NAC Residencies in May 2021
- Published on Wednesday, 05 May 2021 09:52
Agnė Jokšė, Dear friend (2019), film still. Courtesy by Agnė Jokšė.
With Ilze Kalnbērziņa-Praz and Zane Zajančkauska in residency in Nida in May, we are happy to set the beginning for the working group looking closer at the history of Self-publishing in the Baltics. Together with Indrek Sirkel they will join Justina Zubaitė who has been working on the topic in Lithuania since December 2020. Long awaited, finally also Agnė Jokšė is staying in residency in Nida and continues working on Unconditional Love, that she started working on in 2020 as a new commission by NAC. With Vilnius iteration of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts in mind, Margaret Tali takes time off as well as continues her research from Nida.
Agnė Jokšė (b. 1993, Vilnius) is an artist currently based in Copenhagen. In her work, she investigates questions surrounding experience, parallel history, entangled relations, queerness, and language; uses writing, video, and performance as primary mediums. In 2019 her work Dear Friend received the main award at the contemporary art competition JCDecaux Prize, organized by Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. In 2020 she presented Lezbynai at the inaugural group exhibition of the art space Swallow in Vilnius. During the residency, she will continue an ongoing inquiry (title: "Unconditional Love") which investigates the relation between care, compassion, and love through the lens of intergenerational relations.
Ilze Kalnbērziņa-Praz and Zane Zajančkauska work together as Kolektīvs since 2016. Their collective expands and shrinks, temporarily fusing with other collectives to develop and put in motion ideas and projects - most often exhibitions and book designs, and sometimes other interpretative formats, such as games, public programmes, etc. Their recent projects include: “Etā mīnā zīben zāben”, a research-based exhibition on counting out rhymes collected in refugee camps after WWII; editorial and design work for Riga International Photography Biennial; co-curation of the exhibition “You’ve got 1243 unread messages”; a book design for publishing house “Vārdu vārti”; a public programme for the first edition of Riga International Biennial for Contemporary Arts a.o.
Margaret Tali is a writer, researcher, curator and teacher. She studied Art History and Cultural Theory in Estonia, Finland and Germany, and gained a PhD at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis in 2014. Margaret is a postdoc researcher at Estonian Academy of Art. Her current work deals with transcultural discourses of memory in Baltic visual culture, where she is interested in visual art and documentary film and the discussions they have prompted. In Nida, Tali will be working on two articles, both of which deal with the transmission of difficult knowledge in Baltic visual culture, with a focus on visual art and documentary film. During this time, she also plans to read further about the relationships of nature and colonisation to continue thinking about decolonisation in the Baltic context. With the exhibition "Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds" moving to the Vilnius National Gallery of Art in 2022, the time in Nida will also give a chance to research local artists and researchers whose work connects with topics of "Communicating Difficult Pasts".
NAC Residencies are co-funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture.