Tarlan Lotfizadeh

Jelena Sofronijevic (@empirelinespodcast) is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher based in London. Their curatorial projects include Invasion Ecology (2024) and EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They are pursuing a practice-based PhD with Gray’s School of Art, curating exhibitions of Balkan and Yugoslavian/diasporic artists in British collections. Sofronijevic works at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts, highlighting continuities over time, and seeks to make complex ideas accessible, not simple. Much of their research is focused on pluralizing representations of CESEE/diasporic communities and cultures, particularly from the Balkans and Yugoslavia. More widely, they seek to platform perspectives often marginalized or excluded from representation, especially in anti-colonial and environmental activism. 

Tarlan Lotfizadeh is an interdisciplinary artist based in London, born in Tehran, Iran. With a BSc in physics, she began her artistic journey in photography before expanding into sculpture. Tarlan transcends specific mediums, always seeking the most fitting language to express her concepts. Her work explores themes of memory and oblivion through an autobiographical lens, often revealing traces of physics.

Siobhán Shilton is Professor of French Studies and the Visual Arts in the French Department at the University of Bristol. She has published on art and the “Arab Uprisings,” cultural encounters in photography, video, graffiti, graphic novels, installation and performance art, and twentieth-century literature in French on the themes of travel, immigration and diaspora. Her most recent monograph is Art and the Arab Spring: Aesthetics of Revolution and Resistance in Tunisia and Beyond (The Global Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Charlotte Bank is an art historian and curator who has worked with numerous institutions in Europe and the Middle East. Since 2012, she has been the co-director of the artistic project space Art-Lab Berlin and is presently the acting professor of Islamic Art History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in the MENA region in its historical context, with a special focus on the role of art in the processes of decolonization and national emancipation and the representation of artists within the global art scene. Dr. Bank is the author of The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria: Social Critique and an Artistic Movement (Routledge 2020). Her current research project is: Queering Islamic Art: Gender Diversity and Critique of Sexual Normativity in Contemporary Art.