al-yené, Orustyla, 2022.

Joining NAC residency in November – December are: artist al-yené, painter and sculptor Ignacio Valdés, artist Agnieszka Sejud, curator and writer Suzy Halajian, and Neringa Municipality Scholarship 2023 recipient Francesco Rufini.

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al-yené is an artist who was born and raised in the Sakha republic and is currently based in Rotterdam. She works across different media, but mostly with video and poetry. Her practice focuses on continuity, displacement, gaps and absences within Sakha cultural memory. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht. al-yené is also part of sata taas collective.

Ignacio Valdés is a Chilean artist based between Brussels and London. Valdés works mainly with painting and sculpture, exploring the lived memories or recollections from existing images and cinematic moments. Valdés graduated from the School of Art, Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, and later moved to Italy with a scholarship from the Istituto Italo Latino-Americano IILA. He also studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Pratt Institute, New York, and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Valdés has exhibited in Chile at the National Museum of Fine Arts MNBA and the Museum of Contemporary Art MAC, the Istituto Italo-Latinoamericano di Roma ILLA in Rome, the Pinacoteca de Pireas in Athens, the National Library of Damascus in Syria, the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul, and La Fontaine, Center for Contemporary Art in Manama, Bahrain. Valdés represented Chile at the Venice Biennale in 1990.

Agnieszka Sejud is a visual artist living and working between Hamburg and Wroclaw. She graduated from the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics of the University of Wrocław and from the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. Sejud uses various media to explore different aspects of human identity, the idea of individual freedom, and systems of oppression constraining people’s independence. The artist’s practice includes photography, digital and analogue collage, books and zines, videoart and installations. Her vision of the world is vivid, kaleidoscopic and psychedelic. Sejud often employs deformations and deconstruction of imagery to illustrate her purposes and ideas. Her works have been exhibited internationally.

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles and is Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. She has curated projects at LACE, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Hammer Museum, Human Resources (HRLA), (all LA); Oregon Contemporary, Portland; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Sursock Museum, Beirut; and UKS, Oslo. Halajian serves on the Programming Committee of HRLA. She is a recipient of the Arts Writers Grant for the collaborative journal Georgia and Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her writing has been published by ArtEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, among others. Halajian is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Francesco Rufini is a documentary filmmaker and educator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. He started filmmaking with a BA in Anthropology at the University of Bologna and an MFA in Film Directing at the Edinburgh College of Art. His short documentary Dogma (2018) about the quirky world of dog shows in the UK illustrates his interest in film ethics, representation, and identity. Rufini’s later research on Inuit cinema, Robert J. Flaherty and Nanook of the North (1922) was published for the film's centenary. In Lithuania, Rufini has been pursuing his own documentary projects, working as camera operator, and teaching film and photography in refugee camps with ARTSCAPE. After the Storm, a documentary about time and amber searching, will be his first film made in Lithuania.

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 al-yené, Brown Hair Rhymes With Soil, 2021.

Ignacio Valdés, Untitled, 2015.

Agnieszka Sejud, HOAX, 2022, Photo: Agnieszka Sejud


Aimee Goguen, Mountain of the Collapse, 2022. Curated by Suzy Halajianat JOAN, Los Angeles. 
Photos: Chris Wormald. Images courtesy of JOAN.

Francesco Rufini, After the Storm, 2023.