Tom Holert works as an in(ter)dependent scholar and curator with a focus on the politics and spatiality of knowledge in art and culture. He authored and co-authored various books and organised several exhibitions—such as Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (with Anselm Franke, 2018), and Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s (2021), both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2015 he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin (harun-farocki-institut.org). Recent book publications: Navigation beyond Vision (ed. with Doreen Mende, 2023) and ca. 1972. Gewalt – Umwelt – Identität – Methode (2024). Upcoming titles include Kunst und Politik – zur Einführung (2025) and Bildformen des Rechts. Juridische Schauplätze technischer Bilder (Bildwelten des Wissens, vol. 21, ed. with Claudia Blümle and Katja Müller-Helle, 2026). A selection of his writings can be found here.
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at Adelaide University, Visiting Professor at the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. Between 2012-18 he was a member of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity. Justin recently co-authored Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020, Intellect), Reset: Een Nieuw Begin voor Kunst en Cultuur (2023, Starfish Books); and Culture is Not an Industry (2024, Manchester UP).
Dave Beech was born into a working-class community in Warrington in the mid-1960s, Dave Beech is an artist and writer. He is Reader in Art and Marxism at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Labour (Brill 2020), Art and Postcapitalism (Pluto 2019) and Art and Value (Brill 2015). Beech worked in the collective Freee between 2004 and 2018. His solo art practice revisits the critical traditions of photomontage, documentary photography, digital print, the photo archive and the photobook through post-conceptual processes of material metamorphosis. His forthcoming book, Between Exploitation and Stigma, revisits the literature on class, and will be published by Brill.
Patrycja Kaszynska is Senior Research Fellow at University of the Arts London and Research Fellow at Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. She is also Research Affiliate at Northeastern University London, where she was Head of the Art History Faculty before joining UAL. Patrycja has shaped the UK’s national discussion on how the value of arts, culture and heritage is articulated and measured in the context of decision making and has written on this topic. Her interests are at the cross section of critical theory, pragmatic philosophy, cultural studies and cultural policy as these converge in the concept of cultural value.
