Bora Baboçi, Albania

Five Disappeared Kilometers

Biography:

Bora Baboçi was born in 1988 in Tirana. She lives and works in Tirana. She has a background in architecture and spatial research and her artistic works range from drawings to performative installations. She uses real or fictionalised settings, from the domestic to the environmental scale, to disentangle our perceptions of physical space and how it alters our emotions, behaviours and existential experience. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions and exhibitions including Manifesta Biennale (Kosovo, 2022), Mediterranea Biennale (San Marino, 2021), The National Gallery of Albania (2021), Eva International Biennale (Ireland 2020), Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik (Germany, 2017).

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Residency project:

The main subject of Bora Bobaçi’s project are five disappeared kilometers of the river Bièvre. Buried in the undergrounds of Paris since the beginning of the 1900s, literature of the time has described the river with an aesthetics of a cloistered, indoored and disembodied artificiality that has been compared by scholars to modern day virtual reality and hypermediated spaces of artifice. Today through a process called daylighting rivers, several rivers around the world have been brought back to the surface. Within a staged setting in the residency, using an interior and almost domestic perspective, the five disappeared kilometers of the Bièvre will be a space of contemplation, critique and artistic expression. Through archival material, spatial composition and drawings, Bora Bobaçi would like to explore the changes of narrative and how we go about daylighting these seemingly natural entities when they fuel our revised understanding of ecology and nature.

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Poland and United Kingdom

Absurd Passage

Biography:

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins was born in 1987 in London. He lives and works in Berlin. Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire. His works have been presented in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain, 2022), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Finland, 2022), Meetings on Art at the 58th Venice Biennale of Art (Italy, 2019) Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland, 2019) Chisenhale Gallery (United Kingdom, 2017).

Residency project:

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins will continue with his research into the looped and tangled relations of desire and loss, while focussing on disorientation, the thresholds of recognition, the eerie and the absurd. He will also take this time to reflect on his methodologies and the medium of choreography as a way of producing experiences of emergence and shifting perceptions of time. This will happen in dialogue with collaborators and in response to the context.Through this residency he will develop performance scores and writing, have movement research time and rehearsals with performers, contributing to the development of a new body of work.

Iman Issa, Egypt

I, the Protagonist

Biography:

Iman Issa was born in 1979. She lives and works in Berlin. Her practice is concerned with the systems that govern the rules of perception and allow for the generation of meaning. Her work has been widely shown in venues including KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2021), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2017), MoMA (New York, 2017), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2016), MACBA (Barcelona, 2015). She has also participated in the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2019), the 12th Sharjah biennial (2011), the 8th Berlin Biennial (2014), and the 7th Gwangju biennial (2018) among others. She is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), HNF-MACBA Award (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013). Since 2020, Iman Issa has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

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Residency project:

The project I, the Protagonist explores how a definable notion of self and other intersects with the history of portraiture and its interpretation as a form historically associated with the representation of a visual and conceptual coherence of a figure. These notions will be explored in relation to the shifting individuality on which portraiture is based and by examining representations of existing and invented figures in the collections of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

Lina Laraki, Morocco

Insolent Visions

Biography:

Lina Laraki was born in 1991 in Casablanca (Morocco). She lives and works in France.  

Lina Laraki is a film director and visual artist graduated from Central Saint Martins (2014) and Le Fresnoy (2022). Her practice probes obscure themes exploring the ambivalence of nature and human experiences. She expands the experience of cinema through sensorial representations.  

Her films have been shown internationally, that includes Karama at 1:54 Art Fair, UK in 2017 - The Last Observer at Sheffield DocFest, UK in 2021, Halves Through Night at Fantasia IFF, Canada in 2022. Her latest film Shinigami was awarded the Renato & Christine Casciani prize (Around Video Art Fair) in France in 2022.

Residency project:

Following a form of speculative investigation focused on the diverse mental states coupled with anatomical medicine in the face of institutional violence, Lina Laraki would like to examine the way madness was identified and treated in the great gloomy madhouse of La Salpêtrière in the 19th century, and relate it to our contemporary approach of what is considered marginal behaviors and mental disability. The core idea of this project lies in the diversion of the classification system of definitions of madness through elaborated characters, role plays and inverted situations in which narration becomes layered and complex. This new piece of work will be the continuation of her practice, which is led by rhizome thoughts on human deviances (social, behavioral or mental) and their marginalizations from functioning society.

Flaka Haliti, Kosovo

WHOSE BONES?

Biography:

Flaka Haliti was born in 1982 in Prishtina (Kosovo), she lives in Munich and Prishtina. Her artistic practice includes mixed media, and spatial sitespecific installation. Appropriation and Abrogation are continuous lines whereby a new aesthetics as a hybrid state of in-between is created as a new agency that challenges humanist perspectives and their authority over-representation and abstraction. Flaka Haliti represented Kosovo at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Her work has been shown in numerous institutions including mumok - Museum Moderne Kunst in Vienna (Austria, 2014), Museum Ludwig (Germany,2019), Hamburger Bahnhof (Germany, 2019), Museum Lenbachhaus (Munich 2021, 6th Moscow Biennale (2015), Busan Biennale (2018), Baltic Triennial (Vilnius 2021, Manifesta 14, (Prishtina, 2022).

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Residency project:

The animal representations in a sculpture series of Whose Bones? comprises lifesize skeletons composed of the bones of two different animals— an imaginary hybrid, or a political metaphor. It thus alludes to an in-betweenness as a new form of agency, which is deemed crucial to our times in which qualities that used to distinguish seeming opposites can no longer absolutely apply when it comes to the politics of representation. To expand on this line through a collaboration with le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. Flaka Haliti intends to research the sculptural aspects of specimens of cohabitation, survival, hunting, taxonomy and aesthetics through both contemporary art and heritage collections.

Gabriel Massan, Brazil

Ball Of Terror: The Failure Of Continuity

Biography:

Gabriel Massan was born in 1996, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). He is a Brazilian multidisciplinary digital artist, based in Berlin. Across 3D animation, digital sculpting, single-player games, NFTs, and virtual and augmented reality, the artist investigates notions of strangeness and ignorance regarding the imaginary of the ‘Third World’. Gabriel Massan creates worlds that simulate inequality within the Black-Indigenous Latin American experience by combining storytelling and worldbuilding techniques. Gabriel was the Circa ‘Class of 2021’ Selected Artist, 2022 Bangkok Biennale Online Pavillion Invited Artist, The Photographers’ Gallery Open Space and X Museum’s X Virtual Digital Commission artist, and is a 2022-23 Serpentine Arts Technologies Digital Commission artist.

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Residency project:

Ball Of Terror is a multidisciplinary series of works that invite the public to reflect, through interactive storytelling, cases of police brutality and institutional racism, using experiences in simulations, worldbuilding, and games. On that, the project intends to research and discuss the similarities in approach and behavior between the Paris and Sao Paulo police, looking at the aggression against Michael Zecler in 2020 to develop an interactive game experience that portrays spaces of refuge and defense conducted by self-identified targets. In a draw to reroute the outbreaks of violence suffered as a former resident of a drugs conflict territory, Ball Of Terror was first commissioned in 2022 by the X Museum as a metaverse installation and later for a video proposal by the FACT Audiovisual Residency Program. For on-site broader development in 2023, Gabriel Massan aims to produce its third act during the residency.

Ad Minoliti, Argentina

I ▲ R0C0C.0

Biography:

Ad Minoliti was born in 1980 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they live and work. Ad Minoliti’s draws on the legacy of geometric abstraction in their native country, Argentina, where geometry was used as a tool to imagine utopian political and social alternatives. The artist combines personal abstraction and playful figuration freely inspired by the codes of children’s iconography. Ad Minoliti’s work has been presented in multiple institutions, including Tate, St Ives (UK) in 2022, CCC OD, Tours (France), and Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (UK) in 2021, and Museo de arte moderna, Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2018. Upcoming shows include Kunstpalais, Erlangen (Germany), in 2023.

Residency project:

Ad Minoliti wants to explore the role of Latin American Modern Art as a young force that can renovate the production and reception of contemporary art. Once the capital of the intellectual, artistic, and sexual fantasy of European maledominated avant-garde, Paris stands as a special spot in which to develop an experimental analysis of feminist queer art and their Latin American identity within an international milieu. During the residency, she will develop a group of pieces of different media and materials, blending Rococo and Arte Madí (1) aesthetics, design and imagery that will form an installation in their studio composed of miniature dioramas, photos, objects, Gif animations, collages from Photoshop, and more traditional paintings and drawings.

Kirill Savchenkov, Russia

The Solar Snow

Biography

Kirill Savchenkov, born in 1987 in Moscow, currently lives in France. He works with various media including mediated sculpture, installation, performance, and sound. His artistic practice raises the questions of agency, identity and autocracy in the tech-social milieu. He was nominated to represent Russia in the national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennial in 2022 but withdrew from the project in protest over the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over the years, his works have been presented in institutions such as Transart Festival, Italy, 2022; 14th Baltic Triennial, Lithuania, 2021; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia, 2021; V-A-C Zattere, Italy, 2019; 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2018.

Residency project

The project The Solar Snow is focused on the analysis of manipulative dictatorship and oppression based on informational manipulation and the production of uncertainty in multiple dimensions. After the beginning of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war that put together colonialism, resentment and informational autocracy, into a deadly potion, the mechanics of control got entangled with recursiveness and violence in the necro-political state. Kirill Savchenkov will focus on the notions of agency and failed political resistance in this political context. The result of the residency will be a transmedial work based on the archeology of social and sonic media, personal observations, and collaboration with social science scholars.

Karan Shrestha, India

a flow disrupted

Biography

Karan Shrestha was born in 1985, in Kathmandu. He lives and works in Kathmandu (Nepal) and Mumbai (India). His practice incorporates drawings, sculpture, photography, text, film and video that speak to the complex, entangled relations of Nepal’s recent history. His projects are a synthesis of an archive of the terrain, political histories, transient memories and a speculative world that suspends reality, probing all the while at the fraught rhetoric of progress that is constantly pitted as the only way forward. Karan Shrestha’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Jameel Arts Centre (UAE, 2022); Kathmandu Triennale 2017 & 2022 (Nepal), Museo Madre (Italy, 2021); 10th Asia Pacific Triennial, QAGOMA (Australia (2021), and Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh (2020), among others.

Residency project

A flow disrupted holds words and images together to survey the state of water in Nepal in the 21st century. This ongoing work expands on the vocabulary of the 17th century Newari manuscript illustrating scenes of historical teachings concerning South Asian weather. Texts ranging from poetry to articles, excerpts to testimonies, supplemented by paintings, address illegal sand mining, shrinking wetlands, displacement of marginalized groups, the caste hierarchy, change in weather patterns and agricultural practices, and more. Alongside a flow disrupted, an animation film will be developed propounding further the visions and ideas depicting the interconnectedness and interrelation of life forms, foregrounding indigenous knowledge systems that emphasize symbiotic and dynamic associations. Sung from the perspective of water, the work will encompass plural realities, containing in its flow: myths, memories, histories, flora and fauna subject to climate change and imbalances and inequalities triggered by human activity.

Diamond Stingily, United States

Work

Biography

Diamond Stingily was born in 1990 in Chicago, Illinois. She lives and works in New York City. Her work explores themes of class, race and gender and is infused with the deeply personal, incorporating references to her family and her own childhood. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA, 2022), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (Liechtenstein, 2022), Kunstverein Munich (Germany, 2019), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (USA, 2019), Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Florida, USA (2018).

Residency project

During her residency, Diamond Stingily will examine the manuscript of a novel inspired by Antonin Artaud’s muse, the author and actress Colette Thomas, who wrote Le testament de la fille morte (1954) under the pseudonym René. Diamond Stingily will also explore the work of American authors who lived and died in France, such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and will produce new sculptures and videos inspired by his research and poems.

Pakui Hardware, Lithuania

Technologies of Vulnerability

Biographies

Pakui Hardware was founded in 2014 by Lithuanian-born artists Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė. The duo currently lives and works between Vilnius and Berlin. In their installations and research, Pakui Hardware explores the relationship between materiality, technology, and economy. How technology is shaping the current economy and the physical reality itself, including the human body. The duo’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (UK, 2021), Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig MdbK (Germany, 2019), 16th Istanbul Biennale (Turkey, 2019), MAXXI museum (Italy, 2018), Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland, 2017). Pakui Hardware will represent Lithuania in the 60th Venice biennale (2024) together with a modernist painter, Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė.

Residency project

Technologies of Vulnerability aims at exploring how we can build vulnerability within the internal structures of the current and future technologies that are being developed. Looking to prevent asymmetrical power relations with upcoming technologies, perhaps vulnerability could be a tool to construct more inter-dependent, trans-corporeal kinship with technological beings? The project consists of a research on this topic, made through reading and in-person meetings and discussions with philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists as well as technology-developers, which will be followed by further reflections, writing and material experimentations through sculpture and installation making in later stages.