Yuka Oyama is a Japanese-German artist based in Berlin. Oyama’s artistic practice incorporates sculpture, jewellery, video, public interventions, and performances. Oyama is interested in people’s relationship with their material environment, especially the place they call home. She investigates people’s personal stories about home, identity, relationships, heritage, migration, and nomadism through conducting object interviews, where she asks questions about how, when, and why emotional significance emerges to certain personal belongings. Oyama produces wearable sculptures, ‘thing-human hybrids’—objectified humans and personified things—then undertakes performances in theatrical settings, where her collaborators/interviewees unfold their private tales. In her current role as Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design, Gothenburg she leads the Master’s programme in Jewellery Art.

Friederike Fast studied photography in Dortmund followed by cultural, communication, and media studies in Leipzig. She has curated exhibitions at Marta Herford since 2004 as well as art projects in public spaces. She has also worked in a contemporary art gallery in New York, and as a freelance curator organizing international exhibitions. Her work embraces different disciplines as art, architecture and design and is distinguished by a sociopolitical focus and experimental formats such as in Brutal Beauty: Violence and Contemporary Design (2016), The Inner Skin—Art and Shame (2017), Welcome to the Labyrinth—Artistic Deception (2018), and Volatile Dream—Art of the World’s Fair(2019). In 2011, she received the Justus Bier Curators’ Award presented by the Helga Pape Foundation.

Friedemann Yi-Neumann is a research assistant at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen in the BMBF research project “On the materiality of (forced) migration”. Yi-Neumann seeks to understand migration, forced migration, and life in asylum reception by a material culture and home perspective. Yi-Neumann’s curatorial practices include “Hostile Terrain 94,” Former Police Prison Klapperfeld, Frankfurt (forthcoming), “Mobile Welten oder Das Museum unserer transkulturellen Gegenwart [Mobile Worlds or The Museum of our Transcultural Present]“, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.
His main research interests are material culture, forced migration and post-migration, home cultures, asylum reception, dispossessions, museums, households, everyday life, phenomenology, and urban anthropology.

Rachel Brooker (www.rachelbrooker.com/) has taught Yoga since 2003, since 2006 in Berlin, including private lessons, open classes, and retreats. She has also made and produced performance work internationally since 1999. She founded and directs Anima Dance, a dance theater company based in Berlin, and The Field Berlin, a branch of an international artists’ services organization based in NY. She has performed in Spain, England, Germany and the US with Felix Ruckert, Bertram Dhellemes, Marc Bogaerts, among others, and teaches dance in Berlin and internationally.