Participating Artists
- Published on Thursday, 02 July 2015 15:39
KRISTIN TÅRNESVIK (NO)
Residency at Ars Communis Residency Centre Yo-Yo (Lithuania), August-September 2015
Korsmos ugressarkiv, 2014. In collaboration with Espen Sommer Eide
Kristin Tårnesvik is a practicing artist in a wide range of fields and also produces, and she has an active voice in national art policy, holds positions on committees and is involved in private initiatives. In addition to her own artistic endeavours we can mention her collaboration in the Sami Art Festival together with Hilde Methi, which stretched over a period of 4 years (2008 – 2012). RRR, Rural Reading Room, along with Espen Sommer Eide, Hilde Methi and Morten Torgersrud, and Weed biologist Korsmo’s weed archive with Espen Sommer Eide. She is a member of the collective art studio group Flaggfabrikken in Bergen. Her work often considers social and historical questions and can be viewed as a long-term research project that explores the relationship between art, ideology of activism. Her formal expression involves the use of different materials and media, often using experimental combinations of these.
MO ABD-ULLA (NO)
Residency at Nida Art Colony of VAA (Lithuania), October-November 2015
The Other Yellow, 2014. Digital C-print, 80x100 cm
Mo Abd-Ulla’s practice-based research investigates the parameters of proposal versus object, the mechanics of language and the ambiguity of meaning and perceiving – challenges the boundaries between fine art, architecture, design and curatorial practice. His multifaceted projects include interventions, installations, videos, sculptures, paintings and drawings; as “a sort of discursive argument.” He presents his distinct, poetic and imaginative sensibility towards anthropological and political concerns. His work explores intensely relevant and deeply urgent issues, such as the impact of conflict in a public and private context, the dynamics that govern the formation of individual and collective memory, the way both history and intellectual meanings are written, displayed and negotiated, the veracity of historical and present events, the intimate nature of artistic experiences compared to the pervasive influence of politics and economics, and the role of art today, with particular reference to the global context. Many of his works involve intense observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic conditions of particular places, usually conceived through engagement with urban areas.
TANYA BUSSE (NO)
Residency at Nida Art Colony of VAA (Lithuania), October-November 2015
Chaloupe Reduced, 2013. Cutting process, sculpture, pierre de caen limestone
Tanya Busse is a visual artist whose conceptual practice raises questions concerning deep-time, invisible architecture and larger systems of power, with an experimental and often playful approach. She works primarily with video, photography and print. Alongside her own artistic practice, she is also involved in the organization of various artistic and curatorial platforms, through her role as the director of Small Projects Gallery (Tromsø) and co-director of Mondo Books, an independent book distro that focuses on art publications, fanzines, and printed matter from the Northern region.
VICTORIA DURNAK (NO)
Residency at Nida Art Colony of VAA (Lithuania), October-November 2015
Part of NSEW Winter postcards series, 2013. Risograph on uncoated stock
Past and future encounters trigger Victoria Durnak's introduction of narrative structure into the mishmash of lived experience. Her narratives can be personal, detached, informed by others, nonetheless directed and arranged by her. Personal mythologies unfold through her performances, not just by turning life into art, but also by placing herself in odd situations where any task might become art.
GUNNHILDUR HAUKSDÓTTIR (IS)
Residency at Nida Art Colony of VAA (Lithuania), October-November 2015
Der Abstand, 2014. Performance, audio piece and installation
Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir devices methods of working around a subject exploring possibilities of execution, lays down ground rules to work around a concept, gradually expanding it across mediums and sometimes disciplinary borders. Her choice of media varies; she uses the method and media best suitable for the subject matter each time, combining elements of audio, video, performance, sculpture, drawing and text to give form to ideas. She uses simple and accessible means to create clear conceptual assemblies, each work showcasing transient findings in her explorations employing themes of nature, infantilism, consumerism and cultural identity. She believes in collaboration and readily enters them. She has collaborated with composers, authors, philosophers, actors and vocalists. She writes, teaches and involves herself in research and publication. All the above is an inherent part of her practice. She looks for ways to probe culture and people’s methods of veiling the vulnerable; the premeditated and/or unwittingly superficial identity people create for themselves. She is interested in the primal aspect of humanity; sexuality, fear, valor and the instinct to survive in the jungle of civilization and culture. Guilt and curiosity is her primus motor.
BERGLIND JÓNA HLYNSDÓTTIR (IS)
Residency at Ars Communis Residency Center Yo-Yo (Lithuania), August-September 2015
The Inner Workings (The Walkwork): Memoirs of the clock at Lækjartorg Plaza, 2014
Berglind Jóna Hlynsdóttir has been using buildings near important public locations and objects as catalysts or avatars to tell stories about society. She animates or brings to life a local icon, object, building or area through sound and text. The icon questions its identity, associations and reinvents or redefines its role or “persona”. The icon reflects real and fictional ideas based on her research into its history, popular status and public opinions around it. The icons become visual aides — to help us see the invisible infrastructures or interiors that both created them and live within them. To help us understand larger and more intangible contexts. According to her, it is important to create new social structures, to give them framework and a context to exist in. By naming them fiction, it stresses that even in the realm we call reality there are authors. The form of power and control in the world has changed, but its systems are still at play and they have facilitators, authors and assistants. She believes that we need new tools for thinking and comprehending the structure of these new systems and for that something must be created. Therefore the belief that something can be created is important.
EGLĖ BUDVYTYTĖ (LT)
Residency at the Office for Contemporary Art OCA (Norway), October-November 2015
Shaking Children, 2013. HD video, 5'30. In collaboration with Bart Groenendaal
Eglė Budvytytė creates performative and cinematographic situations in which she explores the body’s ability to challenge conventions of conduct formed by public spaces. Authentic movement contrasts with the rational, homogenised layout of the city. Her work manoeuvres between scripted and ordinary behaviour, and searches for unseen gaps and cracks where groups of unusual codified behaviour can be found. In resisting documentary (both the clichés of film language and the realities of the city or social groups born out of urban processes), she creates poetic commentaries through her films and events that defy the usual expectations of the audience, and reminds us that the potential for change lies in the imagination.
SAULIUS LEONAVIČIUS (LT)
Residency at Nordic Artists' Centre Dale (Norway), November-December 2015
One euro cent casted out of gold and lost in the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2014
Saulius Leonavičius’ practice is a critique of art production, ideologies and institutions that formulate identity of art object. This critique, often in a form of small subversive acts in itself is a discursive shape and can be discussed in terms of plastic arts. Self-reflection of art production is a method and also task. Situations that can’t be appreciated from the view of contemporary cultural norms produce ambiguity in the moment of encounter with an art object. Appropriation of other artworks, intervention in to set of given rules, self-reference and contradiction repeats throughout different situations and contexts. Awareness of limitations and play with them, irony towards value hierarchies in art and culture in general are important as well as using the institution as a medium for comments on questions and issues that are already layered in particular space/time.
ROBERTAS NARKUS (LT)
Residency at Skaftfell Ceter for Visual Art (Iceland), October-November 2015
Turbulence – 3, 2014
Robertas Narkus describes his practice as the ‘management of circumstance in the economy of coincidence’. He brings together the ordinary and the absurd to explore notions of chance economics, hypothetical experiences and symbolic capital.
AUGUSTAS SERAPINAS (LT)
Residency at Noric Artists' Centre Dale (Norway), August-September 2015
Secret Studio, 2012. Wood, accumulator, lamp, laptop, 300 x 180 x 40 cm
Augustas Serapinas is interested in the socially engaged and non-material practice of previous generations of artists, such as the one that emerged around the time of his own birth. The early 1990s saw the rise of the ‘relational’ approach to practicing art with, for and through other people. This could also be a good definition for ‘curating’, another term dating from the same period. His experiments with social interaction start from an openness to the encounter, which, as philosopher Alain Badiou points out, differs from experience because it is always based on improbability. The encounter (as a possibility, an act or, if we like, a manifestation of free will) is also fundamentally opposed to the notion of identity (which essentially regulates sameness) and certainly to its instrumentalisation as identity politics. Yet Serapinas is not exclusively concerned with the non-material and inter-personal. He has also busied himself with the discovery and construction of ‘secret spaces’: pockets of subjectivity carved out of the rational infrastructure that society tries to build for itself.