Darta Sidere (Artist in Residence during July 2021)
Darta Sidere is a Latvian artist, currently living and working in Paris. She holds a MFA from Beaux Arts de Paris (2019). Darta has participated in several group exhibitions in France, Italy and Latvia, amongst other countries. Selection of recent shows : Belonging, Sailors Home in Limerick (2022), L’eau et les rêves, Palais des Beaux-arts in Paris (2021), tesseles//pixels, the Louvre Museum in Paris (2018) and The Whole and the Part, the Suki festival in the Yanaka district of
Tokyo (2017). Her artistic research is oriented towards tactility. Currently, she is working on the idea of what a space of touch could be. Physicality, which is grounded in time and space. It is a work about the immersion in matter and going towards the shapeless.
Maja Babič Košir (Artist in Residence during May 2022)
Maja Babič Košir (1978) lives and works between Ljubljana (Sl) and Porto (PT). She obtained her Master’s degree in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and completed her postgraduate studies in creative illustration and visual communication techniques at the EINA University School of Design and Art in Barcelona. Her creative process is based on the principle of meditative introspection. She draws subject matter from her environment and personal history, especially from her rich family archives holding a wide array of materials; this enables her to use intuitive artistic interventions in translating her intimate stories into a visual form. She has participated in numerous independent and group exhibitions, especially in Portugal and Spain, where she lived and worked for almost ten years. She takes regular part in international contemporary art fairs, for example, SWAB Barcelona Art Fair in 2020 and Vienna Contemporary in 2019, 2020, and 2021. In 2021, she also debuted at VOLTA Art Fair in Basel. In 2022, she participated in the new Vienna art fair SPARK and is preparing her first joint exhibition with the fellow artist Nevena Aleksovski at RAVNIKAR GALLERY SPACE.
Erik Smith (Artist in Residence during May 2022)
Erik Smith, born in Boston (US), studied comparative literature and art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Middlebury College in Florence, Italy. He lived and began exhibiting professionally in San Francisco during the 90s and moved to Berlin, Germany in 2003, where he has been based as an artist for the past two decades. Erik Smith has exhibited widely in Germany, Europe, and the US, including Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum, Berlin (DE), SculptureCenter, LIC, (NY) and De Appel Center for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (NL). Recent solo exhibitions include Un-buildings (2021), Galerie Stadtpark, Krems, AT; Displacements (2019), Errant Sound, Berlin, DE; and Psychoarcheology (2017), Fragmenta, Malta. Most recently, Smith was a guest at AIR–Artists in Residence Niederösterreich, AT in 2021.
Erik Smith’s work is about and emerges from investigations of place. Central to his approach is the idea that given sites, structures, the built environment, are defined as much by their immediate, present status as by their peripheral or unseen—spatial, historical, political—characteristics. In seeking to give tangible form to latent or beneath-the-surface features, he is interested in calling into question what is perceived as given and real, and making conscious the subliminal, hidden, or even “repressed” dimensions of such spaces and places.
Nadine Baldow (Artist in Residence during June 2022)
Nadine Baldow (b. 1990, Dresden, Germany) is a visual artist based in Berlin. Her work predominantly addresses the complex relationship between “culture“ and “nature“ and their ongoing impact on each other. Her current practice focuses on the Anthropocene, the impact and history of human traces on the planet. She studied with professor Eberhard Bosslet, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden after completing a wood carving apprenticeship in the Alps – she completed her studies as Bosslet’s Meisterschüler. – Baldow’s work has been exhibited in Switzerland, Ireland, Malta, Germany, Poland, Czech, the Netherlands, South Korea, and India. Numerous galleries and museums such as Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, Urban Nation – Museum for Urban Contemporary Arts Berlin, Valletta Contemporary (Malta), Leitrim Sculpture Centre (Ireland), Halle 14 – Center for Contemporary Arts (Leipzig, Germany) have featured her work in the past. She has been represented on several art fairs, such as the Contemporary Art Week Delhi, OSTRALE – the International Exhibition for Contemporary Art in Dresden, and the ArtFair Düsseldorf.
Ira Grünberger (Artist in Residence during June 2022)
Ira Grünberger (born 1997 in Austria) is currently based in The Hague (NL) where she studies Photography at the Royal Academy of Art. Prior to her current studies she completed a Diploma of Photography from the Institute of Graphic Arts in Vienna. Among other exhibitions, her work has been shown at Foam Amsterdam, Fotohof Salzburg, Fotogalerie Wien and Athens Photo Festival. She is also a co-founder of the artist collective ECLECT Lab.
Her work is driven by the relation between human and more–than–human and is based on the concept of new materialism. This typically leads to the collection of artificial and organic materials such as metal, glass, clay or stone which she uses to re/construct imagery, sculpture and installation. The gathered materials become collaborators with whom she addresses topics including memory, time, and de-construction, whilst also reflecting on human emotions and experiences. Her work revolves around the idea of fusing transformation and permanence, with the goal of challenging our systems binary and hierarchical perspectives. By referring to the other, the non–human, she aims to create a space in which feeling for the other becomes possible, leading to a deeper ecological understanding.
Stef Veldhuis (Artist in Residence during July 2022)
Stef Veldhuis (b. 1992) is an artist based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. After receiving the Bachelor of Music at the Utrecht School of Arts, Veldhuis has furthered his practice through collaborations and artist-in-residencies at Akiyoshidai International Art Village (JP), The NIOZ Changing Oceans Expedition (NL/SXM), Buitenplaats Doornburgh (NL), and Oerol/Waddenacademie (NL).
The dichotomy of the artificial and the natural is central to Stef Veldhuis work. He is fascinated by the ways in which nature resists human action. Through visual and auditory projects, he creates new perspectives to counterpoint our anthropocentric thinking. His works are meditative explorations of natural materials and phenomena, showcasing other-than-human modes of time.
Benedek Regős (Artist in Residence during July 2022)
Benedek Regős (*1989, Hungary) is a Budapest-based artist. He examines the role of photography as a medium and its impact on human culture from several aspects. With his poetic and symbolic pictorial language, combining different genres and technical characteristics, he reflects on the nature of photography, which is always based on observing the cultural imprints of architecture, history, science, built and material heritage.
Benedek Regős graduated with MA Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest in 2017. Additionally he studied at the Photography Studio of the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design in Prague and at Kaposvár University. In 2022, he had his second solo show in Pince (Budapest) and in recent years, he exhibited at several group shows, including in Fotograf Gallery (Prague), Fotogalerie Wien and IG Bildende Kunst in Vienna, Capa Center and Austrian Cultural Forum in Budapest, OFF Festival in Bratislava. He is a member of the Studio of Young Artists’ Association (FKSE) and he was the head of the Studio of Young Photographers Hungary (FFS) between 2017 and 2020.
Nina Kurtela (Artist in Residence during August 2022)
Nina Kurtela (born in Zagreb) is a visual artist and a dance maker who works with choreographic and site-specific practices. She studied “Dance, Context, Choreography” at the HZT, Universität der Künste Berlin and holds a diploma (MFA) in visual arts and art education from The Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb. Through her conceptual, often immaterial and time-based art practice she works with methodologies of endurance, presence, perseverance, rituals, daily practice and matter of chance while questioning notions of monetary values, immaterial labor, identity, belonging, home and its fictions. She creates works across a wide range of forms; namely video, installation, performance, choreography and dance. Her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, theater, dance and film festivals, and in public space: KW Berlin, MUMOK Vienna, MSU Zagreb, HKW Berlin, 104 Paris, Tokyo Opera City Gallery, MMOMA Moscow, Royal Albert Hall London, Ars Aevi Sarajevo, Tanz Im August Berlin, Transmediale Berlin, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Survival Kit Riga, X-border Art Biennial Sweden etc. Nina Kurtela is a founder of Zagreb based non-profit art organization JAGODA – practice and research based platform for expanding the field of discursive thinking, exchange, sharing and caring within innovative process-based art practices.
Anja Slapnicar (Artist in Residence during August 2022)
Anja Slapnicar is a ceramic artist, based in Ljubljana (Slovenia). She completed her Master degree in Geodesy, with a major in Cartography, which gave her tools to search for clay. Slovenia has an intersection of several geological surfaces, which enables Slapnicar to source clay from its diverse territory. She forages clay as a sustenance for creating functional ceramics. Slapnicar tends to leave a fingerprint of a specific location in her work. Her sense to feel materials around her are heightened and it is this very quality that she wishes to bring to her clients. She is especially drawn towards wood fire technique, which follows the example of the rock cycle; fire melts the fragmented particles – clay – back into a rock-like material. To Slapnicar, clay carries a story, a story that dates millions of years back. It can tell us whether it was under the sea, high in the mountains, ages and places it travelled from and what life it carried. It is this story of our ancestors, connection to the land of the clay, that Slapnicar wishes to convey through her ceramic objects. Slapnicar has exhibited at various events internationally, such as Taiwan Chawan Festival Miaoli, Taiwan (2019), Chawan Expo Miaoli, Taiwan (2016 ), Lines of Earth Miaoli, Taiwan (2016, Chawan Expo Hemiksem, Belgium (2015), Chawan Expo Singapore, Singapore (2014).
Sandra Lieners (Artist in Residence during September 2021)
Sandra Lieners lives and works in Luxembourg. She studied in Vienna (Austria) at the Die Angewandte – Universität für angewandte Kunst and in Florence (Italy) at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Since 2013, her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions in Luxembourg and abroad. She has taken part in several residencies ( SVA New York, Kulturkontakt Vienna) and her work has been awarded various prizes, including the Pierre Werner Prize from the Luxembourg Art Circle. Her paintings are transcribed impressions of observations of the world surrounding her, presented in series of works via a slow and long process of painting. Lieners works with classic notions of painting such as materiality of paint, visualization of light or art history. She confronts them with references to contemporary societies and digital aesthetics. Apparently opposite poles enter into dialogue and present themselves under the gaze of the artist, as a testimony to sensitivity.
Jiajia Qi (Artist in Residence during August 2021)
Jiajia Qi is a Chinese artist based in The Hague (NL). She graduated from the Interactive Media Design department of the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (2018) and studied in the Interior Architecture design department at Tokyo Zokei University in Tokyo (2017). She also holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Zhejiang A&F University in China (2011). Her work is centered on transforming the familiar surroundings into something unfamiliar by precisely measuring, calculating and placing a given spatial setting. Jiajia Qi has presented her work at international venues, including Billytown Gallery, The Hague, NL (2022), MAMA showroom, Rotterdam, NL (2021), West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, CN (2020), Luo Zhongli Art Museum, Chongqing, CN (2020), Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, KR (2020), Het Wilde Weten Gallery, Rotterdam, NL (2020), Photo Vienna 2019, Vienna, AT (2019) and Moria Stichting Gallery, Utrecht, NL (2018).