Speakers

„Arch Hades is an acclaimed, best selling poet from London, author of four volumes – High Tide (2018), Fool’s Gold (2020), Paper Romance (2021), Arcadia (2022) – known best for exploring the topics of modern romance and poetry of philosophy in a traditional lyrical style.

In 2021, she shifted focus to the intersection of the spoken word with various art mediums, which culminated in her debuting ‘Arcadia’ at the prestigious Christie’s 21C evening sale in New York, where it became the most expensive poem ever sold.”

Krzysztof Zanussi is a film director, producer and scriptwriter. Director of many award-winning, internationally acclaimed films (awarded in Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Moscow, Chicago, Montreal, Berlin, Tokio): The Structure of Crystal (1968), Illumination (1973), Camouflage (1976), Constant Factor (1980), The Year of Quiet Sun (1984), Wherever You Are If You Are (1988), In Full Gallop (1996), Persona Non Grata (2004), Revisited (2009), Foreign Body (2014). Krzysztof Zanussi is also a theatre director staging productions all around the world. He has authored several books. Has honorary doctorate of many renowned universities and gives lectures all around the world.
President of Tor Film Production, producer of the films by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Agnieszka Holland and many others. Professor at Silesian University in Katowice (Poland).

The Fashion Yearbook art director Fiona Hayes studied graphic design and art history in her native Dublin, Ireland, and started her career in media at the BBC in London. A fervent magazine lover, she has worked as art director of Punch, Company, Eve, British House & Garden, GQ India, and the British and Russian editions of Cosmopolitan. In 2002 she founded independent photography magazine DayFour, publishing it continuously until 2012. She has had a lasting influence on the face of Condé Nast: as art director of Russian Vogue 1998-2000 and again 2010-2012. She also spent two and a half years in Munich with Condé Nast Germany. Between 2013 and 2019, Fiona oversaw all of the launches of Condé Nast International – 14 magazines, including seven editions of Vogue. She still consults as design director at large for Vogue Hong Kong.
Outside the publishing world, Fiona has been art director of contemporary art auction house Phillips de Pury in London and New York, and consultant art director for Russian luxury retail group Mercury/TSUM. Current clients range from a multinational retail group to a boutique publishing organisation.
She lectures on media at Leeds University, photography at Oxford Brookes University, and creative direction at Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design, London.

Polish film director, screenwriter, and producer, whose works have been awarded or premiered at festivals in Cannes, Venice, Tribeca, Berlin, Toronto, Palm Springs, and Chicago. Member of the American Film Academy.His film „Corpus Christi” (2019), inspired by real events, won over 50 awards at almost 70 film festivals and was nominated for an Oscar in the Best International Film category. The four films he made attracted a total of 5 million viewers to cinemas in Poland. He was honoured by the Polish Film Academy with the Best Director and Discovery of the Year statuettes, he also won the Best Film statuette. His interests are not limited only to fictional films – he is also involved in other audiovisual forms – from commercials, music videos, through series to his own contemporary ballet show „Xenophonia” presented at the Malta Festival in 2016. He is the director of full-length documentaries, one of which – „Spływ” – was in the Top Ten competition at the 2007 Krakow Film Festival. His second documentary entitled The Warsaw Uprising attracted 600,000 people to Polish cinemas. viewers and won the prestigious Golden Reel Award and the Polish Film Academy award for the Best Documentary Film. In 2020, he made the film „Hejter” awarded with the Best Film Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The film was purchased for distribution by Netflix, and the rights to the series were acquired by HBO. Komasa is a lecturer at the National Film School in Łódź and an expert at the Polish Film Institute.

Arthur Poujois (b.1994, Charleville, France) is an artist with a focus on painting, stained glass and installation making. After completing a bachelor’s at the Slade School of fine art and a semester at the New York Studio School, he moved to Paris to establish his studio practice and begin a master’s degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. Following this, he became a resident artist at the Lee- Alexander Mcqueen Sarabande foundation in London.

Poujois explores the properties of images through various forms: whether developing experimental techniques of engraving, etching, screen printing, painting or just orchestrating images with the viewers themselves.
There are puzzles without solutions around us, and his work tries to reveal new ways of coding or decoding those as such. The images Poujois makes are interactive motions of printed time; the core nature of his work lies in that paradox. He calls himself an “Earther casting the runes”, intending to find an ecology of images that would break what he calls the automatisation of representation. Individually through a never-ending flux of images, Poujois’ performative abstraction subverts the honesty of the mark and the dishonesty of the eye.

“The best way to describe my fascination for storytelling and the magical quality of symbols and images is to recall my first encounter with the ancient Egyptian book of the dead. I remember being seduced by the estranged beauty of the hieroglyphs and the spiritual meaning given to them.
Since then, I have always carried with me a deep interest in spirituality and philology. At the dawn of enlightenment, the word ‘grammar’ (the study of language) evolved into ‘glamour’ (magic spell). Just like a magic spell, forms and signs can create an illusion, one that I’ve imposed myself to find in my creations. Indeed, my work is rooted in magic, storytelling and an obsession for transmission and symbiosis.” (Extract from the artist’s statement)

Poujois has appeared in several group shows in Paris, London, New York, Moscow and Hong Kong. He lives and works in London.

Jan Valik (b. 1987 in Slovakia), currently based in London, received his MA from Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2012. He received the third place in the VUB Foundation Painting Prize ’16 (Slovakia, 2016) and recently he was shortlisted for Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021.

Practice of Jan Valik is tangentially connected to the ideas of painting as a psychological space where relationship between human perception and the visual experience consists of complex ties but also of fine nuances.

The contradiction of the land’s permanence with its volatile and arbitrary borders contrasts deeply with one’s own imagination projected onto it. Fluid and evoking spatial and pictorial ambiguities, his works balance the tensions of simultaneous presence and absence to disrupt (conventional) binaries of abstract and figurative. This is a persistent theme in Valik’s painting practice, underscored by contemporary issues of global displacement and migration, environmental anxiety and posthumanist understanding of histories.

Valik has participated in a number of Artist-in-Residence Programs, notably at BankART (Yokohama, Japan, 2016), Banska Stanica (Slovakia, 2018) and Egon Schiele Art Centre (Cesky Krumlov, Czechia, 2018). In 2020 he joined Turps Studio Programme where he is currently for the second year.
His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and Japan, as well as in group exhibitions in the UK and across Europe (Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, France and Ireland) as well as in China and Japan.