna. His books include Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007), Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau (2018), and the forthcoming Post-foundational Theories of Democracy: Reclaiming Freedom, Equality, Solidarity.