We are happy to share the news that the artist Zhanna Gladko from Minsk will come to Nida to stay in one of the studios in October. Vika Matuzaitė will be working in Nida in October on the process based project Chicago Boys Nida version by the artist Hiwa K. Gisèle Gonon, Liene Pavlovska, and Jasmine Reimer have successfully gone through the constantly changing roller coaster of Covid-19 arrival measures and rules of their first month at NAC, and can finally focus on their work. 

Gisèle Gonon lives and works in Berlin. In her practice Gonon dissects economic and social processes related directly to her own environment, in particular labour, agriculture, and territorial politics. In Nida, Gonon will make a video montage around the Berlin agricultural protests of early 2020, and she will further deepen the sociological, iconographic, and formal research of the events. Gonon is the co-founder of the CCPC collective [Collisions, Cataclysms and Construction Permits] and participated in the Goldrausch-Künstlerinnen Projekt. Her works were recently exhibited at Continuum in Bordeaux, Ostfriesland in Berlin, and Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig (2019).

Zhanna Gladko lives and works in Minsk. Zhanna Gladko works with family archives, creates a private collection of objects, photographic series of works, stock documentation, installations. Constructing ambivalent images Zhanna Gladko aims to rethink topics such as gender politics, religion and culture, the system of art and society, history and memory. In Nida, Zhanna Gladko will focus on creating a new series of works as part of her main project Inciting Force. This is a series of self-portraits, which will be conceptually connected with the comprehension of the current events in Belarus. Subsequently, Gladko plans to present the series in November this year at one of the European exhibitions, the focus of which is the woman and her role in the protest.

Vika Matuzaitė is a social activist and practitioner, who connects creative and educational spaces, mostly working with social topics (human rights, social justice, activism). Main working principles that Matuzaitė leads her practices in are ‒ equity, participation that is based on transparent and clear relationship valuing every input equally and as enough. In collaboration with the artist Hiwa K, NAC and the Nida based women’s choir “Smiltatė”, Vika Matuzaitė is working on the Nida version of the project Chicago Boys that Hiwa K started 10 years ago in London. Chicago Boys is a pop-music revival band and a neoliberalism study group in one. They will be diving into and looking for connections between the fall of the iron curtain and a sudden arrival of neoliberalism, it’s effects on communities and local people and how they are felt to this day. 

Liene Pavlovska lives and works in Riga. She is a visual artist and scenographer. Her work is constructed around the interest in social-economic society models and collective desires resulting from them, as well as how they determine the living space of humans and other beings. She is engaged with a question of how to imagine new, inclusive future scenarios on the ruins of existing ideologies? Pavlovska is researching and using theatrical modes of expression and the experience of catharsis in the context of visual art. Her work manifests as multimedia, spatial installations. In Nida, Pavlovska will analyse the spatial politics of the Curonian Spit as a Unesco World Heritage site, continuing research she started during a HIAP residency on the Suomenlinna island of Helsinki, focusing on a defense fortress, another Unesco World Heritage Site.

Jasmine Reimer lives and works in Berlin and Toronto. In her sculptures, installations, and performances Reimer captures transformation and hybrid forms, corporeal experiences and  excess. She researches historic and contemporary goddess symbols, and how these woven into fabrics or voiced in song-speak of kin-like relationships, ecology, spirituality, and religion. In Nida, Reimer will focus on matriarchal societies of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Eastern Europe, studying the work of archeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbuta as a leading reference. Reimer’s solo exhibitions were shown at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario (2018), Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto, and Projet Pangee in Montreal (2017).

NAC Residencies are co-funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture.