Shiraz Bayjoo: Apart Bez, Tu Korek

Shiraz Bayjoo is a contemporary multi-disciplinary artist who works with film, painting, photography, performance, and installation. His research-based practice focuses on personal and public archives addressing cultural memory and postcolonial nationhood in a manner that challenges dominant cultural narratives. Bayjoo has exhibited with the Institute of International Visual Arts, London; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; 5^th Edition Dhaka Art Summit; 14^th Biennale of Sharjah; 13^th Biennale of Dakar; and 21^st Biennale of Sydney. Bayjoo is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England. He is an artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation, and has recently been awarded an Artist Research Fellowship with the Smithsonian.

As an independent curator, Ilaria Conti focuses on research-based practices engaging with decolonial epistemologies and articulating new relationships between institutional infrastructures, communal knowledge, and civic agency. Most recently she served as Research Curator at the Centre Pompidou, where she was part of the curatorial team of Cosmopolis, a multi-year platform devoted to research-based art. Previously, she served as Exhibitions and Programs Director at CIMA New York; Assistant Curator of the 2016 Marrakech Biennale; and Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other positions. She is the Vice-President of the African Art in Venice Forum.