Baff Akoto, United Kingdom

Racines Sculpturales

Biography

Baff Akoto was born in London, raised in Accra. He lives and works between Accra and London. Baff Akoto's practice uses still and moving image, performance, sculpture and installation to embrace the fluidity of contemporary visual grammar whilst exploring plurality, (self) perception and the societal implications of ableism, ritual and dance.

Awarded the Grand Prix at the 13th Rencontre de Bamako, Mali (2022) and the Main Prize at the Aesthetica Art Prize, United-Kingdom (2022). Baff Akoto’s artworks were exhibited in institutions like Triennial Whitechapel Gallery, United-Kingdom (2022), Whitechapel Gallery, United-Kingdom (2022) and UP:RISE Digital Public Art, United-Kingdom (2021).

Residency project

Marked by waves of post-colonial migration, the inhabitants of the 10th and 18th arrondissements offer a symbolic representation of the rich tapestry of modern France. And a compelling opportunity to develop tactile sculptural forms as a means of exploring identity, heritage, and belonging - the central themes at the heart of this residency - within living, breathing complex communities.

Kent Chan, Singapore

The Fires From the Museums

Biography

Born in Singapore, Kent Chan lives and works between Amsterdam and Singapore. An artist, curator, and filmmaker, his practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions. Through them, he excavates biases within museology by examining the climate-control system as metaphor and endeavours at situating the tropics within the future tense. Recent exhibitions include: Gasworks (United Kingdom, 2023), Liverpool Biennial ( United Kingdom, 2023), Videobrasil (Brazil, 2023), Seoul Mediacity Biennale ( South Korea, 2023) and Kunstinstituut Melly, (Netherlands, 2021).

Residency project

Continuing his research into the relationship between heat and art, Kent Chan will look into how these relations further extend unto politics. Examining how the influx of tropical artworks into French museums looking to decolonize can be read parallel to the warming of the climates. The project will work towards developing a moving-image work in conjunction with a lecture-performance, alongside a series of prints. Focusing his research on past fires in French museums, Chan questions whether these paradigm shifts in museology might lead to revolutionary ends and the razing of museums, or if decolonisation means the eventual warming and coming to terms with other climates.

Nolan Oswald Dennis, South Africa

Pluri-polar studies

Biography

Nolan Oswald Dennis was born in 1988 in Lusaka, Zambia. They live and work in Johannesburg. Their practice explores ‘a black consciousness of space’ the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation - questioning histories of space and time through system-specific interventions. They work within and against a grammar of world-making: using indexical, analytic and educational devices (drawings, diagrams, maps, models, etc) as ambiguous tools for rehearsing possible meanings rather than forms of instruction. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Young Congo Biennale (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2019); Palais de Tokyo (France, 2021); FRONT triennial, (United-States, 2022); Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands, 2023); the Shanghai Biennial (China, 2023), Liverpool Biennial (United-Kingdom, 2023) and the Lagos Biennial (Nigeria, 2024).

Residency project

Pluri-polar studies are a speculative field deduced from the intersection of geophysics, polar counter-histories and the ecological polycrisis that envelops us. Nolan Oswald Dennis asks: what happens if we take the black, indigenous, feminist and queer histories of the polar regions as the first points of reference for a whole-earth science?  

This orientation frames the scientific peculiarities of the South and North poles as geographic, magnetic, and celestial approximations which shift across the surface of the globe and are prone to reversals rather than the fixed locations we imagine. Since conventional knowledge misrecognizes the polar regions as the ends of the world, then alter-knowledge reminds us there are many ends of the world, that each end is a beginning and at each beginning there is a pole and every pole, in relative independence, moves. Polarité (derived from Glissant's notion of Mondialité) will guide their research into a non-hegemonic history of planetary sciences.  

Basmah Felemban, Saudi Arabia

It Makes Sense Under The Sun

Biography

Basmah Felemban was born in 1993, Jeddah. Lives and works between Jeddah and London, her practice as a curator and artist intertwines in themes of reimagining lost history through sci-fi literature, she works in various mediums including painting, video games, and sculptures. Basmah’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Diriyah Biennale Foundation (Saudia Arabia, 2023), Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin (Germany, 2022), Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU (United-States, 2023), Saudi Art council (Saudia Arabia, 2020) and Maraya Center (United Arab Emirates, 2013).

Residency project

During her time in the residency, she will develop a documentary installation that will position her curatorial practice in graffiti and street art within her work as a multimedia artist. Under the sun is articulated through one of the longest surviving objects, the rock, the oldest witness and calculator, and at the physical juncture where the desert meets the sun, a place of transformation, and amnesia. She’ll collect and accumulate stories by break dancers, rappers, and graffiti artists that at times feel like myths and place them within the distorted playing field she builds in her work, an elaborate mind map that looks into themes like Graffiti Writing As an Ancient Practice, Urban Environment Impact on Graffiti, and Abandoned Spaces in Transition.

Eve Fowler, United States

Filles manquées

Biography

Eve Fowler was born 1964 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fowler lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Fowler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates the problems, possibilities, and ethics of what it means to bear witness to the work, body and life of another. Whether working through a camera’s lens or in paint, installation, sound, or public space, her practice moves in and with the margins: towards what has been unrepresented, ignored, struck from the record. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (United-States, 2015) Participant Inc (United States 2016), Dundee Contemporary Art (Scotland, 2018) and Gordon Robichaux Gallery (United-States, 2023). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Residency project

Filles Manquées is a long-form film project that employs empathic witnessing to tell the many stories of seventy-seven-year-old French trans artist Florence Derive. Scenes in which she sits before me looking into her lens (they witness one another) weave with moments where she recounts her earliest and most formative memories (we listen) and still others where they trace together the spaces from Nantes to Paris that make up her creative and emotional lives.

Steffani Jemison, United States

Cyc

Biography

Born in 1981, Steffani Jemison lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work considers the weight of physical and social forces and fantasies of escape. Through video, writing, performance, and installation, her work poses such questions as: "How do we learn on the fly? How do we fly? If we’re all we’ve got, how do we use ourselves to find the forms of the future?” Jemison’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (Switzerland, 2024); the Whitney Museum (United-States, 2019), the Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands, 2019), and Jeu de Paume (France, 2017).

Residency project

Using the Greek myth of Icarus as a starting point, Steffani Jemison will extend her research on fugitivity, floating, and flight as visual material and embodied practice. In Paris, Jemison will explore the legendary performance Icare by choreographer Serge Lifar and the Icarus motif in work by Matisse and Picasso, including Picasso’s Paris mural The Fall of Icarus, sited at UNESCO headquarters. Jemison is also interested in the form of the heist in relation to themes of flight and escape: she will investigate traditional and unconventional playgrounds as physical training spaces for escape (recently, incarcerated artist and art thief Vjeran Tomic is said to have used the cemetery Pere Lachaise as a parkour playground). Jemison's research will culminate in Cyc, a body of work that takes its title from the cyclorama, a type of theatrical curtain used to create the illusion of infinity.

Myriam Omar Awadi, France

Flowers' voices. The garden that still grows on our images' skin.

Biography

Myriam Omar Awadi is a Franco-Comorian artist born in 1983 in Paris, France. Lives and works in La Reunion. She invites voices that are not always audibles, in search of the fires that their last breaths rekindle : millions and myriads of souls’species made of wood, clay, glass, embroidery, shimmering sequins and sea water, dripping on the microphones and waking up from their premeditated extinctions through the sweat of our deviant listening. They tell stories for gardens, they rock morbid suprematism, they sing politics dilute in the liquid humors of love. Myriam Omar Awadi’s work has been presented in numerous institutions including Bamako Encounters African Biennale of Photography (Mali, 2019), Palais de Tokyo (France, 2021), MADOI with Le Louvre (France, 2021), Zeitz Mocaa (South Africa, 2022) and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India, 2023).

Residency project

At the end of the 19th century, Razaka and Ramilijaona, studio photographers in Madagascar, colored some of their photographs using flowers’ pigments from their garden. There are therefore garden memories, plants DNA, knowledges, sciences and practices carefully guarded and deposited almost secretly on the surface of each of their photographic prints. The first questions germinate there, on the surface of these images, the place of revelations, the place of consented capture of biological and spiritual essences, for our history sake. What do the flowers of Razaka and Ramilijaona say? What languages do they speak? What are their stories? Where do they come from? Would it be possible to reconstruct gardens’ fragments that lie dormant in each image? Make this potential garden the place to invoke the voices of flowers, trances of their Phylo-genomic parliament, and the ancestors who carry them?

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Guatemala

Re-Drawing the Tarot: The Tarot of Marseille through the Lens of Guatemalan - Mayan-Mestizo Spiritual Practices

Biography

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa was born in 1978 in Guatemala. He lives and works in Guatemala City. His practice encompasses performance, sound, drawing, and sculpture, exploring themes of loss, displacement, and cultural resistance, often referencing the Guatemalan Civil War. Ramírez-Figueroa’s work has been presented in numerous institutions, including Tate Modern (United-Kingdom, 2014); MoMA (United-States, 2023); Venice Biennale (Italy, 2017); New Museum (United-States, 2018) and at Thyssen-Bornemisza (Spain, 2020).

Residency project

He will create new works in textile, paper, and performance. His research will be anchored in the playing card collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Additionally, he will draw upon his family’s tradition of card divination, using the cards to aid him in the studio, echoing in this way John Cage’s use of the I ching. This project will merge his interest in plants—both as imagery in playing cards, such as the Tarot of Marseille, and as elements of oral history, healing, and folk religion in Guatemala. He will utilize resources from the Paris Herbarium at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle and collaborate with botanists and horticulturalists to integrate botanical elements into my work. Playing cards are a versatile form of communication, providing a space for evolving symbolism, imagery, and divination. This project will explore and expand upon these possibilities, creating a unique fusion of traditions and interpretations.

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Thailand

Silent Witnesses: An Intertwined Narrative of Resilience

Biography

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul was born in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1974. She currently lives and works in Bangkok. Wantanee's multidisciplinary practice explores complex social, political, economic, and socio-ecological issues. Her work has been presented in numerous institutions, including in Thai Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (Italy, 2009), Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai (Thailand, 2023), Frieze London (United-Kingdom, 2023), The 7th Anyang Public Art Project, Anyang City (South Korea, 2023) and Bangkok Art Biennale at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center (Thailand, 2022)

Residency project

Silent Witnesses is a multimedia exploration of the intertwined narratives of animals in wartime and shared stories of suffering and survival across cultures. The project delves into the profound interconnectedness of life on Earth through creative techniques, including installations, visual storytelling, and a video essay. Drawing inspiration from historical artworks to contemporary issues fosters compassion, empathy, and awareness. Central to the narrative are Castor and Pollux, two elephants from the Jardin des Plantes Zoo in Paris, whose story symbolises the enduring bond between nations and cultures even in times of adversity. The project aims to engage both local and global audiences, inviting reflection on the universal themes of resilience and interconnectedness.

Suzanne Treister, United Kingdom

HEXEN 5.0

Biography

Suzanne Treister is born London 1958. She Lives and works between London and the Pyrenees. A pioneer in the new media field since 1989, Treister works across the permeable boundary separating the frontiers of scientific enquiry from mystical revelation. Often spanning several years, her projects interrogate the relationship between emerging technologies, society and alternative belief systems to suggest unseen forces that shape our present reality and have implications for the future that we are only beginning to understand. Treister's work has been presented in numerous institutions including Tate Modern (United-Kingdom, 2024); 14th Shanghai Biennale (China, 2023); High Line, New York (United-States, 2022); Serpentine Galleries (United-Kingdom, 2019); Centre Pompidou (France, 2015) and the Spaceships of Bordeaux (France, 2013-2022)

Residency project

She will be working on the final stages of her current project, HEXEN 5.0, the sequel to my previous project, HEXEN 2.0 (2009-11). HEXEN 5.0 will include 78 new Tarot works and 6 large diagrams, critically and historically exploring new global developments in terrestrial and interplanetary technologies, science and communications, corporate and governmental forces, the ecosystem and climate crisis, recent and traditional fields of knowledge, new branches of bio/socio/political theory, contemporary countercultural and futuristic movements, new directions in science-fiction, and proposed solutions for an ethical survival of the human race. The work will be for exhibition and also published as a printed tarot deck, intended to be used as a learning tool for groups to discuss and envision positive alternative futures.

Peng Zuqiang, China

Understories

Biography

Peng Zuqiang was born in 1992 in Changsha, China. He Lives and works in Amsterdam. He works with film, video and installations, with an attention to the affective resonances within histories, bodies, and language. Peng's work has been presented in numerous institutions including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Italy, 2023), videobrasil (Brazil, 2023) Kevin Space (Austria, 2023), Cell Project Space (United-Kingdom, 2022) and e-flux screening room (United-States, 2022).

Residency project

The project Understories is an ongoing video installation which started with research on 8.75mm film - a celluloid format unique to China and never circulated elsewhere. As a format where no cameras were ever made for, the film was primarily used for mobile projection units to exhibit films in countryside, mountains, islands and ethnic minority regions in China from the 70s to 80s. The work intends to reimagine this medium of propaganda as a medium for remembering, resilience and other mythifications. For the residency, he will continue to work on the writing of several voice scripts that will transform into part of the soundscape of the work. While also experimenting with darkroom techniques to manipulate shot and archival celluloid footages.