A curated residency “The Ritual Room” has started in Nida Art Colony
- Published on Thursday, 11 October 2012 15:33
From October 1 to November 4 the residency project “The Ritual Room” is taking place in Nida Art Colony. Curators of the project Ūla Tornau and Asta Vaičiulytė invited a number of artists using different mediums and ways of creating to live and work together for five weeks. The project topic was left open, but as a starting point the curators suggested immersion into common slow time in the remote landscape of Nida and several keywords: coded languages, contemporary rituals, subjective mythologies, magic of everyday ways, urban tales in the countryside, urban mysticism, nostalgic rock and new / old visuality. Living together in Nida, working collectively and individually, sharing experiences, references, inspirations and conversations would create a possible common space for an upcoming exhibition.
Artists participating in the project: Kipras Dubauskas (LT/BE), Laura Kaminskaitė (LT), Axel Linderholm (SE), Lea Porsager (DK), Distruktur (Gustavo Jahn ir Melissa Dullius) (BR/DE), Ilya Dounar (BY), and Jonas Žukauskas (LT/GB).
Nida Art Colony collaborates with Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, where an exhibition, which gets its start-up in the residency, is going to take place in April-May 2013.
The residency starts a programme of curated residencies in Nida Art Colony with artists and curators living together for a certain time and working on a particular topic.
The project is supported by Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.
Open Studios by Artists-in-residency in September 2012
- Published on Wednesday, 26 September 2012 22:00
On Tuesday night (September 25th), seven artists in residence opened up their studios, sharing their work with the other residents at the colony. The presentations went late in to the night aided by beer and soup.
Working primarily with digital video, Renja Leino (FIN) has been using her time at the colony to collect and experiment with mythologies and stories surrounding the local amber, working with local school children, the ‘Amber King’ (Kazimieras Mizgiris who is running several amber galleries) and Nida’s beaches.
Fiona Reilly (Ireland) has been working with loaded spaces in Nida, such as its disused landing strip and the Russian border, a cyclical dialogue evolving between her and these sites through her drawing and video work; her experimental actions influence her surroundings and in turn, the unpredictability of the landscape and the people she encounters are fed back in to her practice, bringing in to play questions surrounding intention vs actuality and making work within the public realm.
Through methodically charting his time making art and the times in between, Peter Wehinger’s (Austria) work gradually takes form via its own documentation; its repetitive nature giving the passing time at the colony a newly structured pace. He is coming with a grant “Voralberg goes to Nida”.
Jonas Jurcikas’ (LT) large-scale painting confronts the weight of his country’s history on his shoulders as a contemporary Lithuanian artist. Figures lifted from soviet imagery float in an abstracted void above a young child, perched at once between its own history and future. He got this residency as a winner of Young Painter Prize.
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky (CH/NL) is continuing with her Sand Drawings series, capturing the naturally occurring mark making made in the sand by the beach’s grasses. Her digital portraits re-frame this playful activity in an almost anthropological or scientific format so that the grasses are re-contextualised, revealing the precision in the untamed yet seemingly mathematical drawings.
And two more artists were present for a shorter residency which was combined with one week in Kassel during dOCUMENTA 13. This residency is organised by Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association and supported by Lithuanian Ministry of Culture
Lina Albrikienė (LT) is continuing her series of investigations into her family history, this time collaborating with a musician to bring to life hand-written musical notation found in an old notebook that had belonged to her father. Through both physical and narrative traces left by her family she is able to explore her heritage, sharing her personal exercises with the viewer.
Robertas Narkus (LT) presented documentation of the encounters leading to the realisation of his fifth work in a series entitled 12 Chances; Chance Number Five resulting in the opening of a shoe shop. The juxtaposition between freely letting chance run its course and the methodology present in the collection and application of these encounters made for an exciting juncture in this series of works.
This image: Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Sand Drawings (work in progress), HD Video (stills) 2012
Top image: Fiona Reilly
Trying Out How Far Remoteness Can Be: Icelandic Case Study: 4 photo essays
- Published on Sunday, 02 September 2012 16:56
Vytautas Michelkevicius was doing research trip on remote artists-in-residency places in Iceland. All the trips through remote Icelandic residencies is covered in photoblog - 1500 km and 6 residencies visited. http://remotenet.nidacolony.lt/
Nida Art Colony has initiated Baltic-Nordic Network of Remote Art & Residency Centres. It brings together 8 centres located in the remote areas in order to share the experience and ideas how operate in the remoteness and how to interact with local communities.
Residency in Bregenz for Young Lithuanian Artists in 2012
- Published on Thursday, 30 August 2012 15:57
If you are Lithuanian artist under 35, welcome to send your portfolio and CV to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. till 6th of September.
More info in Lithuanian version of this website.
Exhibition "The Quarters of the Chess City" by Vilnius Academy of Arts Students and Graduates
- Published on Thursday, 26 July 2012 20:41
On the 28th of July (2012) Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts presents the exhibition “The Quarters of The Chess City”. The opening is at 6pm.
The exhibition’s title refers to John Brunner's science fiction novel “The Squares of the City”. The novel tells a story of a road engineer, who is asked to improve the street net of a fictional South American capital city Vados, while the latter has got an almost perfect street system already.
The novel's structure is based on the chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin, which is described in a chess handbook “The Game of Chess” by Harry Golombek. Every move (except the castling and the three last moves) has an equivalent in the script of the novel. The exhibition concentrates on the general atmosphere of the game, unrealized moves, castling, lapses and the last three deviated moves. Reference to Steinitz's and Chigorin's game is partly speculative, chosen as means to urge reflection of relations between artists, curators and institutions.
The exhibition “The Quarters of The Chess City” neither adopts the model of the Steinitz-Chigorin game, nor retells the Brunner's novel. It partly shares the opinion on the novel expressed by the Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and literature critic Algis Budrys: "this is a confusing, overpopulated, almost-unidentifiable-with story set in a city which seems to have been created for the sole purpose of having Brunner set a 'human chess game' in motion upon it... There is nothing in particular here to catch and hold the reader's involvement."
The word “squares” is substituted by the word “quarters” in the title of the exhibition. This substitution is noticed only when the reader starts to think about the transfer of the novel’s model into the context of contemporary art. Converted title contributes to and mystifies the idea of the show. In this instance mystification is a positive and desired quality of the art work/exhibition/text, which could draw and shape the quarters of the chess city in the map of the viewer’s imagination.
The exhibition presents artworks by students of Vilnius Academy of Arts: Marija Šnipaitė, Linas Jusionis, Milda Laužikaitė, Vytenis Burokas, Jonas Vaitiekūnas, Vytautas Viržbickas, Justas Žekonis, Arnas Anskaitis, Viktorija Peleckaitė.
Curators: Gintarė Matulaitytė & Danutė Gambickaitė
The exhibition is open from July 29 to August 31, all days of the week from 1 to 7 p.m.
Opening of colony resident Franziska Nast exhibition "Never Say Ever"
- Published on Monday, 16 July 2012 20:57
The NIDA/SHARE Summer School for Artistic Research On Visual Thinking & On Writing as Artistic Research
- Published on Monday, 16 July 2012 20:36
“Re-Visions and Re-Drafts”
Vilnius Academy of Arts and SHARE are pleased to announce the NIDA Summer School for Artistic Research at NIDA art colony. This is a 9 day intensive summer school in July 2012 that will address issues of visual thinking, thinking-through-practice and the role of creative and experimental writing practices in doctoral level studies in visual art forms.
The Summer School will feature a joint international curriculum hosted and devised by different partners in the SHARE network. The School will have teaching inputs from a broad range of artists and educators including: Giedre Mickunaite (Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania); David Bate (University of Westminster, England); Mick Wilson (Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland); Jan Kaila (Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Finland).
The NIDA/SHARE Summer School is funded by EU structural assistance to Lithuania. This has enabled the School to offer 8 scholarships whereby all accommodation costs, and a subsidy for travel costs, will be provided to successful applicants.
The programme will offer an ideal place for exchange and dialogue among doctoral researchers and supervisors working on creative practice in visual arts and design. The summer school will bring artistic researchers together to share a programme of lectures, presentations of current work, seminar discussions, screenings and readings that will explore the issues arising in doctoral level studies by visual artists and designers. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their research and gain insights into the range of formats that can be used in preparing doctoral work for final submission.
Some of the topics covered will include: examples of doctoral submissions across art and design; examples of art and design research from outside the academy; visual thinking models from the visual arts and design; case studies of thinking through practice in art and design research; examples of experimental writing in contemporary art and design; practical workshop on creative writing; presentations of student and teacher work; critical discussions of ideas in response to screenings and readings; one-to-one conversations and informal dialogues.
Summer School Personnel
Summer School Curators
Alvydas Lukys (Vilnius Academy of Arts)
Schelte van Ruiten (ELIA, Deputy Director)
Summer School Teachers
Giedrė Mickūnaitė (Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania)
Lolita Jablonskiene (Lithuanian National Gallery of Art, Lithuania)
Mick Wilson (Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland)
David Bate (University of Westminster, UK)
Summer School Visiting Keynote Speakers
Prof. Jan Kaila (Finnish academy of Fine Art, Finland)
Prof. Klaus Jung (Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Germany)
Summer School Administrators from Vilnius Academy of Arts:
Rasa Antanavičiūtė (Nida Art Colony, Executive Director)
Aušra Trakšelytė (Vilnius Academy of Arts)
Movie & music nights and exhibitions at the Colony from Thomas Mann festival
- Published on Friday, 13 July 2012 08:58
From 16th to 20th of July we host Thomas Mann Festival. Movie nights at the Colony starts from Tuesday, Openings of the exhibitions start from Monday 6 pm. Full programme
http://www.mann.lt/?q=en%2Fnode%2F353