About the Contributors

Naazish Ata-Ullah

Naazish Ata-Ullah is associate professor and head of printmaking in the Department of Fine Art, National College of Arts in Lahore. Naazish Ata-Ullah has exhibited across Pakistan, India, UK, and Scandinavia and has advised and prepared papers for international organizations.

Mark Axelrod

Axelrod is the director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing and has received numerous writing awards, including two United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowships for Creative Writing and awards from the Sundance Institute. He has published four novels, Capital Castles (2000), Cloud Castles (1998), Cardboard Castles (1996), and Bombay California (1994), and has recently completed a novel in three books titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash. He has also written several collections of short stories, including Dante’s Foil and Other Sporting Tales, The Apotheosis of Aaron, and Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage, the last recently published by the Fiction Collective 2 and a prequel to Balzac Coffee, Leonardo’s Suites. He has published two books on screenwriting, Aspects of the Screenplay (2001) and Character and Conflict: The Cornerstones of Screenwriting (2004), and has recently completed a book on adaptation titled, I Read It at the Movies. He recently assumed the position of coeditor of the literary journal The New Novel Review and is a regular reviewer for The Review of Contemporary Fiction. He has been published in numerous journals in the United States and Europe, including the Iowa Review and the New York Quarterly.

Mieke Bal

Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to seventeenth-century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism, and migratory culture. Her many books include Of What One Cannot Speak (2010), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3rd edition, 2009). Mieke is also a video artist, and occasionally she acts as an independent curator.

Pablo Baler

Pablo Baler is a fiction writer, art critic, and associate professor of Latin-American literature and visual arts at California State University, Los Angeles. Baler is the author of the award-winning novel Circa (1999) and widely published short stories. He is also the author of Los Sentidos de la distorsión: fantasias epistemológicas del neobarroco latinoamericano (2009), a highly praised essay on Neobaroque aesthetics. His latest collection of short stories, La burocracia mandarina, was recently published by Lumme Editor in San Paulo, Brazil (2013). Baler is the editor of The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-First Century.

Jan Garden Castro

Castro was one of the founders of the literary journal River Styx and is a contributing editor for Sculpture magazine. Castro has conducted interviews with various literary and artistic figures: Margaret Atwood, Eavan Boland, William Cass, Christopher Merrill, and Quincy Troupe. She has also curated an exhibit titled Sonia Delaunay: La Moderne. Castro has written numerous reviews and is author of The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. She and Kathryn Van Spanckeren are editors of Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, a collection of critical essays on Atwood’s work.

[Johnny] Sue Golding

Golding is a contemporary philosopher and artist whose research covers the intra/interdisciplinary intersections of fine art, digital/electronic arts, and the new sciences. Renowned for her poetic-philosophy enactments and soundscape exhibitions, Johnny Golding is currently director of the Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR) and holds the chair as Research Professor of Philosophy and Fine Art at the Birmingham Institute for Art and Design (BIAD-BCU). Her most recent publications include “Dirty Theory: Philosophy after Metaphysics”; “Fractal Philosophy, Trembling the Plane of Immanence: The Small Matter of Learning How to Listen (or Attunement as the Task of Art)”; “Conversion on the Road to Damascus: Minority Report on Art”; “The University Must Be Defended”; and “Assassination of Time (or the birth of zeta-physics)”. Executive editor of zētēsis: the international journal for contemporary art, philosophy, and science (London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, October 2012) publishing research driven by curiosity.

Glenn Harper

Previous editor of Art Papers and the current editor of Sculpture magazine, based in Washington, D.C. Harper has also edited the following anthologies on contemporary art: Sculpture Reader: Contemporary Sculpture since 1980 (2006), Conversations on Sculpture (2008), and Landscapes for Art: Contemporary Sculpture Parks (2008).

Salima Hashmi

Professor Salima Hashmi is the dean at the School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. She taught at the National College of Arts, Lahore, for thirty-one years and was principal of the college for four years. She is a painter of repute whose works have been shown in Pakistan and in international exhibitions. She has written extensively on the arts and has curated exhibitions of contemporary art and traditional textile. She curated Hanging Fire—Contemporary Art from Pakistan for Asia Society Museum, New York. Her book Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan was published in 2002. Her publication Memories, Myths, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan was coauthored with Yashodhara Dalmia for Oxford University Press, India in 2006. Most recent books are A Song for This Day, which includes illustrations by her, and Two Loves: Faiz’s Letters from Jail (coeditor, 2011). Salima Hashmi is the daughter of the celebrated Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Ayesha Jatoi

Ayesha Jatoi is a visual artist whose practice comments on art-making itself and often questions the relevance of traditional modes of working today. Trained as a miniature painter and photographer at the National College of the Arts in Lahore, Jatoi’s work shares a fascination with manuscripts and the spatial divisions of the illuminated page. Of late, text has started to play a very dominant role in all her work, often freeing itself altogether from the image. Jatoi is also a founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, published in Lahore, Pakistan.

Hagi Kenaan

Kenaan is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University, specializing in Continental philosophy, phenomenology, and aesthetics. He is the author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (2005), and The Ethics of Visuality (2012) also translated into French as Visage(s): Une autre éthique du regard après Levinas (2012).

Quddus Mirza

Quddus Mirza is an artist, art critic, and independent curator. He is associate professor in fine arts at the National College of Arts, Lahore. Trained as a painter at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and Royal College of Art, London, he has shown extensively in numerous important group exhibitions, along with several one-person exhibitions, held in Pakistan and UK. He has also curated a number of exhibitions, including Trade Union and Take Away at Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, NCA, and One to One at Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore. His other exhibitions include Love at National Art Gallery, Islamabad; Beyond Borders: Art from Pakistan, at National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, India; and Exotic Bodies, based on the miniature paintings from the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum, which was displayed at Preston Museum in UK. Mirza is an art critic, with a regular weekly column appearing in Pakistan’s major newspaper, The News, as well as contributing to other publications like Dawn, Herald, Himal, Depart, Libas, Contemporary, Flash Art, and Art India. He is the coauthor of a book Fifty Years of Visual Arts in Pakistan and has written essays on Pakistani art in different international catalogues.

Huma Mulji

Huma Mulji is a Pakistani artist born in Karachi. The most recent exhibitions in which Mulji participated include Twilight at Project 88, Mumbai, 2011; The Rising Tide, Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi; Where Three Dreams Cross, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2010; The Empire Strikes Back, The Saatchi Gallery, 2010; Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Asia Society Museum, New York; and in 2008, Half-Life, at the Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery, Lahore; Farewell to Post Colonialism, Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China; Desperately Seeking Paradise, Pakistan Pavilion, Art Dubai, UAE; and Arabian Delight, Rohtas Gallery, Lahore.

Liliana Porter

Internationally renowned visual artist Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires and has lived in New York since 1964. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in numerous important collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Clouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; and many others. Presently, she is a professor of art at Queens College, City University of New York.

Rashid Rana

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Rana received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore (1992) and an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (1994). Rana is one of the most significant and influential figures among the new generation of artists from Pakistan. Distinct for his imagery and pictorial strategies, he has been showing extensively all over the world. His most recent international exhibitions include Solo Exhibition, Everything Is Happening at Once, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK; Lisson Gallery, London, UK (2011); Where Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Fotomuseum|Winterthur, Switzerland, and Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, Saatchi Gallery (2010); The Power of Ornament, Lower Belvedere, Vienna; and Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Asia Society Museum, New York (2009).

Stelarc

Stelarc is an Australian artist who has used prosthetics, robotics, VR systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate, and involuntary interfaces with the body. He is interested in the evolutionary architecture of the body and possible ways of redesigning the human augmented by implants and exoskeletons. Some of his projects include the THIRD HAND, VIRTUAL ARM, STOMACH SCULPTURE, EXOSKELTON, PROSTHETIC HEAD, and WALKING HEAD. He is surgically constructing and stem cell growing an EXTRA EAR on his arm that will be internet enabled, making it a publicly accessible acoustical organ for people in other places. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2003 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Monash University. In 2010 he was awarded the Hybrid Arts prize at Ars Electronica and has also a Special Projects Grant by the Australia Council. He is currently Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University London. His artwork is represented by SCOTT LIVESEY GALLERIES in Melbourne.

Ana Tiscornia

Professor of visual arts at New York State University in Old Westbury and art editor of Point of Contact: The Journal of Verbal and Visual Arts, distributed by Syracuse University Press. She cooperates with the Spanish magazine Atlántica, the Colombian Art Nexus, and the Uruguayan Brecha.
 In 2002 she was present at III Bienal de Lima. (Uruguayan representative), Lima, Peru. 
In 2006 she was present at IX Bienal de la Habana (Havana, Cuba)

Polona Tratnik

Artist and scholar, Tratnik is assistant professor of philosophy of culture at the University of Primorska, research associate at the same university, Science and Research Center of Koper, and president of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics. As artist, Tratnik has participated at major world-recognized cultural events such as Festival Ars Electronica (Linz, 2008), Bios 4 (Sevilla, 2007), Vitrti (Antwerpen, 2007), In Vivo in Vitro (Athens, 2006), Biennial for Electronic Arts (Perth, 2004), and L’Art Biotech (Nantes, 2003). Tratnik is one of the pioneer artists in the field of bio art. Her artistic and cultural work intertwines with science, especially biotechnology.