Rupert Residents Announced for January-June 2018
We are pleased to announce the selection of the following group of artists and curators to take part in Rupert Residency Program for the period of January– June 2018. Candidates were selected through a public Open Call. Final selections jury consisted of Robertas Narkus, artist, cofounder of Vilnius Institute of Pataphysics and organiser of artists’ day centre Autarkia, and eeKulgrinda experimental engineering camp, Rupert director Justė Jonutytė and Rupert Residency and Alternative Education Programme curator Adomas Narkevičius. We are happy to welcome the following group to the program (in alphabetical order):
Abri de Swardt (ZA), Chloe Stead (UK), Christopher Aque (USA), Daphné Boxer (CA) & Eli Kerr (CA), Ellie Hunter (USA), Guillaume Adjutor Provost (CA), Yan Xing (CN/USA), Ioanna Gerakidi (GR/NL), Isabel Legate (USA), Jacob Dwyer (UK/NL), Laurie Kang (CA), Leah Clements (UK), Megan Plunkett (USA), Santiago Taccetti (AR/DE), Vilte Bražiūnaitė (LT/AU) & Tomas Sinkevičius (LT/SE), Zuzanna Czebatul (PL/DE).
Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, South Africa) holds a MFA in Fine Art with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London (2014). De Swardt has held solo exhibitions at White Cubicle, London (SPF Matthew Barney, 2015); MOTInternational Projects, London (Catapult Screensaver, 2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (To Walk on Water, 2011). He has taught at universities in South Africa. In 2018 De Swardt will have a major solo exhibition with POOL, Johannesburg. At Rupert the artist will continue his engagement with queer and Southern subjects as proxies of what Michael Taussig calls “effervescent”, “no sooner emerged than” disappearing, the “exact opposite…of monuments”, through repurposing the orchestral pit in stage architecture as the site for underscoring context and action alike in the ‘dressing’ of scenes. Sound emerges at the lip of the stage hemispherically: from the bottom and from the before, south to north. De Swardt seeks to deploy decolonial methods of evacuation to ask what an orchestra of the South might sound and look like. This will involve procedures of post-ethnomusicology: instead of studying musical difference as geopolitical signifier, to think of ways to reposition the modes in which sound and music are located and politicised to begin with.
Chloe Stead (b. 1988, UK) is an English writer and critic living in Berlin. Her writing has been published in frieze d/e, frieze, Spike Art Quarterly and AnOther Magazine. Her short stories have appeared in Pfeil #5, Pfeil #8 and The Interjection Calendar 2016, all published by Montez Press. She holds a BA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths, University London and a MA in Fine Art from the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg. At Rupert Chloe Stead will begin researching for her first book.
Christopher Aque (b. 1987, USA) is a New York-based visual artist. His work address intimacy, desire, and sexuality in relation to surveillance, data collection, and other expressions of power. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 2009, his MFA from Hunter College in 2016, and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. His work has been included in exhibitions at SculptureCenter, New York; Laurel Gitlen, New York; Motel, Brooklyn, NY; and Regards, Chicago, among others. He is currently a Fall 2017 AIRspace resident at Abrons Arts Center, New York. While at Rupert, Christopher wishes to consider the body in solitude, using the nearby nature and pastoral settings nearby as a site to produce a new body of photographs and films, and to develop further ideas for installations and writing. In her book Jane, Maggie Nelson asks “what are you like when you’re alone? / ugly, heavy, disreputable, / alone, awake, useless”. Aque wishes to consider these qualities—the body in relation to others has an immediate use, but to consider the body alone, qualities of productivity, desire, and usefulness can be reconsidered.
Eli Kerr (b. 1988, CA) and Daphné Boxer (b. 1987, CA) a curator duo VIE D’ANGE from Montreal. VIE D’ANGE is committed to advancing exhibition practices and to locating alternative means of supporting young artists practicing today. With an interest in experimental modes of display and contextual presentation, VIE D’ANGE produces exhibitions from two gallery spaces spanning across a 300 m² auto-body garage in Montréal, Canada. Their exhibition programme is approached as a continuous yet non-linear script of episodic narratives. Within this open-ended and unfolding framework, their exhibitions materially enunciate contemporary social complexities and uncertainties though provoking a divergence of challenging perspectives and possibilities into collision. At Rupert, Boxer and Kerr will begin developing a publication adjacent to their exhibition platform. With an interested in the publication as an exhibition context onto itself, they plan to recuperate documentation and exhibition histories into a new fragmentary format. Through working alongside artists and writers, the publication will also circulate newly commissioned art works and writing, including interviews, profiles, essays and re-aestheticized news stories.
Ellie Hunter (b. 1989, USA) is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Hunter recently completed an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and has a degree in Studio Art & Latin American Literature from Dartmouth College. She is the co-founder and director of The Sunroom, a gallery and programming platform currently located in Richmond, VA. At Rupert, Hunter will develop a series of sculptural works as an inquiry into the anesthetized body. It is often the case that when surgical devices are most active, the human body is in an unresponsive state; then the reverse is also true: when we awake and are released into the world, the devices are shelved. The sculptures will draw upon materials collected from the surrounding natural environment at Rupert, as well as cast metal instruments in order to embody an interplay of activated and deactivated forms.
Guillaume Adjutor Provost (b. 1987, Canada) holds a ph.d. in the study and practice of the Arts from UQAM, Montreal. His research focuses on the concept of curatorial art, namely the use of curatorial approaches as creative practice. Through an indeterminateness of forms, Provost’s production plumbs our unconscious expressions, the idea of usage and the construction of ideals. More specifically, he is interested in what lies on the periphery of history-making: counter-culture, personal archives, the vernacular and science-fiction. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Catalonia, and Scotland. At Rupert he will develop a video and sculpture project which begins with the exploration of Claude Vivier’s musical legacy. A French Canadian composer of contemporary music and, through his compositions, touched on issues related to homosexuality before he died tragically in 1983. The project comes from an interest in the transposition of immaterial languages to visual forms. As a queer artist, Guillaume Adjutor Provost sees creation as a language to decode our collective past and to navigate the present.
Yan Xing (b. 1986, China) is known for his interdisciplinary projects which have built a complex, compelling body of work that reflects critically on how history is manufactured today. He graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009, in 2012 won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Young Artist; that year, he also received a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize from the Pinchuk Art Centre. Yan Xing has exhibited and performed extensively, at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Rubell Family Collection, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Kadist Art Foundation. His latest solo exhibition opened this June at the Kunsthalle Basel. During his residency at Rupert, Yan Xing will develop a new body of work based on his ongoing research into how morals, history, and aesthetics are being manipulated by the living conditions of today’s society. Through the use of fiction writing, fantastical backstories, and imaginative articulation, his multicomponent works attempt to construct a parallel practice for critically documenting historical facts at the same time as offering speculations on the current situation.
Ioanna Gerakidi (b.1992, Greece) works as an artist, writer and curator, based both in Amsterdam and Athens. Her work draws on eros and love, on trauma and disorder to talk about the philosophies and haptic dynamics of language and voice. Her texts, when presented as reading performances, aim to enact the politics and the poetics of lamentation, while tracing fragmented narratives and auto-ethnographic structures. She holds a BA in Media and Communication Studies (University of Athens) and an MA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut). She has worked for, among others, Athens Biennale AGORA, Athens Digital Arts Festival and LIMA Media Art Platform. Her words have been included in several publications. She is a co-founder of Implode Platform for Sound Arts and a co-initiator of Uh Uh Uh Umm Reading Group. During her residency at Rupert she will work on a writing piece exploring the linguistic and paralinguistic systems of desire and pleasure, of rejection and grief. The work will be derived from the schemas of intimacy, proximity and self-exposure implied in the fractal voice of eros and disorder, while reflecting on a composition of a series of external art and non art references
Isabel Legate (b. 1992, USA) received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2015. She has had a solo exhibition at Motel in Brooklyn, NY and has exhibited internationally in Zurich and in Venice. Legate’s artworks explore concepts of femininity, plasticity and the commodified body through sculpture, installation, writing, drawing and scent. Legate is currently based in Austin, Texas and in New York, New York. During her time at Rupert Legate plans to continue work on an ongoing project titled We Burned It So We Would Reek. We Burned It So We Would Reek explores the ways in which commodities are imbued with meaning and become tools in constructing the desires and aspirations of individuals. Using the formal and material language of her prior artworks Legate will integrate them into a narrative fabric that tells the story of two bodies within one, their struggle, a pleasureable collapse and their slow bloom into something delicious. The project will culminate in an installation of video, scent and sculpture.
Jacob Dwyer (b. 1988, London) is an artist based in Amsterdam. His work has been shown in art spaces and film festivals including, IFFR (Rotterdam), IDFA (Amsterdam), BFI (London), BALTIC 39 (Newcastle), Galerie Juliette Jongma (Amsterdam) and Herrmann Germann Contemporary (Zurich). He has completed residencies at De Ateliers (Amsterdam) and Deltaworkers (New Orleans).At Rupert Jacob will develop a series of audio works to be presented in cinemas. The works will be driven by a range of characters/voices who approach reality from a position somehow outside of it. In relation to Rupert’s setting he is interested in the writings of Witold Gombrowicz, whose narratives often play out between a city and the nature that surrounds it.
Laurie Kang (b. 1985, Canada) works in photography, sculpture, installation and video. Kang has exhibited internationally at Topless, New York; The Power Plant Gallery, Cooper Cole, 8-11, The Loon, Franz Kaka, Toronto; Parisian Laundry, Montreal; Carl Louie, London, Canada; Quezon City, Philippines; Feldbuschwiesner, Berlin, Germany; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw; Raster Gallery, Warsaw, Poland; Camera Austria, Graz, Austria. Kang holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. During her residency at Rupert, she will continue research and making around a project “The Scribble, The Knot and The Blob”. The project spans photography, sculpture, installation and video under the guise of a story, becoming a space to enact ongoing research and making as affected by science and biology, personal history, science-fiction and feminist theory. With a sensitivity to materiality, her work embodies rather than illustrates these influences. She will work on a video that uses both the natural and industrial landscapes of Vilnius, including botanical gardens and epigenetic laboratories, and will gather materials onsite to make images and sculptures exploring the intra-relations between body and matter, and the contingent multiplicity of selfhood.
Leah Clements (b. 1989, UK) is an artist based in London. Her practice is concerned with emotional experiences, the relationship between the psychological and the physical, and instances of self-loss into other people or worlds. Self/other boundaries and collective identities, the subconscious, and the impact of emotion on the body have been explored through collapse (prelude) at Muddy Yard (2017), we felt the presence of someone else at Jupiter Woods (2016), Beside Chisenhale Gallery Online Commission (2016), Beside at Chisenhale Gallery (2015), You Promised Me Poems, Vitrine (2015), and The Empath Project at Res. She is currently an artist in residence at SPACE (London) as part of the HereNow programme, where she is focussing on ‘empathy interfaces’: how current technology such as VR is being used in attempts to instill empathy in its users. At Rupert she will be working towards the first edit of a new film work titled collapse, which will use thermal imaging footage filmed at Guy’s Hospital Sleep Clinic alongside interviews with people who fall asleep at times of stress to think about the physical act of collapse as an articulation of personal and political un-coping, and about the creation of psycho-architectural hinterlands through film as a means to access other worlds with new possibilities.
Megan Plunkett (b. 1985, USA) is an artist and publisher based in Los Angeles, California who has exhibited at Bad Reputation, Emalin, Redling Fine Art, Mitchell-Iness & Nash and 356 Mission, among others. She is the co-founder and co-publisher of The Kingsboro Press, a non-thematic independent press dedicated to raw art and literature that publishes books, periodicals and collaborative works.In addition to her practice as an artist, she moonlights as a private detective.During her residency at Rupert, she will work towards the completion of her first artist’s book.
Santiago Taccetti (b. 1979, Argentina) lives and works in Berlin. He has exhibited work in venues such as Cabaret Voltaire, Manifesta 11 in Zürich, Centre d’art Santa Monica, CCCB Barcelona, Istituto Italo Latinomericano in Rome, La Panaderia in Mexico City, CC San Martin and CC Recoleta in Buenos Aires, 1857 in Oslo as well as at Retrospective Gallery and the Baryshnicov Art Center in New York. He is the co-founder of the ongoing project Stoneroses. At Rupert Taccetti will develop his project “A House is not a Home” which combines video, sound recording, and the collection of objects and comes together using different techniques such as Loose Association, a thought disorder in which series of ideas are presented with loosely apparent or completely unapparent logical connections and Derivé, a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances; introduced by Guy Debord of the French Situationist movement of the last century.
Vilte Braziunaite (b. 1991, Lithuania) & Tomas Sinkevicius (b. 1991, Lithuania) – the artist duo that has been working together since 2014. Their works have been exhibited in Lithuania, Austria, and Sweden. Vilte Braziunaite graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts and currently is studying at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Austria. Tomas Sinkevicius graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts and holds an MA from Konstfack, Sweden. Their practice could be summarized by a sense of uncanniness accompanying their works: precise 3D renders, videos and spatial installations. Faithful to the nature of digital media, they emphasize the open-source nature of the work, encouraging other practitioners to reuse and interpret it in their own creative process. At Rupert, Vilte and Tomas will continue developing their multi-sided project “Paint Job”. The project explores how late capitalism and automation create a new mode of subjectivity, a form of life whose conditions are not determined according to its own physical needs, but established by the demands of deregulated, globalized capital. The project already consists of series of aluminum sculptures and for time at Rupert they wish to further develop aluminum casting and coating techniques and reach out to Vilnius-based aluminum fabricators experienced in casting also to further explore pigment astaxanthin.
Zuzanna Czebatul (b. 1986, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Staedelschule Frankfurt in 2013, and later attended the MFA Program at Hunter College, New York as Fulbright Fellow. She is also a recipient of the 2015 SOMA Scholarship, Mexico City. Czebatul has had solo exhibitions at 83 Pitt Street, New York; Piktogram, Warsaw; MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, New York; Bad Reputation, Los Angeles; Schmidt & Handrup, Cologne and Gillmeier Rech, Berlin. Recently, her work was included in group exhibitions at Fondazione Baruchello, Rome; Kevinspace, Vienna; Plato, Ostrava; Tenderpixel, London; Exile, Berlin; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Jeanrochdard, Brussels; Heidelberger Kunstverein and Villa Romana, Florence. Later this year, her works will be presented in a solo exhibition at Ujazdowski Castle for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. At Rupert she will be working towards a solo exhibition at Futura, Prague in September 2018. Her research here will continue to investigate architectural forms that would represent the cultural paradoxes of before-and-after the political changes of 1989-91 in Eastern Europe.
Picture: Isabel Legate, My Eyelashes Ribbling (Melon Flavored), 2017
We would like to thank Rupert Residency Program partners and sponsors:
Lithuanian Council for Culture