jury 2023

CASSILS (CA/US), Chair of jury

Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils' art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils' work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment. 

Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.  

They are the recipient of the National Creation Fund (2022), a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalog Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils' work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum.

Cassils is an Associate Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.

Adelaide Bannerman

Adelaide Bannerman
Adelaide Bannerman is a curator, and curatorial director of Tiwani Contemporary, an international commercial art gallery in London, UK and Lagos, Nigeria.

Her independent research interests valorise the gestures, readings and engagements with live and visual art performance. She is a trustee of PUBLICS Helsinki.

Giovanna Esposito Yussif

Giovanna Esposito Yussif
Giovanna Esposito Yussif engages with curatorial praxis and research. Her background is in art history, museology, and critical theory. Giovanna has a long-standing commitment to nondominant praxes, dissentient imaginations, epistemic plurality and epistemologies in resistance. In 2019 she curated the Pavilion of Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale with the Miracle Workers Collective. She is currently artistic director of the Museum of Impossible Forms, co-artistic of Drifts and the curator for M_itä biennale 2023.

Giovanna has collaborated with diverse institutions such as Helsinki Biennial, Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA, Helsinki City Museum, Archive, Goethe Institut, Savvy Contemporary, Manifesta Foundation, SOMA, Sinne Gallery, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Baltic Circle, Helsinki International Artist Program, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, RabRab Press, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Galería OMR, Fundación/Colección Jumex, among others. She edited A Greater Miracle Of Perception with Archive Books (2019) and Polyphonic Texts and Toolkit with Night Schoolers (2019), as well has written for diverse contemporary art publications. She has been guest Lecturer for Kuvataideakatemia, Taidekoulu Maa, Mentor for Live Art and Performance Studies-Theater Academy in Helsinki and Curatorial Practice at the University of Bergen, and an active contributor to diverse collectives, networks, and boards.