Tehran-born media artist, activist, educator, and curator Morehshin Allahyari is inspired by concepts of collective archiving, memory, and contradiction. Her sculptures and videos challenge social and gender norms by responding to, resisting and criticizing contemporary culture and politics. For her “LEAVING BEHIND TO GET AHEAD” talk, Allayhari builds on a new body of work called “She Who Sees the Unknown”, examining digital colonialism and ‘re-figuring’ as a feminist and de-colonialist practice.

Beirut-based artist, writer and technologist Jessika Khazrik’s practice ranges from composition to machine learning, performance, urban research and history of science and linguistics. Through intimately investigating the influence of the global economy, the techno-politics of voice, vision and matter on the organization of knowledge and space, her work probes and re-imagines experiences of witnessing, dwelling and labor. A recipient of the Ada Lovelace prize from MIT in 2017, she was in 2012 and 2013 a fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program and is currently a fellow at Digital Earth. In “The Internet Is Slow: An online performance”, Khazrik subverts the modes of spectatorship facilitated by Lebanon’s dormant internet infrastructure as a compositional tool that stretches beyond the confinements of technology and time.