Mahammed Alimu is a Brussels-based visual artist and photographer. Born in Abu Dhabi, of Somali origin, he picked up on photography and graphic designing as a minor while he was at university.
He discovered his passion for portraits and storytelling after experiencing it with his friend’s point&shoot camera. Moving forward, he mastered image-editing software such as Photoshop and Lightroom, not only to get the best out of reality but also to create his own visual world.
Mirra Markhaëva is a young visual artist born in 1992 in the little republic named Buryatia. The range of her skills includes illustration, graphic design, lettering, painting, and sculpting but mostly she’s passionate about the creation of murals. She has started her studies in ESA 75 in the Graphic Design department and succeeded her jury, but couldn’t be graduated due to the fact that she’s stuck in paperless status. Searching for ways to educate herself any way she joined Open Design Course and then continued with The Post Collective.
Find more here: Mirra’s ArtWorks
Elli Vassalou (1983° Greece) is a Brussels-based multimedia artist, activist, researcher, and performer. She has studied Architecture and Urbanism [M.Arch.] at the Patras School of Architecture – GR and Visual Arts [M.A.], at Autonomous design department, KASK School of Arts, Ghent – BE. She designs and contributes to participatory platforms, actions, and socially engaged projects focusing on public space, collective memory, feminist/decolonial pedagogies, and the commons.
She works hybridicly with film-making, photography, movement, sound, discursive and multi-sensorial tools, site-specific and archival art. She is seeking new ways of polyphonic narrating, assembling bodies, spaces, and objects in a critical and creative dialogue.
She moved to Belgium in 2015 and since then she is working on the project “Syntrofi”, a series of performative lunches about inclusion and exclusion in art & education. Currently, she is active in the co-learning and co-creating platforms School of love, Sasé Istwé, Open Design Course for refugees and asylum seekers, Parallel Perceptions, Decolonize the art school research group, and the Post Collective.
Marcus Bergner is an Australian artist based in Brussels. He is a member of the Australian sound poetry group Arf Arf who has mounted hundreds of performances in Australia and Europe between 1985 and 2015. He was awarded a Ph.D. degree in art history in 2009 from Melbourne University.
Marcus has made over 25 experimental films that have been screened extensively worldwide and a selection of these films is distributed by Light Cone, Paris, and the German Film Archives, Berlin. Recently with the Belgium artist, Myriam van Imschoot, he presented a series of workshops on sound poetry in art schools and institutions in Belgium, France, and Portugal. His most recent solo performance was part of ‘The Autobiographical” at Performance aan de Laan in 2018 in Rotterdam. Due to his pending residence status when moving to Brussels he followed Open Design Course 2018.
Sawsan Maher is a Syrian researcher, activist, philosopher, and designer.
She studied Philosophy and social science and specialized in political science.
Her passion to find communicative tools to connect academic humanities and activism activated her great interest in design and methodology.
Hooman Jalidi is an Iranian artist. He began to study visual arts and music in 2004 during this period he devoted himself to drawing, painting, collage, illustration, pattern design, digital design, fabric manipulation, and textile design. He took part in Center Cultural Omar Khayam (CCOK) with his paintings in the Royal Academy of Fine Art of Brussels and also in the project “Next generation, Please!” festival in Bozar. He has presented his work in various exhibitions including at the WIELS Art Book Fair 2017 in Brussels as well as taking part in the “this being human is a guest house” exhibition at Cinemaximilian. He is also a member of Cinemaximiliaan and Open Design Course.
