Beate Söntgen is Professor of Art History and was Vice President of Research and Humanities in the Presidential Committee (2012–2019) at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. She heads, together with Erich Hörl, the research training group “Cultures of Critique” as well as, together with Susanne Leeb, “PriMus – PhD in Museums.” Before joining the Leuphana University in 2011, she held a professorship in Art History at Ruhr University of Bochum (2003–2011), where she directed, together with Ulrike Groos, the postgraduate program “Art Criticism and Curatorial Knowledge,” and was Laurenz Professor for Contemporary Art at the University of Basel, Switzerland (2002–2003). She is a member of the Advisory Board of Texte zur Kunst and of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation. She has published on modern and contemporary art, art theory and art criticism. She co-edited Judgement Practices in the Artistic Field (in print, München: Edition Metzler, 2020), was guest editor of Der Ort der Kunst­kritik in der Kunstgeschichte for the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (78:1, 2015), and with Ewa Lajer-Burchardt co-edited Interiors and Interiority (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2016).

Katharina Tchelidze is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Art History at Leuphana University in Lueneburg (Germany). From 2024-2025 she is a Visiting Researcher at the Ilia State University, Tbilisi (Georgia). Her research interests include history and theory of modern art distribution, historiography of artistic practices, and transcultural entanglements in 20th art. In her dissertation project H2SO4 - Formations of the Avant-Gardes, she examines artistic practices of intervention in the 1920s in Georgia. The work focuses on the historical reconstruction of the practice of performances that deal with the olfactory.

Julian Volz is a curator, and research associate in the graduate programme Cultures of Critique at Leuphana University Lüneburg. In his dissertation, he is researching contemporary artistic practices that are referring to the (cultural-)revolutionary era of independent Algeria in the 1960s. Other research interests include Third Cinema, Queer Contemporary Art from the SWANA region and modernist Art in North Africa. Together with Meike Gerber and Emanuel Kapfinger he edited an anthology on Hans-Jürgen Krahl (2022), who was one of the leading theorists of the movement of 1968 in West Germany.