2025 Residency Programme

Rupert centre for art, residencies, and education is proud to introduce its 2025 open call residents. Over 600 artists responded to the international open call late last spring. After an intensive selection process led by Rupert’s team in cooperation with external jury members, we are delighted to announce the participants of our 2025 programme, chosen from that open call.

An eclectic selection of artists, collectives, curators, writers, and interdisciplinary researchers will join Rupert over the coming year. Each resident will develop creative projects through research and critical discourse, often engaging with our public and alternative education programmes. They will immerse themselves in Lithuania’s contemporary art and cultural context in Vilnius and throughout the country.

Our 2025 residency cohort will examine subjects including the sociopolitical histories of garment-making and its associated labour; the capacity of moving images to represent what is forgotten; contemporary rites for coping, healing, and celebration; practices of desire and love; fiction as a mechanism of political resistance; and organisational means that can convey tangible effect. In April and May, a focused season of residencies will concentrate on cinematic practices, with associated mentorship and public programming initiatives. Additionally, a selection of these residents were chosen by the Rupert team to participate as tutors in the 2025 Alternative Education Programme.

As always, Rupert’s curatorial team facilitates tailored study visits for residents with representatives of the local art field and encourages their participation in activities or events with our institution and beyond.

The selection panel for the 2025 open call included Rupert staff members Viktorija Šiaulytė, JL Murtaugh, Monika Lipšic, and Goda Palekaitė, along with Audrius Pocius (curator, Medūza and former AEP participant), Yana Foqué (director and curator, Kunstverein, Amsterdam), and Amy Watson (director, POOL, Cape Town and 2023 resident).

While this announcement involves 2025 residents selected from the international open call, the full list will grow over the next months with institutional partnerships and invited residency projects.

The participants of Rupert’s 2025 Residency Programme are:

JANUARY

Josephine Sales and Zoey Lubitz (US), both based in New York, are engaged in collaborative research about disability and transness. At Rupert, they will develop ‘Doll Parts,’ an experimental text that adopts ‘the cut’ as a conceptual framework, incorporating text, sound, cinema, found material, and scores for movement and thought. Cuts are fragmentations, cutting is self-injury—to cut is to transform, to edit, to correct, to alter the material forms of representation and embodiment. Such violent and transformative potentialities act as an organising principle for incorporating shared aches and pains in a dialogue emerging from parallel practices—Zoey’s ongoing research on ‘mutilation,’ gender, and transsexuality; and Josephine’s work on violence, trauma, and disability.

Zoey Lubitz (US) is a curator and arts worker. Teaching, writing, and facilitation, in addition to organising exhibitions and performances, comprise her practice. Her project with Gordon Hall, the Center for Experimental Lectures, commissions performances that question the ways in which knowledge is embodied, communicated, and administered. Through a focus on sculpture, video, and reproducible media her work interrogates the relation of form and materiality to the reproduction, survival, and resistance of precarious, racialized, and resilient forms of social and political life.

Josephine Sales (US) is an artist working with time-based media, sculpture, and performance to consider the relational capacities of disability, dependency, and debility. The artist’s work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Kai Matsumiya, and The Shed. Recent engagements include Artist in Residence at the University of California Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts (2021-2023) and exhibiting in E.A.A.T., Experiments in Art, Access and Technology at Beall Center for Art+Technology. Sales received an MFA in Photography from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College.

FEBRUARY

Angeliki Tzortzakaki (GR/NL) is a curator, writer, and tutor. Her research interests orbit around what a body can or can not do whether human, organic, or none of the above, considering aspects of its labour and performativity while moving beyond nature/culture binaries. She has curated and participated in programmes such as All of Greece One Culture, 2024 (Gortyn, Crete), the 2024 Sonic Acts Biennial (Amsterdam), 8th edition of THF RAW (Athens), 2023 ELEVSIS, and the 19th Mediterranea Biennial (San Marino); as well as Saari & HIAP (Helsinki), Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck), Theatrum Mundi/Onassis Foundation (London, Athens), JaJaJa NeeNeeNee (Amsterdam) and PARADISE AiR (Matsudo). In 2021-2022, Angeliki received the SNF Curatorial Fellowship ARTWORKS, while previously a research fellow at the nomadic programme A Natural Oasis? (2018-20).

At Rupert, Angeliki will research wearability and textuality and the consequential oppression and resilience tactics addressed in performative artistic practices. Angeliki will look closer at the work of (Baltics-based) artists of different generations who have been using elements from the history of costume to address narratives around the body, the materials, and their context. 

FEBRUARY AND MARCH

Imani Mason Jordan (UK) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator interested in poetics and performance. Imani has written numerous articles, reviews, essays, poems, plays and love letters, some of which they have published. Since 2016, they have developed a keen interest in poetics, oration, experimentation and practices of reading aloud, from which they have synthesised a performance practice that centres writing and collaboration as well as using the speaking voice as an instrument. After completing their MA in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths in 2019, their pamphlet OBJECTS WHO TESTIFY was published by Taylor Le Melle at PSS. Imani is also Director of PAPERFLESH PUBLISHING, a multi-genre small press and editing studio for the intellectually rigorous, politically minded black writer. Since 2018, Imani has curated various exhibitions and public programmes alongside Rabz Lansiquot as Languid Hands (2019-) and SYFU (2018).

At Rupert, Imani Mason Jordan is completing THE BOOK OF SLASH POEMS, a mythobiographical book-length poetry collection / performance script that uses automatic writing and the experimental multi-sensory use of the “/” to explore the erotics of kinship and the gender-deviant body. Imani will also develop their solo performance work TREAD/MILL, which uses minimalist techniques to explore the labouring body and material cultures of carcerality.

MARCH

Candice Nembhard (UK) is a writer, artist-curator, archivist, and musician living and working between Birmingham and Berlin. They are the Digital Curator for Birmingham Museum & Gallery, founder-director of Bedtime Stories Radio Club, and 2023/24 Woven Foundation Curatorial Fellow; previously a Jerwood Arts Curatorial Fellow, Obsidian Foundation Poetry Fellow, and artist-curator at Eastside Projects. Their practice concerns methodologies of grief through text, sound, moving images, and shared performance alongside the production, preservation, and maintenance of Black audio-visual archives and libraries. They have exhibited, performed, and screened their work at Volksbühne (Berlin), BOZAR (Brussels), Southbank Centre (London), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Kunstverein (Hamburg), Hebbel am Ufer Theatre (Berlin) et al.

At Rupert, Candice will continue developing their research-performance series Offering into a multimedia experience; exploring uses of sound, performance, and moving image within public/collective rituals of grief. As part of her research, Candice wishes to explore Baltic grieving ceremonies and work with local choirs/musicians and craft makers to cultivate a shared, live activation on bereavement.

APRIL

Nazira Karimi (KZ/TJ) tells women’s stories to explore Central Asian memory and environments impacted by colonisation through her films. Born in 1996 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, she repatriated to Kazakhstan with her family in 2013. In Almaty, she studied scenography and painting, and in 2024, she graduated with a Magister degree from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Shortly thereafter, she returned to Central Asia. Now she is part of multiple female artist collectives and platforms, fostering art and knowledge production and nurturing art communities in Central Asia. Her work has been presented at the 60th International Art Exhibition ‘Foreigners Everywhere,’ Biennale di Venezia, and Documenta 15 (2022) as a member of the DAVRA Research Group initiated by Saodat Ismailova. 

In her latest film, ‘Hafta’, she crafted a partly fictional narrative honouring seven generations of women in her family, exploring the grief and erased memories resulting from Russia’s colonisation of Central Asia. This research deepens her commitment to confronting the collective trauma felt in Tajikistan, where the scars of civil war remain largely unspoken. Her long-term vision is to understand how the war happened, its origins, and its impact on her people and the region. At the moment, she is working on her new film ‘Khudoi,’ which mourns the lives they’ve lost, and marks the beginning of this new study.

APRIL AND MAY

Sweatmother (UK/US) is an artist and filmmaker based in London. His moving image work blends performance, self-recorded documentation, internet and archival materials to explore and make visible queer lived experiences. He seeks to create art for his community to share, learn from, and find solace in sensitive depictions of their shared raw realities and obscured histories. He continues to develop his visual art practice alongside his collaborations and lived experiences, proposing new ways the world can interact with otherness.

At Rupert, Sweat will experiment with “interventions against forgetting” within his archival project  Otherness Archive, an accessible online-based archive, that combines pioneering contemporary audiovisual works with their pre-existing counterparts, creating a space where past, present and future coexist in a joint mission of the work representative of the trans and queer experience.

Annie Crabtree (UK) is an artist working with moving image to explore subjectivity as a vessel for challenging dominant societal norms. Informed by autotheory, feminist geopolitics, emotional geography, and crip theory, their work centres nuance, contradiction, and emotion, triangulating image, sound, and voice in a rhythmic and disruptive manner to resemble the repetitive reverb of traumatised remembering. Annie has exhibited with the Edinburgh Art Festival, Glasgow International, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, and the London Short Film Festival, amongst others; supported by the Hope Scott Trust and Creative Scotland. Annie is the Project Manager for LUX Scotland, a non-profit agency dedicated to supporting, developing, and promoting artists’ moving image practices.

At Rupert, Annie will focus on playful experimentation and reflective research to develop a new body of work that centres on the idea that memory is an image on repeat. They will examine how digitally manipulating analogue materials can expand recurrent themes within their practice—untangling, depicting, and evoking the cyclical nature of traumatised memory and the potential of repetition as a cathartic rehearsal to manifest new equilibriums.

MAY

Sam Keogh (IE) is an artist based between Glasgow, Scotland, and County Wicklow, Ireland. He makes sculpture, drawing, collage, and writing – often brought together as installations which facilitate performance. These performances take the form of fractured monologues, dramatised by song, movement, and interactions with the work’s physical elements.

At Rupert, Sam will develop a new performance in his ongoing body of work on ‘The Unicorn Tapestries’, a series of 16th-century Flemish tapestries depicting the hunt and capture of a unicorn. Keogh has been remaking these tapestries as large 1:1 scale collages which see the rarefied world depicted in the tapestries being invaded by a cast of monstrous entities, their bodies frankensteined together from a combination of pre-modern visual culture and contemporary popular fantasy media.

JUNE

Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė (LT) is an artist, curator, and researcher whose work focuses on methodologies rooted in people’s history, feminist and queer ethnography, and theory. She has extensively studied labour history, particularly highlighting women’s work stories from the Soviet era and the 1990s in Lithuania. Recently, she co-curated the event series “Obscene West. Naglis” at the Kaunas Artists’ House, examining the cultural shifts related to sexualities during the tumultuous 1990s. Agnė’s research explores the intersections of gender, labour, and memory within the post-Soviet space, addressing the complex dynamics arising from historical changes. As one of her methods of practice, she proposes a collaborative filmmaking process based on the concept of the Imaginary Archive, engaging artists, activists, and researchers to create a more inclusive narrative that revisits the postcolonial people’s experiences.

Sophie Paul (UK) is a designer and writer based in London. She writes about iridescence, girls, plastic, crystal, and slime, and is interested in self-organised, queer, feminist practices and print culture. She works as an access support worker, associate lecturer in the Design department at Goldsmiths UoL, and is one half of the feminist press Sticky Fingers Publishing.

At Rupert, she will be working on a long-term research and performance project, which explores a re-conceptualisation of girlhood through iridescence, in it’s deceptive cunning. The works traverses the Arctic Sea, awash with the waxy undead bodies of sailors, jewels, and ice palaces.

JULY

Kris Dittel (NL/SK) is a curator, editor, and writer. Her practice is driven by long-term research projects that materialise in various forms: exhibitions, publications, public events, performances, texts, talks, and more. Her recent projects include ‘Unruly Kinships’, an exhibition, study group series, and event program, co-curated with Aneta Rostkowska (Temporary Gallery, CCA Cologne 2022-23), which explored possibilities and forms of (queer) kinship and the ways we may form relations with/in the world. With Clementine Edwards, Kris co-edited ‘The Material Kinship Reader’ (Onomatopee, 2022), which addresses material relations beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family. At present, she’s working on two volumes as co-editor: ‘Unruly Kinships’ (Jap Sam Books, 2024) with Aneta Rotskowska, and a children’s book ‘Life with Fifi ‘(Böks, 2024) with Angelica Falkeling.

Kris will dedicate her time at Rupert to writing and working on a chapter of her research trajectory on desire and love, which contemplates the question: Can we consider love as a political project beyond the capitalist logic of romance? How does the question of desire and the production of desire in and through art play into this issue?

NOVEMBER

soft power (DE) is a collective curatorial endeavour, critically appropriating with its name a political term that describes and uses the influence which ‘soft’ assets such as culture and art can have on policies and economic spheres. In addition to exhibitions and other public formats that have been taking place in soft power’s exhibition space in a former factory building in Berlin since 2021, as a non-profit organisation (Kunstverein), soft power also hosts changing residencies and functions as a multidisciplinary workspace. In their ongoing collaboration, artistic directors Eva Herrmann and Linnéa Bake are working on critically examining “soft power” as a conceptual framework through curatorial research, practice, teaching, and writing—guided by how this ambiguous notion can be productively subverted, challenged, and reclaimed from various perspectives. 

During their residency, Eva and Linnéa aim to develop a new curatorial format that reflects on the issue of contemporary art being conditioned as an extension of state-sanctioned narratives, especially while witnessing a successive dismantling of artistic freedom and a growing number of incidents of cultural censorship. In this context, their research at Rupert will focus on the artistic employment of fiction and its narrative forms’ nuanced recognition of subjectivity as a result of, but not in direct dialog with, political control.

NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER

Armin Lorenz Gerold (AT/DE) is an artist and composer based in Berlin. Working across a multitude of media, he primarily focuses on voice and sound, making audio plays, live performances, broadcasts, and installations.

In his project low frequencies, which will be extended through Rupert, Gerold develops a series of indoor and outdoor loudspeaker sculptures. He creates sound compositions for these sculptures in dialogue with his historical and literary research on land surveys, resource extraction, and territorial conflicts. Applying different audio recording and processing techniques, Gerold aims to sound his complicity while also trying to examine the potential of redistributing volumes and narratives.