Nida A-i-R in September 2019

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Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Back-to-school season at Nida Art Colony starts with a lot of of VAA students and new residents! Some of the latter came to the residency with defined goals, others - to explore Nida and maybe themselves. Meet Eglė Budvytytė, Paul Maheke, Jin Mustafa, Marek Ther, and Elin Már Øyen Vister. We also welcome returning resident Gabi Schillig.

Residents Eglė Budvytytė, Paul Maheke, Jin Mustafa, Mark Ther, and Elin Már Øyen Vister have been invited by guest curator Rado Ištok to work in Nida for two months and develop works for the Nida Art Colony summer exhibition 2020 within the framework of the 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture project. They will also run the workshop Dwelling on the Threshold, exploring the potential of spaces of passage, flux and fluidity. It will take place at the Colony 9-12 October, 2019. 

Mark Ther (b. 1977) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Prague, the Czech Republic. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, including an exchange at the Copper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Ther’s videos and films, which often combine reality with fiction, take as a subject traumatic, controversial, and suppressed issues in relation to identity, gender, sexuality, and the Sudetenland identity, related to the history and deportation of the Sudeten Germans from the Czech borderlands after WWII. These issues are complemented with elements of humour, pop culture, sensuality, camp and queer aesthetics. His films are characterised by an enigmatic atmosphere and the narrative of the untold, opening a field of interpretation to the viewer.

In 2011 Ther was awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for young Czech artists. His works have been shown internationally within film festivals and visual arts institutions.

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Rado Ištok. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė

Rado Ištok is a curator, researcher and editor from Slovakia, based in Stockholm. He is a curator of art residencies, workshop and an exhibition at the VAA Nida Art Colony (2018-2020) in the framework of 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, and a project leader of Spaces of Care, Disobedience and Desire (2018-2020), a research project in collaboration with Marie-Louise Richards and Natália Rebelo, supported by the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Recent exhibitions include Liquid Horizons (2019) in Bratislava, Slovakia; Other Visions (2018) in Olomouc, the Czech Republic; and I’m fine, on my way home now (2017) in Stockholm, Sweden. He worked as an assistant curator for the exhibition Positions #3 (2016) at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Editorial work includes Decolonising Archives (2016) for L’Internationale Online, Queer Scandinavia (2015) for A2, and the forthcoming publication Crating the World (2019) coedited with Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn.

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Eglė Budvytytė. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Eglė Budvytytė (LT/NL) (b. 1981) is an artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She graduated from Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2008, and has been working at the intersection between performing and visual arts ever since. Budvytytė makes videos and performances to explore the relationships between a body, public spaces and an audience. She looks at the body as a site where different powers operate, and approaches movement/gesture as technology for a possible subversion of normativity, gender and social roles.

Her work was shown, amongst others, at 13th Baltic Triennial, Riga (2018); Lofoten International Art Festival (2017); Block Universe, London (2017); Art Dubai commissions (2017); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2016); Liste, Art Basel (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); De Appel Arts Centre (2013); and Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam (2013). She was resident at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012) and at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2013).

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Paul Maheke. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Paul Maheke (FR/UK) (b. 1985) lives and works in London, UK. He is a Master of Art Practice in École Nationale Supérieure d’arts de Cergy (2011) and completed the Associate Programme in the Open School East, London/Margate, UK (2015). With a focus on dance and through a varied and often collaborative body of work comprising performance, installation, sound and video, Maheke considers the potential of the body as an archive in order to examine how memory and identity are formed and constituted.

Selected solo exhibitions include OOLOI, Triangle France, Marseille (2019); A fire circle for a public hearing, Vleeshal, Middelburg (2019) and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); Letter to a Barn Owl, Kevin Space, Vienna (2018). Selected group exhibitions and performances include Meetings on Art, 58th Venice Biennale (2019); 13th Baltic Triennial, Tallinn Art Hall (2018); Ten Days Six Nights, Tate Modern, London (2017).  

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Jin Mustafa. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Jin Mustafa (SE) (b. 1988) is a visual artist, DJ and electronic music producer based in Stockholm, Sweden. She works with various media, such as moving images, objects, sound, and music. Her works explore the relationship between technology, imaginary spaces, and questions of personal and collective memory.

As a music producer she made sound for Filipa César’s lecture performace Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral’s Agro-Poetics of Liberation (2019) at Sonic Acts in Amsterdam and exhibition Looming Creole at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2019). Recent exhibitions include The Shift, Haninge Konsthall, Stockholm (2019), Ripple at Alta Art Space in collaboration with Signal, Malmö (2018); If she wanted I would have been there once, twice or again at Zeller Van Almsick Gallery, Vienna (2018); a collaborative work with Natália Rebelo for Chart Emerging at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2018); and I’m fine, on my way home now, Galleri Gerlesborg (2018) and Mossutställningar, Stockholm (2017).

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Elin Már Øyen Vister. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė

Elin Már Øyen Vister (NO) (b. 1976) is an artist, composer, and forager based in Røst, Norway. With a broad background in audio and music as a DJ and producer, as well as in the field recording and radio, they bring an interdisciplinary approach and experience of a multitude of practices to their expression.

Már is occupied with listening as artistic practice and as a way to compose, sense, and experience the world, much inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s ‘deep listening’ philosophy. Már’s work strives to break with Western patriarchal hegemonic narratives that have placed the human being in the centre and instead focuses on the landscape’s innate stories and knowledge, influenced by indigenous methodologies and indebted to and informed by queer, multicultural, and pluriversal understandings of life and the cosmos. Their ongoing long-term projects include Soundscape Røst and Deconstructing Norwegian-ness. They co-run Røst Artist in Residence at Skomvær Fyr in Røst.

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Gabi Schillig. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Gabi Schillig (DE) (b. 1977) studied Architecture in Coburg and completed her postgraduate studies in Conceptual Design at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main before founding her Studio for Dialogical Spaces in Berlin in 2008. In April 2018 she was appointed as a Professor for Spatial Design and Exhibition Design at the Berlin University of the Arts at the Institute for Transmedia Design. 2012‒18 she was teaching as a professor at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf. 

In her artistic practice and teaching Gabi 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 will continue her project she made during the residency in Nida in August 2019 about the relation of body and landscape. Artist will create relational objects or communication devices, capes or displays that are carried on the body to open up a dialogue between the human body and the landscape.