Maria Thereza Alves is a Brazilian artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. She attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and was awarded a DAAD scholarship (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdients/German Academic Exchange Service) in 2000. She has had shows across Europe and North America and has recently exhibited at: Manifesta 7 (Trentino - Alto Adige), 2008; Greenwashing (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin), 2008; Port City. On Mobility and Exchange (Bristol), 2007; Quanahuac (Kunsthalle, Basel), 2006; Liverpool Biennial, 2004; Rest in Space (Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin), 2003; Venice Biennial (2001). She was co-founder of the Green Party in Brazil.
Alain Badiou holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach at the Collège International de Philosophie. His numerous works of philosophy include Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, (Minnesota University Press, 1999), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, transl. by Peter Hallward; (New York: Verso, 2000), Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, (London: Continuum, 2003), Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Being and Event, (New York: Continuum, 2005), Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2 (New York: Continuum, 2009),Theory of the Subject, transl. by Bruno Bosteels; (New York: Continuum, 2009) and Philosophy in the Present (with Slavoj Zizek) (New York: Polity Press, 2010).
Bik Van der Pol are Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol (Rotterdam) who have worked collectively since 1995 as Bik Van der Pol. They explore the potential of art to produce and transmit knowledge and research methods of how to activate situations in order to create a platform for various kinds of communicative activities. Their work engages with revitalization of memory in the present and with questions of knowledge and history, thus creating the necessary potential for a dialogue and an ever-reforming discourse through which they develop an understanding of situations that surround us. The recent exhibition It isn't what it used to be and will never be again at CCA Glasgow (10 October - Saturday 21 November 2009) was the result of research that Bik Van der Pol undertook whilst in residency at Cove Park in Summer 2009.
Simon Critchley is Chair of Philosophy at the New School of Social Research, New York, and is the author of many books including The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992), Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (1999) and, most recently, Infinitely Demanding (2007), On Heidegger's Being and Time (2008) and The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008). His next book, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying is published in the Autumn (2010). At the New School, Professor Critchley currently teaches a course on 'Thinking the Present' which addresses many of the questions and concerns which also inform the theme of Glasgow International 2010: 'Past, Present, Future'. He is the 'chief philosopher' of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictional organization modeled upon Futurism and Dada, which he co-founded with the artist and writer, Tom McCarthy and which has performed in events at Tate Britain and Athens Biennale.
Jimmie Durham is a sculptor, essayist and poet who has been making and exhibiting work since 1963. His first solo exhibition was at the public gallery of the University of Texas at Austin in 1965; a period when the cultural and political uses of material, objects and space were central to his practice. Since that time his substantial career has deftly bridged the space between art and activism. During February - April 2010 Durham undertook a three-month Production Residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios (GSS) to create new work for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
Anders M. Gullestad is a PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is writing a dissertation in comparative literature on parasitical relationships in Herman Melville's work. Together with Lars Sætre and Patrizia Lombardo, he has edited the anthology Exploring Textual Action (Aarhus University Press, 2010). He is copy editor of the journal Ekfrase: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture and a member of the editorial board of Audiatur bokhandel.
Susan Spitzer is based in Los Angeles and is the translator of Alain Badiou's Five Lessons on Wagner (Verso 2010) and the Incident at Antioch (forthcoming with Columbia University Press).