Curators

Anastasia Patsey is a curator based in St Petersburg, Russia, who works internationally. She graduated from the Saint Petersburg State Stieglitz Art Academy (Department of History and Theory of Visual Arts) and holds a dual MA in curatorial studies from Saint Petersburg State University and Bard College, NY. Since 2012 she has been a permanent member of the curatorial team at Pushkinskaya-10 – the oldest non-governmental cultural institution in Russia, founded in 1989.

She also works as an independent curator in collaboration with art institutions in Russia and abroad. In 2013 Patsey founded the 2,04 gallery, which functions as a shared art laboratory and project incubator for emerging art professionals. She is co-founder and board member of the Paideia School for the Interpretation of Contemporary Art, launched in 2014. Since 2012 she has been the director of the St Petersburg International Art Residency (SPAR), which regularly hosts

interdisciplinary art professionals from all over the world. In the autumn of 2015, Patsey was offered the position of director at St Petersburg’s Museum of Non-Conformist Art (MoNA), which she currently holds. She is regularly invited as a guest lecturer by the National Research University Higher School of Economics, the Pushkin Leningrad State University and the St Petersburg State Polytechnic University.

Antti Tenetz is a visual artist. His works are situated at the interface between media arts, activism, bio arts and urban art. In his works he combines and fearlessly uses different forms of expression, media, technological platforms and materials. His focus is on multi-disciplinary and multi-artistic cooperation between art and science, he often uses technologies such as drones and satellite tracking, and he has made digital representations of animal sensory systems.

Tenetz approaches and uses his art across these hybrid systems to bring new themes to discussions across the arts and science concerning experience, our relationships with nature, privacy, law, landscape and natural values, other species, and the formation, respect and survival of our living space. Tenetz is one of the founders and the head of the curatorial team for Pohjavirta, the Finnish Cultural Foundations project.

He currently works as a regional artist of biological arts for the Art Promotion Centre of Finland. Tenetz’s works and cooperation projects have been exhibited in Finland and internationally, including at the Istanbul Biennale parallel programme (2017); Tate Exchange at the Tate Modern, London (2017); Venice Biennale (2013-2015); Lumipalloefekti exhibitions, X-Border, ISEA Istanbul, Science Gallery, Pan-Barentz, and e-mobiLArt. He has also won three national snow-sculpting competitions.

Tenetz is a founding member of the Subzero group (2012), he leads the Public Art Purchase Committee, he is a member of the board of the Northern Osthrobothnia Cultural Fund, and he was chair of the board of the Finnish Bioart Society between 2011 and 2013.

Merja Briñón is an arts manager and visual artist who lives and works in Ii, Finland and Madrid, Spain. Currently she is an artistic director for Art Ii Biennial and an executive director of KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre. Previously she has worked as a regional artist at Arts Promotion Centre Finland and as an arts manager at the Artists’ Association of Lapland. She holds an MA in arts management from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

In her artistic work, Merja Briñón explores different phenomena such as perceptions of time, the space state between the visible and invisible world, liminality, and the aesthetics of silence and emptiness. She is currently studying for a doctorate at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lapland.

She has also studied visual arts at Universidad de La Laguna, Spain, and qualified as a graphic artist and illustrator from Kuopio Academy of Design. Her works have been displayed in several national and international solo and group exhibitions.