The first early autumn residents at Nida Art Colony: Giedrė Mickūnaitė (LT), Hanna Schaich (AT), Julia Heurling (SE), Amira Hanafi (USA/EG), and Naomi Woo (CA).

Giedrė Mickūnaitė (LT) (b. 1971) is a professor and researcher of art history. She received MA and a PhD in Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Since 2003, Giedrė works at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

How visually mixed experience is purified by language? How and why does vernacular art become foreign? When do images require stories? How narratives influence visual forms? These are the questions that Giedrė poses to sources of the past while inquiring into the process of visual and verbal translations. Giedrė argues that oblivion is a culture’s vehicle transforming it into a tradition. Her art historical inquiry focuses on visual hybridity and verbal purity and reveals how oblivion works for memory’s sake. 

During the residency, Giedrė will write a few articles based on her research on the Greek manner in the arts of Poland-Lithuania. 

Hanna Schaich (AT) (b. 1986) completed her MA in fine arts at the Weißensee School of Art, Berlin in 2014. Hanna’s work revolves around needs and dreams, hopes and strategies, finding ways out of often monotonous and dreary life experiences. What fuels our aspirations? What prevents us as social beings from pursuing our desires? When and why do we fight for something? How do we maintain our dignity? And what are our individual strategies for negotiating life inside capital? 

Her videos reflect working along the lines between documentation and fiction, commentary and staging. Hanna’s writings and voice-overs are triggered by an autobiographical impulse to ask questions about our individual strategies to encounter life. 

Julia Heurling (SE) (b. 1973) has acquired BA and MA degrees in Textile Design from the Swedish School of Textiles. Since 2016, she is a part time PhD candidate at The Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University.

Her current artistic work is based on photography. Julia focuses on exploring repetition and meaning through pattern and sequence. She is interested in how flow, continuity and rhythm communicate visually. The result of her artistic work is photographically based sequence and pattern compositions of two or three dimensional images or objects. Combining photography and pattern open up for investigations on visual narrative that lie beyond motifs or content of individual images. Julia would describe her work as visual thinking and the result as reflections. During the residency, Julia will reflect on how to expose her work and look for ways for it to become valid or relevant within “knowledge production”. If the research does not reach an audience or if the audience does not understand the research, what is the point of the work?

Amira Hanafi (USA/EG) (b. 1979) received BA in Political Science at Rutgers College and MA in Writing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Now lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. 

Amira is an artist and writer with a research-based practice. She works with written and spoken language, assembling multivocal archives of material connected to particular histories. Multivocality is both a theme and a strategy in Amira’s work. The artist is interested in the complexity of meaning that comes from collaging different voices, in the intersections of identities that are expressed, and in how multivocality can be an expression of collectivity, its rewards and challenges. Amira is researching the process of language, its materiality, its instabilities and contingencies. She approaches the work both formally and informally, by system and intuition, with logic and emotion.

At the residency, Amira will produce new works on the topics related to conflict, rootless communities, migration, displacement, ways of making strange territories your own, conviviality, identity and related experiences. Also, artist will prepare for her solo exhibition in Vilnius in the end of October.

Naomi Woo (CA) (b. 1990) is a pianist, conductor and musicologist, holds degrees in Mathematics & philosophy, Piano performance, and Musicology. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge. Naomi research focuses on the domain of performance studies, combining her previous work in performance, philosophy and music studies. With Sasha Amaya, she is co-artistic director of Tick Tock, a multidisciplinary ideas and performance lab that explores the intersection of sonic and choreographic arts.

Naomi's residency at Nida Art Colony is supported by Canada Council for the Arts.