Nida A-I-R in January 2015
- Published on Thursday, 22 January 2015 12:52
Photo from the NAC archive
New Year – new Artists arrived to Nida Art Colony. We have 5 artists: two of them come to the Colony for the first time, the rest – are comming back and they have reasons for that.
Welcome: Martin Rørtoft, Anne-Lise Stenseth, Natacha Paganelli, Šarūnas Nakas and Vytautas Michelkevičius.
Martin Rørtoft. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Martin Rørtoft is a Danish curator and art producer. His work and practice involves a multidisciplinary approach to artistic processes in the intersection between text, installation, visual media and performance combined with scientific, critical and historical research.
During his residency at NAC he will be researching and writing a concept for This is not for you, a video and sound installation going into the mentally disordered mind – how schizophrenia and psychosis affect ways of structuralizing physical and imagined space and the balance of reality.
Anne-Lise Stenseth. Photo By Julija Navarskaitė
In her work Anne-Lise Stenseth (NO) focuses on specific themes that questions different aspects of culture, history and the contemporary. Her interests revolves around cultural difference and similarity, identity, otherness, inter-human relationship and antagonism in the social, political, private and public field. Over the past 15 years Anne-Lise has mainly worked with video-portraits and audio-visual essays.
In Nida Art Colony, among several other projects, Anne-Lise Stenseth will continue her work and research for an ongoing project about female figures in history and the present with the intention of adding a Lithuanian female figure. She will also prepare an exhibition in Titanikas at Vilnius Academy of Arts that will show selected video-works from 2008-2014.
Natacha Paganelli, Anne-Lise Stenseth. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Natacha Paganelli (FR) work usually examines a social, economic and political context of a country through a Western prism. “Working with the medium image, I get used to think about prejudices and preoccupations that my country could have about another cultures and I like playing with clichés. From this perspective as a research I’m trying also to understand the other side in collecting images and interviews as a notebook from inhabitants or people I meet in aim to create a new perspective, point of view, staged photographs.“– says Natacha Paganelli.
Following the recent attacks in Paris and the Commemoration of the twenty fourth anniversary of the events of January 13, 1991, Natacha would like to handle researches about the topics such as freedom, democracy, terror via different symbols. Interviewing people from different cultural social environments through photographic or video representations to create a critical debate as video installation.
Šarūnas Nakas. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Šarūnas Nakas is a well known Lithuanian composer of contemporary classical music, essayist, conductor, performance and video artist, organiser of contemporary music festivals and presenter of radio programmes."My compositions could be compared, in some respects, to macro-systems, like lakes, oceans, rivers, nebulae, star clusters, or vast Northern landscapes: it makes no sense to single out individual sounds, motifs or episodes in my music, because changes occur here at a very slow and hardly perceptible pace."- says Šarūnas Nakas.
In Nida Šarūnas keeps on working on developing his music and light projects: Vibrations cosmiques and Delirium of Apollo. “I seek to place an emphasis not on the mystical, but rather on the way that the subcultures of the megapolis and multilingualism – the cosmos of here and now – impact modern life. The intricate layering of meanings is realised like an acoustic Tower of Babel through the use of field recordings and musique concrète technologies.”
Anne-Lise Stenseth, Natacha Paganelli, Vytautas Michelkevičius. Photo by Julija Navarskaitė
Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius is resident in the colony for the first time after 4 years of artistic directorship. He is RiR (reasearcher-in-residency) working on his book on artistic research and its ambiguous and complicated relationship to academia and art world. After two years of post-doctoral research and fellowships in universities and academies in Helsinki, the Hague, Utrecht and Chicago, he is trying to put his experience with critical evaluation into academic and visually appealing book. "Nida is the perfect place to dip your consciousness into solitude and to devote from 10 to 14 hours of your day for writing pleasures and martyrdom. And if you start feeling lonely, you can always organize a party or a sauna with other residents until 5 a.m."– says Vytautas.