Biennale of Sydney

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist. Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, from 2007 to 2020, he was Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized close to 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011. He is currently Assistant Professor of Arts and Entrepreneurship at the College of Performing Arts at the New School in New York. 

He writes a weekly column titled Beautiful Eccentrics. 

Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. With Dr. Sarah Truman she co-directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a SSHRC partnership grant Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen – a 6 week performance project that explore food soveriegnty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies.  

In 2019 a year-long, whole-of-school, place-based learning project was conceived and managed by Dr Sarita Gálvez. The project for the Moreland Primary School community became known as Creekulum. Creative forces folded together Indigenous perspectives, creativity, stories, walking, making and scientific inquiry led by Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elders Uncle Bill Nicholson and Uncle Dave Wandin, Briony Barr and Gregory Crocetti (Scale Free network), and Angela Foley (Merri Creek Management Committee) who will represent Creekulum 2019.

In Creekulum urban Merri Creek places (on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne) became a classroom that fore fronted appreciation and connection to Country affecting the entire P-6 cohort and school community.

Angela is a non-Indigenous educator committed to interculturally informed eco-literacies for Country, age-appropriate education, and creative learning through a/r/tography (art/research/teaching). Her undergraduate studies in Geography and History and Philosophy of Science were developed in her doctoral work The art of place-making on Wurundjeri Country today (2021). Foley’s leadership roles span 30 years with early years to tertiary level education and research with an array of partners including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, state and local government agencies. She has developed and co-delivered courses for RMIT (Melbourne), Monash University and University of New South Wales. She was the Urban Campaigner for Total Environment Centre (Sydney) (1994-1998) and joined Merri Creek Management Committee (MCMC) in 2000 to develop and deliver waterway and biodiversity education projects in a framework of connecting to Country.