SPEAKERS 2024

Co-founder and Creative Director of Libros Mutantes Madrid Art Book Fair. He is also dedicated to creative research and art direction. He collaborates permanently with artists, curators, photographers, producers and institutions to give life to all kinds of projects, offering a wide range of services aimed at providing global coverage to the image and communication needs of brands, institutions or artists.

Among the catalogues and books published in connection with the Libros Mutantes project, the following are worth mentioning: El Libro Mutante, NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, New York, 2013: Index Art Book Fair, Zapopan Art Museum, Guadalajara, 2014, Atlas: Spain Focus, LA Art Book Fair, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2016, Print Forever, Melbourne Art Book Fair, NGV International, Melbourne, 2017 and Editorial Encounter, ARTBO Weekend, Chamber of Commerce, Bogota 2018.

Founded by Rina Zavagli, Galerie Martel was born in 2008 with the desire to support artists who share the same ambition: to explore new territories and break down the boundaries that separate various modes of expression (illustration, painting, comics, animation...). It is one of the very first galleries to assert the importance of comics and to promote them in its exhibitions as a full-fledged art form.

Concerned with representing the richness and diversity of graphic arts, Galerie Martel has supported internationally renowned artists such as Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, and Lorenzo Mattotti. However, it has also focused on giving a place to creators from all walks of life. By highlighting the works of pioneers such as Dominique Goblet, Anke Feuchtenberger, or Nina Bunjevac, as well as emerging talents like Emil Ferris, Brecht Evens, and Yann Kebbi, the gallery strives to cover a wide stylistic and narrative spectrum. These multiple collaborations have allowed it to develop a unique identity while strengthening the continuum of graphic arts by participating in creating a new horizon, free of all compartmentalization.
Since its creation, the gallery has participated in important art fairs such as Drawing Now and Art Paris in France. It has managed to stimulate the creativity of its artists by giving them the opportunity to renew their propositions.

Over the years, Galerie Martel has collaborated on projects developed by international museums such as the Centre Pompidou (France), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Museo Santa Giulia di Brescia, the Palazzo Blue (Italy), and the Cartoon Museum Basel (Switzerland); as well as with various institutions: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Bibliothèque publique d’information, the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image d’Angoulême, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. With an ever-stronger identity in the field of contemporary drawing, the gallery will inaugurate a new exhibition space in September 2024 in Brussels, a major capital of contemporary art.

With little formal schooling and married into a labouring family when she was very young, Sangita Jogi lives in Rajasthan, in a traditional patriarchal set-up. As a young mother and daughter-in-law, she is kept busy with household chores—her time is not her own and her mobility curtailed. Despite all this, Sangita has discovered an extraordinary creative outlet for herself: she draws. The women she conjures up relish everything: the warmth of female friendship, the excitement of far-off places, the energy of sport, the thrill of performance, the pleasures of dressing up, the hedonism of parties...

Shradha Kochhar is a textile artist best known for her home spun and hand knitted ‘khadi’ sculptures using ‘kala cotton’. Her work is at an intersection of material memory, cotton legacies and intergenerational healing. Focused on generating a physical archive of personal and collective south Asian narratives, her art is linked to women’s work, invisible labour and loss. Her work has been shown at the Melbourne Museum and Houston Centre for Contemporary Craft among others and is featured in New York Times, British Vogue, Architectural Digest, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and others.

Sliman Mansour (Arabic: سليمان منصور, b. Birzeit, British Mandate of Palestine, 1947) is a Palestinian painter and writer, considered an important figure in Palestinian art. He has been described as an artist of the Intifada, whose work provides visual expressions of the Palestinian cultural concept of sumud (in English: constancy, steadfastness). He studied fine art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem from 1967 to 1970 and has been active in Palestinian artistic life since that time. Like other Palestinian painters living in the occupied territories, he has participated in several group exhibitions with Israeli artists. After the outbreak of the First Intifada, he was arrested and several of his works were confiscated for using the colours of the Palestinian flag in his paintings (green, black and red), which was illegal under Israeli law.
From 1986 to 1990 he was director of the League of Palestinian Artists, an organisation dedicated to the promotion of local artists and the organisation of exhibitions.
In 1988 he produced a series of eight abstract paintings evoking four Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 war (Yibna, Yalo, Imwas and Bayt Dajan), and participated in Dana Bartelt's exhibition (and subsequent book) Both Sides of Peace: Israeli and Palestinian Political Poster Art, published in 1998 by the Raleigh Contemporary Art Museum, North Carolina. In those years, he was one of the first Palestinian painters to move away from painting and to begin experimenting with non-traditional plastic materials, such as clay and straw, taken as a metaphor for the soil of his homeland.
His works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in many countries including Israel, Japan, Russia, Norway, the United States, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Egypt where his work I Ismail won the Grand Prize at the Cairo Biennial in 1998. He is a founding member and director of the Al-Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem.

During the first part of her career she dedicated herself to illustrating books for different publishers around the world while making webcomics independently. In 2015 her first comic book "La pelusa de los días" was published in Spain.

She was part of the Historietas Reales and Chicks on Comics collectives. She is a founding member of the Línea Peluda collective.

In 2019 she won the FNAC-Salamandra award with her graphic novel project "Naftalina". Later that same book would be awarded the Fauve Prix Public France TV during the Angoulême 2023 festival.

An internationally renowned cartoonist, he has dialogued with the languages of theatre, dance, cinema, music and graphic arts since his beginnings. He has a prolific collaboration with the periodical press and publishing industry in Italy and abroad (Frigidaire, Il manifesto, Esquire, Liberation, Les Inrockuptibles,
Internazionale, et al). From 2003 to 2008 he edited Bianco e nero, the magazine of the C.S.C. of Rome. His works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Russia, Japan, Korea, Europe and Italy.

He has a long-standing relationship with the D406 Gallery in Modena and the Galerie Martel in Paris. In 1995 he was one of the founders of SQUADRO - Stamperia and Art Gallery in Bologna, of which he curated numerous exhibitions and editions until 2023. Among the publications translated abroad are Anita (Freon, 1998; Sinsentido, Avantverlag; Kappa, Bologna), based on texts by Gabriella Giandelli; The Story of the Bear (Futuropolis, Avant-Verlag, Quodlibet 2014); My mother is called Loredana (Fidèle éditions, Quodlibet 2016); Bartleby le scribe, drawings for the tale by H.Melville (Futuropolis-Gallimard 2021).

He has signed coordinated image projects and editorial series such as the written comic book drawings for MANO magazine (ADI selection, Design Index 2000 and Compasso d`Oro Award 2001) with Giovanna Anceschi; the graphic project for the MALAGOLA School (Teatro delle Albe); the recent SIGARETTEN publishing house (2020) In the performing arts, Stefano Ricci has crossed the perimeter of drawing to reach scenography, author, installation and sound creations. His drawing and live music performances stand out for their ability to bring out, through improvisation, a play of references between paper and instrument. After Udine, Hamburg, Angoulême, since 2021 he is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.

Born in the village Van in Rajasthan, Tejubehan is from the Paua tradition of bards and mystic singers. When she was 10, a terrible drought and famine forced the family to move away from the village in search of food and a living. They wandered around until they reached Ahmedabad, where the family lived in a makeshift slum. Tejubehan met the artist and singer Ganesh Jogi there, and the two became childhood friends, finally marrying when she was 16. It is very unusual for women in their community to sing or otherwise participate in public life.

Tejubehan has a fine voice, and encouraged by her husband Ganesh, she began singing along with him. They performed in restaurants and on the streets. Like Ganesh, she met the well-known artist Haku Shah. Tejubehan initially copied her husband's style of art, but then learned to sit by herself and evolve her own style. From the beginning, she loved drawing women, and this has been her inspiration ever since. In 2020, her first book, Rear Window, was published by Ansten Press. Rear Window is an illustrated anthology observing life in the converted old Arsenal Stadium, during London lockdown. A series of illustrated short stories.