Simon Rees is the head of curatorial development at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts. He has held senior positions in national exhibiting institutions in Australia, New Zealand and Lithuania. And in 2007 he was commissioner of the award winning Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas. Rees travels regularly to deliver lectures on contemporary art from former-communist Europe and contributes writing to a range of international publications. Photo: Zane Oborenko

Sabine Breitwieser is the Director of the Museum der Moderne – Rupertinum Salzburg (since September 2013). Previously she was the Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Founding Director and Chief Curator of the Generali Foundation in Vienna.

Mayssa Fattouh is the artistic director and curator of the Katara Art Center, a ground level platform for contemporary art and the creative industries emerging from the Gulf. She has developed projects, exhibitions, and collections across the Arab region, and has participated in juries and talks around independent platforms, residencies and the critique of the ideology of institutions, and her name has appeared on the pages of catalogues and numerous arts publications.

Aida Mahmudova is the founder and director of YARAT and an artist. She creates multimedia sculpture, paintings and installations; many of which recall memories of specific places ora sense of place. One of Mahmudova’s concerns is the rapid modernisation of Azerbaijan since the republic gained independence from the Soviet Union. In 2011, Mahmudova founded YARAT to promote Azeri contemporary art.

Erzen Shkololli (Director of the National Gallery of Kosovo)
Erzen Shkololli has been one of the eminent members of Kosovo’s new art scene. Internationally acclaimed, he has also been an active mediator and organizer of the inter-cultural and intra-cultural dialogue between Kosovo and the world, as well as within the Kosovo art scene. In September 2011 Erzen Shkololli, has been appointed as a new director National Gallery of Kosovo. He has curated numerous international exhibitions of contemporary art with some of the most important international and Albanian artists of our times. Erzen Shkolloli is a commissioner of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the 55th National Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2013. This marks a historic moment for Kosovo, as the country is deputing for the first time at the world’s foremost art event.
Photo by Enver Bylykbashi

Jarosław Suchan a director of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. Art historian, critic and curator of many exhibitions of Polish and international art. He is also an author of numerous texts about modern and contemporary art, and editor or co-editor of the books about Władysław Strzemiński, Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski and Polish-Jewish avant-garde in interwar Poland.

Adib Dada (collector and architect) Through his Beirut-based design practice the OtherDada, Adib explores the space between architecture, biomimicry, technology and art. He reconsiders the world differently: like a system of relationships, exchanges, and not like a system of isolated objects and actions. He views sustainability as a knowledgeable and happy relationship towards the pleasure of an environment with the potential to be transformed, to produce new reasons to inhabit.

Christoph Draeger is an internationally known conceptual artist who lives in New York and Vienna. In 1996/7, he moved from Brussels to New York for a one year-scholarship at P.S.1′s International Studio Program. Draeger’s projects take form in installation, video, and photo-based media to explore issues pertaining to disaster and media-saturated culture. His latest film, Hippie Movie (53 min, 2008), was featured in MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight exhibition in New York, in February 2010. In 2011, he won the renowned “Prix de Mer” award for best exhibition at West Gallery in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Rron Dalladaku (collector) after earning his Masters in Economics and Social Studies at the WU Wien decided to rediscover his roots in Kosovo by perusing his first career steps there. After working as an economist in various EU institutions and as a lecturer of economics, he decided to make the step into self employment and continue working as freelance economic consultant. It was then when he decided to start an art collection, but not without linking it strongly to his economic ideas of the market and consumption. He is currently continuing the experiment by developing his consultancy SSD Consulting and trying himself out as an entrepreneur, all this of course also in order to expand his art collection.