Sven Spieker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in modern and contemporary art, aesthetic and critical theory, and global and transnational art and art history. He is the founding editor of ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print Journal (MIT Press) as well as a co-founder of the Working Group Cultures of World Socialism. In 2008 Spieker published The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press). In 2017, he edited a volume about destruction in global art (Destruction, MIT Press). His latest book publications are a co-edited volume about sound in art and culture (Akusmatik als Labor: Kultur/Kunst/Medien, ed. with Mario Asef, 2023) and the monograph Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2024). Forthcoming is Socialist Exhibition Cultures. International Art Exhibitions in the Socialist World, 1950-1990 (ed., Toronto University Press).
Christene d’Anca Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Medieval Studies. She is currently a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary research interests include women and storytelling, alternate power structures, and female patronage of the funerary arts. Christene’e articles have been published in the Journal of European Studies, Early Middle English, The Romanian American Journal for the Humanities, Romanische Forschungen, Journal of Animal Ethics, and EuropeNow, with chapters in various edited collections.
Polly Savage is Senior Lecturer in the Art History of Africa at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on the intersections of art, curating and decolonisation in Africa, with particular focus on the cultural networks of international solidarity in Lusophone Africa. She holds a doctorate in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art and previously worked at London’s October Gallery. Her edited volume Making Art in Africa 1960-2010 was published by Lund Humphries in 2014.
Bojana Videkanić is an Associate Professor of contemporary art and visual culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms, socialist art, and anti-imperialist cultural work in the 20th century. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 came out in 2020 for McGill-Queens University Press.