Palace Rendezvous

Kateryna Mishchenko (*Poltava, 1984) is a writer, curator and co-founder of Medusa, an independent Ukrainian publishing house. She taught literature at the Kyiv National Linguistic University and worked as a translator in the field of human rights. Her essays have been published in national and international anthologies and magazines, as well as in the book “Ukrainian Night”. Her books are The Book of Kyiv / Kyjiwska knyzka (2015) and Aus dem Nebel des Kriegs. The Present of Ukraine” (2023). She is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Janka Vogel (born in 1988). Studied Educational Science and Protestant Theology in Kassel, Marburg and Sibiu (Romania). Graduate studies in Southeastern European Studies with focus on Romania / Moldova at University of Jena; publications and research on the Romanian diaspora in Berlin. Currently Head of the Social and Migration Affairs Department at a mayor welfare organization in Berlin. Lecturer at FSU Jena and BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. Member of the Southeast Europe Association, Board member of the German Romanian Society and member of the HepMig Advisory Board of the Robert Koch Institute.

Voin de Voin (born 1978) lives and works in Sofia. He completed his master’s degree at Das Arts – Institute of the Advance Research in the Performing Arts and his bachelor’s degree at Gerrit Rietveld Academy and also obtained a diploma from SNDO- School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam.

Voin de Voin works in various fields of visual arts, from performance to installation, incorporating his research on collective rituals and human behavior, gender studies, ancestral knowledge, psychogeography, sociology, and parapsychology. He celebrates art as activism. His work has been shown in institutional and non-institutional spaces, art fairs, performance venues, festivals, museums, public spaces, and nature around the world.

In 2023, his anti-war activities in Bulgaria confronted various civil society constructs such as marriage, prison, and media censorship. He organizes and curates SAW Sofia Art Week, which has been held annually since 2016.

Haruna Honcoop is a Czech-Japanese filmmaker, graduate of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), where she is currently a PhD candidate writing about Chinese independent documentary film. Her film essay Built to Last – Relics of Communist-Era Architecture (2017) was awarded the Archfilm Lund festival prize. Her short film True or False (2016) won a prize at This Human World festival in Vienna. Olympic Halftime documentary film that deals with the architecture and urbanism of Olympic cities in Beijing, Tokyo, Paris and Athens and other fiction film made in German-French co-production Annexions will both premiered in 2023. She is currently developing a new documentary film I Am Taiwanese about the political identities of Taiwanese and Eastern Europeans.

Paul Jeute, born in 1981, studied history and art history in Dresden, Halle, Prague and Sibiu, then literary writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig.
During his studies, he wrote for the cultural editorial departments of the Prager Zeitung and the Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung in Romania. His master’s thesis was published in 2013 in revised form with the title Bucharest. Myths, Destruction, Reconstruction. An Architectural History of the City. He has been awarded scholarships for his literary texts in Schöppingen, Stuttgart, Šamorín (Slovakia) and Jagniątków (Poland), among others. He currently works for the Adult Education Center Bad Segeberg and as a freelance author and cultural historian.

Lubomir Peytchev, born in 1980 in Sofia, Bulgaria after attending a German high school in Sofia, moves to Germany to study. After studying law at the FU and HU Berlin, he switches to architecture at the TU Berlin. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree, he studied for a year at the TU Delft, where he wrote his master’s thesis on the underground remains of the mausoleum of dictator Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia, which was blown up in 1999. After graduating, Peytchev worked as an architect in Berlin, and since 2019 he has been back in Sofia. Since 2018 he has been a member of the Bulgarian branch of Docomomo – International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement.

Kristine Andra Avram is a researcher at the Center for Conflict Research at the Philipps University of Marburg. Her dissertation, submitted in 2022, on attributions of responsibility in the context of collective violence and state repression using Romania as a case study, received the Dissertation Award of the Southeast Europe Society and an award from the Forum Friedenspsychologie. Her research focuses on (inter)national criminal justice and transitional justice, the sociology of law, and narrative approaches and analyses.

Dr. Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London (UCL). His first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and he is currently completing his second book, Recolonial Russia: Architecture, Ecology and Violence in Putin’s Paradise, forthcoming in 2025 with MIT Press. He is director of the FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity at UCL; and co-convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics), a seminar and events platform also based at UCL.

Michaela Lakova (b. 1987, Sofia) is a visual artist and researcher based in Rotterdam. Her work includes video and installations, and the themes she explores are erasure and memory. She holds a BA in Stage and Screen Design from National Academy for Theater and Film (2011), Sofia, Bulgaria and an MA in Design and Communication from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2014). Selected group exhibitions include: Unknown Gods, w/ Voin de Voin, Clearing gallery (New York City, 2023); Fabrication of dreams, forplay society parallel program of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, (Kochi, India, 2023) or Altered Voices group show at Doza gallery, (Sofia, 2022). Michaela is also a freelance videographer and video editor working primarily in the cultural sector in the Netherlands. In 2022 she was part of the organization of Sofia Art Week vol. 5 / RE-SPIRIT TRANSPIRIT.

Pavel Karous (b. 1979) is a sculptor, teacher and publicist in the field of visual arts in public space. He graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and then worked there as an assistant. In his sculptural work, he mainly deals with the relationship between geometry and human society, abstraction and realism. He is dedicated to official, unofficial and illegal artistic interventions in urban public space with socially and politically engaged content. With his long-term project “Aliens and Herons”, he documents visual art in public space from the period of real socialism. In 2019, his second publication “Hotel Praha” was published, about a defunct unique building that served the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and became a victim of privatization by the richest oligarch in the Czech republic. Currently, you can visit his author’s exhibition at the “Střecha social cooperative” in Prague, at the “Moon Gallery” in Liberec, or see his work at the joint exhibition “Dystopian Monuments” at the Turčianská Gallery in Martin in Slovakia Republic or in the Gallery of Modern Art in Roudnice nad Labem.

Evgeniya Molyar is an art historian. She studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. The focus of her work is the cultural heritage of the Soviet era, especially monumental art. She curated a project entitled SOVIET MOSAICS IN UKRAINE. As a member of the self-organised initiative DE NE DE, she researches and preserves the uncomfortable cultural heritage in the context of ideological changes. Molyar is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. Her special interest here is researching contemporary artistic practices in Ukrainian art that turn to the cultural heritage of the Soviet era.

Dr. Robert Grünbaum (born 1967 in Leipzig); from 1989-1994 studied political science, contemporary history and German language and literature at the University of Mannheim; 1999 doctorate (Dr. phil.) at the Technical University of Chemnitz; 1994-2000 research associate at the Chair of Political Science at the University of Bayreuth; since 2000 head of the Department of Political Education, since 2001 also deputy director of the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany. Author and editor of numerous publications on the history of the GDR, on GDR cultural history, and on German unity.

Thomas Beutelschmidt – born in Frankfurt/Main, lives and works in Berlin;
freelance publicist, curator and director; numerous journalistic works and publications, events and exhibition projects. Studied German, political science and art history in Freiburg and Berlin; teacher training (Stud. Ass.) and doctorate (Dr. Phil.);
Media training at the AV-Zentrum of the Päd. Hochschule Berlin; editorial assistant at Sender Freies Berlin; research assistant and lecturer at the FU, TU and HU Berlin; head of DFG projects on GDR media history at the HU Berlin and the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung.