Greeting our last artists-in-residence this summer: Heidi Axelsen (AU) and Hugo Moline (AU), Arnas Anskaitis (LT), Stephen Bain (NZ), Jenna Rossi-Camus (UK), and Gabi Schillig (DE)

During the residency, Hugo and Heidi are planning to investigate the possibilities of dunes and rhizomes as organising principles within their collaborative arts/architecture practice. Their investigation will be conducted through walking, drawing, writing, and, possibly, constructions/installations.

Arnas Anskaitis (LT) (b. 1988) received a Master’s degree in Photography and Media Arts (2013) from Vilnius Academy of Arts where he is teaching as a lecturer. Since October 2016, Arnas has been studying in the Fine Arts Doctoral Studies. Through practice and research, the artist aims to reflect on the connections between language, perception, writing, and non-writing. In his work Arnas employs a variety of media including installation, performance, video, and photography.

During the residency, Arnas plans to work on his doctoral project An Artist’s Systems of Knowing, Mapping and Exposition. He will attempt to combine two sides of artistic research (practice and theory) through writing ‒ a writing system as an art project. Part of the doctoral thesis could be written and presented using this system.

Stephen Bain (NZ) (b. 1966) is an Aotearoa: New Zealand theatre and performance maker. Trained in Architecture (Victoria University, NZ), Theatre (Toi Whakaari, NZ) and Scenography (a.pass, BE), he has directed and designed many original plays and performances, regularly recipient of arts council commissions (Creative New Zealand) since 1992, multiple theatre and fringe festival awards as well as artistic residencies. For the past 10 years he has been specifically engaged in public-space performances including audio interventions, theatrical shows and small scale interactive installations. His design work includes many theatrical collaborations and teaching at performance schools and universities. In 2016 Stephen began Phd studies at the University of Tasmania (AU) to research public space performance and the strategic role of fiction to unsettle the political dynamics of space.

During the residency Stephen will work on his PhD researching “Performed fiction as a strategy toward revealing the politics of public space”. He will represent 100 performances for the city as an exhaustive interrogation, in a multitude of spaces and urban contexts including the virtual sphere. At present Stephen is working with an on-line format that uses data-visualisation techniques in an attempt to communicate the interplay between performance and space.

During the residency Jenna will continue to work on her PhD research project, Fashion & Folly, which is at once a hypothetical exhibition, an exhibition proposal, a manifesto for site-responsive exhibition practice, and a personal meditation on her relationship with fashion satire. 

In her artistic practice and teaching Gabi Schillig investigates contemporary and future questions of spatial design such as the relationship between space and body, the evolution of spatial systems, the potentials of materiality and the experimental use of analogue and digital design methodologies. Her conceptual approach results in multi-sensorial, dialogical structures and spaces of communication on multiple scales and in different contexts within spaces, cities and landscapes. These contexts lead to the emergence of an experimental spatiality based on social and physical processes as well as connect materiality and interaction in an immediate way.

During the residency, Gabi Schillig is planning to develop experimental dialogical objects and performative spatial constructs that enable people to perceive 'nature' in a different way, defining potential spaces of geometrical abstraction, multisensorial perception and interaction.