Uman (b. 1980, Mogadishu, Somalia) is a Somali-born contemporary artist who lives and works in upstate New York. Self-taught, her multidisciplinary practice—spanning painting, drawing, and sculpture—combines abstraction and figuration through vibrant color, expressive gesture, and symbolic imagery. Shaped by a life lived across Somalia, Kenya, Denmark, and the United States, her work reflects a rich cross-cultural visual vocabulary informed by East African textiles, Arabic calligraphy, spirituality, and the natural world. Often described by the artist as forms of self-portraiture, Uman’s compositions weave together geometric patterns, intuitive mark-making, and dreamlike imagery to explore identity, memory, and transformation.

Helmut Middendorf (born 1953 in Dinklage, Germany) is a German painter associated with the Neue Wilde (New Wild) movement, which emerged in West Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The group sought to revive expressive, energetic painting after a period dominated by conceptual and minimal art.

His early paintings reflect the raw energy of West Berlin’s underground culture, particularly the punk and new wave music scene. With bold colors, vigorous brushstrokes, and dynamic compositions on big canvases, Middendorf depicted musicians, nightclubs, dancers, and urban nightlife. These works captured the atmosphere of a city marked by political tension and cultural experimentation.

Throughout his career, Middendorf has continued to explore expressive figuration and abstraction, expanding his themes while maintaining the intense, gestural style that characterizes his work. His works have been exhibited internationally and are included in major museum collections.

Eleni Bagaki (b. 1979, Crete) is a visual artist based in Athens working across painting, text, photography, and installation. Informed by feminist theory and autofiction, her practice explores the space between autobiography and fiction, examining how personal narratives intersect with broader social and political realities. Her work asks how art can unravel and reimagine the dominant cultural narratives that shape female identity, desire, and belonging.

Often beginning with lived experiences—such as love, loss, rupture, or longing—Bagaki treats these moments as raw material rather than subjects to document. Through processes of fragmentation and reconstruction, she transforms them into new narratives, using art as a way to reorganize memory and continually rewrite biography. Moving fluidly between media, she combines humor and fiction to construct intimate visual and linguistic worlds centered on female subjectivity, sexuality, and gender representation.

Christina Dimitriadis (b. 1967, Thessaloniki, Greece) is an artist, photographer, and lecturer based in Berlin, where she has lived and worked since 1993. She received her BFA in Photography with honours from Parsons School of Design at The New School for Social Research, New York, in 1992.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Berlinische Galerie (Berlin), EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens), mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Istanbul Modern, MEP – La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), and C.R.A.C. Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain (Sète), as well as in exhibitions such as the Auckland Triennial, Istanbul Biennial, Moscow Photo Biennale, and Thessaloniki Biennale.

Her work has received international attention in publications including Artforum, Mousse Magazine, Flash Art, Camera Austria, Der Spiegel, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her monographs include Technologies of the Self (2015), Island Hoping (2019), and J’ai perdu mon Eurydice (2025).