She combines elements of music, performance and fine arts, with an open mind towards new materials, styles and expressions. Szmytka embeds art in life, and her works are explicitly concerned with presenttime features of human life, including society and identity, communication and media, living and inhabiting time and space. Her works often play with idioms of the millennial generation, while using tools of advertisement, entertainment and commerce – often with clear references to modern pop culture. Beside her solo activities, Jagoda Szmytka is founder and one of the leading figures of the cultural activism group “PLAY Plattform” and founder of the art-pop band “ENTER Collecthief”. JEPPE ERNST (DK, 1985) is currently doing his postgraduate studies in composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. Ernst’s compositions often ask the most fundamental questions about the phenomenon of music. In his consistent perspective, music is not sound and /or tones, but movements and (social) interaction in the fullest sense. Thus, his music expresses an exploration of “the action of music” from different angles. KATRINE MØLLEBÆK (DA, 1983) is a musician, composer and cultural entrepreneur. As a composer she has worked with artists such as Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen and Heidi Hove. She is also the founder and artistic director of the festival LAK, which seeks to represent and explore Nordic sound art outside of the institutional and traditional frames of art. Besides LAK, Katrine Møllebæk has worked with a wide range of festivals and exhibitions, among others at the Venice Biennale, Wundergrund, Copenhagen Jazz Festival and Roskilde Festival. LENIO LIATSOU (GR, 1975) is a Greek pianist who specializes in new music, having performed countless premieres of new works. She has worked with composers such as Peter Eotvos, Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer, Manos Tsangaris and Georges Aperghis. Her work and interests, however, are particularly focused on the development of new forms of art which leads her to work not only with composers, but also with directors, actors and dancers. She is a founding member and pianist of the Greek contemporary music ensemble dissonArt.
LEO HOFMANN (CH/DE, 1986) composes and performs works for music theatre, sound per formances and experiments with audio drama formats. His works focus on the voice as an aural and performative event, as well as the search for haptics and physicality in music. Since Leo Hofmann finished his Master in Contemporary Arts Practice and graduated from the University of Bern, he has composed and created a wide range of works within experimental music theatre, including the piece UNGEDULD , and he has received several prizes and grants, including the Giga-Hertz Encouragement Prize of ZKM Karlsruhe and the Medienkunstpreis Oberrhein. With the system wind.attach (2011), sensuous headphones with both sound and air for the ears, and the work Pachinko Playalong (2014), an audiovisual performance, Leo Hofmann has explored new (digital) music interfaces; an artistic area of interest, characteristic of many of his works. MANOS TSANGARIS (DE, 1956) is a composer, drummer and installation artist, and one of the most important representatives of experimental music theatre of today. His compositions are internationally acclaimed and have been performed at many renowned festivals and theatres. In 2009 he was appointed professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, and in the same year, elected as a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin (director of the music department in 2011). He has been a member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste since 2010. Since the 1970s, Manos Tsangaris has repeatedly taken performance conditions to be an essential theme of his compositional work, expressed in different artistic formats. He has always worked to expand and refine the use of media in his composition and craft, and his main focus is on how various human areas of perception are linked to one another in art works – and how they can be developed so as to converge. MARTIN ANDREAS HIRSTI-KVAM (NO, 1991) is a composer who works in different fields of expression, from acoustic ‘concert music’ to more conceptually oriented works using electronics and visual elements – always in an attempt to give new perspectives to what constitutes music, listening and live performance.