My work has been evolving around the idea of perception of our own identity and its fragility. It often seems possible to trace the thoughts and actions of an individual and connect them to external sources like their culture, the way society has made them and their genetics and instincts. While representing the human figures (through oil painting or through photography) I exclude any context in an attempt to express the uncomfortable moment of confrontation with the emptiness of the self. But although I see myself as corrupted by society, I also came to realize I’m also corrupted by my own animal desires. Underlying my artistic work, there’s a process of research that goes back and forth between the sphere of values and context (from external sources) and the sphere of desires and instincts (from genetics). I am society and society is myself. Each individual bounces between the polarity of victim and aggressor of society. Individually humans are fragile. Without the others we are nobody. Even our own definition of “I” presupposes the existence of “others”. If the human being is the result of its context and instincts, all its actions can be justified and predicted. The human is an inoffensive animal. It’s almost comical how fragile it becomes.
In the GlogauAiR residency I intend to continue and develop the project I’m currently working on. “ANIMALS” is about the displacement of people as individuals in society. These days human beings are used to the constant change. Their biggest strength is adaptation, so we, humans, adapted to this pace. In fact, we crave change. Our curiosity is inherent to our species. Paradoxically, humans also need a sense of belonging and integration. Change is happening faster than ever before. Too fast for people to ground themselves. Displacement became normality. And normality is the acceptance of the majority. Berlin is the culmination of displacement. Being one of the most multicultural cities in Europe, this stage of contemporary people is the best scenario for a further evolution of my project.
I intend to present this idea through a series of portraits where the individual beings are displaced out of their context. Free of conceptions they appear in an uncomfortable emptiness. Then, I want to take my artistic process further and take the portraits themselves out of the environment of the studio. Out of context, the paintings are ungrounded, like those who they represent. Through this contrast I intend to express the overlapping values we all share and the struggle of integration.
CV Summary
Education
September 2014 – June 2018: Bachelor degree in Painting – Fine Arts University of Lisbon
Collective Exhibitions
3.27 June 2017, Centro Cultural de Cascais, Cascais, Portugal
12×12 December 2016, Atelier da Travessa, Lisbon, Portugal
O meu lugar December 2015, Associação de Moradores da Portela, Loures, Portugal
The whirlwind of stardust. The tide of the sea. The irruption of a volcano. These childlike fascinations bring to the fore the continuous going back and forth between science and the mystery of nature. They are at the core of my photographic work as I’ve been dialoguing, since 2010, with scientists who explore and document natural phenomenon. Nature has a will of its own. It always finds its way outside of the humankind culture and its influence. A volcano for instance is still something non-negotiable. We attend to measure the world around us through our physical presence, how we engage with our surrounds, and how we perceive color, time, motion and scale. The aim of my work is to tackle the environmental issues through different prisms, to confront both the scientific and the artistic point of views on ways we enter in relation to our environment, to the natural phenomenon and their aesthetic perceptions and to discover new forms of data.
Throughout my work and travels, I have been fascinated by natural phenomena such as craters, swamps, volcanos and comets. In these contexts, since a few years now, I have started a dialogue with scientists working on and documenting these phenomena. The story begins with an encounter and evolves in crossing the scientific and photographic approaches, confronting point of views on ways we enter in relation to our environment, to the natural phenomenon and their aesthetic perceptions. The aim to tackle the environment issue through different prisms and discover new forms of data. My practice takes place in a research within the space, the experience and the encounter. It is therefore in this will of encounter that I head towards GlogauAIR. I’m always looking for workshop where I could learn and enhance my technique. I have the strong will to experiment new types of alternative process. In the context of this program, I wish to develop this line of work more in details, both artistically and theoretically. I also find this program as a great opportunity to share interests in analogue methods of processing, to confront points of view, to cross practices and give a hand to others within their research. It is a beautiful place favorable to create and share. Important for ideas’ irruption, and bringing forward new perspectives.
CV Summary
Laure Winants is a Brussels based visual artist (b.1991).
BA in Visual Communication and a MA at IHECS Academy, Brussels, Belgium, in the year 2016, during which she also completed a fine arts specialization at the Belas Artes of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Specialized in photography at KASK, Gent (2017-2018).
The aim of her work is to tackle the environmental issues through different prisms, to confront both the scientific and the artistic point of views on ways we enter in relation to our environment, to the natural phenomenon and their aesthetic perceptions and to discover new forms of data.
Recent screenings and exhibitions of her work include: Short Film festival at Namur (Terra Nullius, 2016), collective exhibition 60/60 (The Comet is coming, mars 2019), Museum of Photography in Charleroi (2019), Belgium, R.A.V.I (Artist residency 2020), Kunstcentrum Hasselt (2021).
I am often referred to as the Hairtist, because I have a predilection for using synthetic hair in my work. Hair Brut is a closer definition as my creations could be Art Brut using hair exclusively. Creating strong symbolic evocations and infinite creative power, I joyfully manipulate it in all its forms for installations, or crafted objects. Tamed or savage and in unending combinations of color blends, hair constantly challenges me. Handling these strange threads requires a constant defiance of control and patience. Freed from the confining shapes of human heads and ‘hairstyling’ and taken as a crude, ruthless material, it offers an amazing world of possibilities. The challenge to push the boundaries ever further, to deconstruct and reinvent the use of this primitive material inspires me to continue exploring the art of Hair Brut.
is a conceptual project, inspired by the « rebirth « that David Bowie experienced in Berlin. It is meant to become a paper object, which assumes its planned obsolescence. Polaroïd portraits will be combined in a physical photo album, to be hopefully sold to a collector. The afterlife of this album remains unknown. It might pass from hand to hand as decades pass and be found in an antique book store on a future flea market.
« Hey Babe » is a mystery.
The album won’t provide any explanations on why all these different people are wearing the same orange mullet hairstyle. It will only mention their first names, and the place where the photo was shot. David Bowie himself won’t be referred to either. This object is conceived with more of a glimpse to its afterlife than its present day impression. Created for those who will discover it in the distant future and find intrigue and curiosity. Instigating the viewer to figure out the reference of place, person and ‘why’ this curious hairstyle?
« Hey Babe » is about loss of memory.
As papers fade, generational souvenirs fade with them. Who will still remember David Bowie next century ? Even decades after the belle epoque of Glam and Bowie most of the youth of today would not know the reference to the lyrics of « Rebel Rebel » or to the hairstyle.
« Hey Babe » is a secret hommage.
When turning the pages of the album, it will be obvious that this strange hair style fits none of the models, young or old, male, female, children, maybe even dogs. David Bowie: and if there will be nobody like him again?
CV Summary
Born in Nice in 1966, Wig master since 20 years
Contemporary visual artist since 2014:
2014: “Cabinet de Pilosités” (personal exhibition- Espace Carpeaux in Courbevoie / France)
2016: “The Bowigs” (personal exhibition- La Galerie Partagée Paris / France)
2016: “The Rattan Project/1” ( participation -Maison et Objet _Craft Paris/ France )
2017: “The Rattan Project/2” ( participation -Maison et Objet _Craft Paris/ France )
2018: “Tiré par les cheveux” (group exhibition – Viroflay / France)
2018: “The Rattan Project/3” ( participation -Maison et Objet _Craft Paris/ France )
During the years I have been using different techniques and I have come to learn the importance of the basics for any artwork, drawing and writing are becoming my priority regardless of the techniques used on the final piece. I try not to limit myself by a specific material but rather find the concept and the idea that I want to work with and from there build up using the material that best suit the purpose. Since a couple of years I been influenced also by aesthetics of mysticism, the designs of the Tarot of Marseilles, the designs of oracle cards and the sculptures of Santa Muerte among others, this is a language that I like to embrace and one that I feel comfortable with. Other aesthetic influences are great comic artist like Moebius and Ashley wood. But also the traditional Japanese woodcut illustrations, botanical illustration and contemporary Japanese pop artist and manga artist. When it comes to literature I feel very inspired by cyberpunk and science fiction writers like William Gibson, Isaacs Asimov and Philip K. Dick. But also by the latin American “boom” Novels by writers like Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar. My aim is to keep constructing my own aesthetics as I learn form this influences wile enjoying the diversity of different mediums.
I enjoy creating art that can be used and touched, art work that is not off limits for the people that encounter them, it is in this context that I choose materials and techniques that make this possible, as coffee mugs or T-shirts.
Continuing with my work with fabric and clothes, I want to create a piece of wearable art, a dress.
After doing my master on Visual Arts In Situ³ at the Royal Academy of fine Arts in Antwerp known for its outstanding Fashion Design program, and studding its history I learned to see fabric and clothing as a vehicle of expression. I do not attempt to be a designer, instead I want to use clothes as medium of communication.
During the last couple of years I have been researching about my own family history, like all Latin Americans my Culture and DNA is very diverse as result of the melting of numerous human groups. During this journey of ancestry research a picture of my grandmother’s sister came to surface, in this photograph she wears an amazing and mysterious dress.
So far I have been unable to identify its origin, she was the first child of my great-grandmother and she was twenty five years older than my grandmother, this makes impossible for the eldest family members still alive to have any information about it.
From its design it is clear that its origin is not Europe or America (the continent), and it has some similarities with the middle eastern and North African Kaftans.
During the residency I will make a dress, not a copy or recreation but an interpretation, an homage to this uncertain but beautiful heritage.
On the fabric I will incorporate patterns inspired by the Botanical scientific Illustrations from the Jose Celestino Mutis Botanical expedition in the Kingdom of New Granada today known as Colombia and by the patterns of islamic geometric design.
Inspiration for this is also the work of Katsuya Terada and hes big format intricate Illustrations with animal and human characters.
The materials I will use are my own fabrics recycled from clothes and bed linen, part of the processes will be reusing and re purposing when possible, having as goal a sustainable artwork.
CV Summary
My first degree was a Bachelor in graphic design, what I loved the most from it was Illustration, so I went through that path, took extra lessons on free hand illustration, scientific illustration and mixed techniques, when I finish the bachelor I wanted to be an Illustrator but I didn’t feel comfortable having to deal with clients and their opinions, so I thought “I’m going to illustrate my own ideas” and that is what artist do. So I realized I wanted to be an artist after all and went and started a masters degree on Visual Arts at the Universidad Pedagogica in Bogota, I fell in love with conceptual art and performance, art history fascinated me and there I got introduced to the new media and art in the web. In this master I experimented with installations and I got immersed in to virtual worlds and the possibilities of creating art in those environments, there I did a series of online performances from Bogota broadcasted via web to The Netherlands and shown live on an Amsterdam local TV station. During this Master I had the opportunity to do an internship in the Netherlands thanks to the contacts I met in this virtual scene, this ultimately led me to move to Europe, unfortunately after five years of master studies in Colombia I didn’t get the chance to graduate from that master I was doing before I had to move out of my country.
A couple of years later, then living in Belgium I had the wonderful opportunity to do a master in the Royal Academy of fine Arts of Antwerp, there I was encouraged to get out of my comfort zone and I went in to more traditional media. As part of my graduation exhibition I had sculpture, ceramic, silkscreen work, an installation and video art, the high standards at the academy pushed me to create a big body of work that ultimately made me win the “Strt-Schot” prize, an award that is giving to the best of all the master graduates form the academies of the city. As part of this award I had an exhibition the following year in witch inspired by the rich history of fashion design of the academy in Antwerp I moved in to a new medium, fabric, I learned how to use a sewing machine and created a piece from home made T-shirts hanged in the gallery in washing lines. Since then I been developing this craft, experimenting in ways to apply color and designs, improving my skill with the sewing machine and drawing in general. I am specially interested in integrating Islamic geometric design and botanical illustration into the work I am doing with fabric.
On a different path, at the beginning of this year I took a three month online course with the university of Standford on creative writing, I always wanted to tell my own stories to used them as fuel to my creative process in my visual art, at the moment I am writing shorts stories and essays that I publish on my website.
Silvestre Preciado is an interdisciplinary artist who works with oil painting and airbrush techniques. During her residency at GlogauAIR, she will be working on a large painting & sculpture installation parallel to upcoming shows in Paris’21 and Berlin’21. Silvestre is originally from New York but is permanently based in Berlin. She graduated from The Cooper Union (US)’12 and received her Masters in Philosophy & Art History from the University of Kent ’17, UK.
The GlogauAIR studio space will be utilized as both studio and installation viewing space. Large stretched and draped canvas panels will delineate an L shaped room that will mirror itself from both entrance doors, without requiring the viewer to need to enter the space. The mirroring effect is an analogy to the installation’s concept of “algorithmic echo chambers”, meaning the reverberation of content that cycles through highly complex algorithms that result in creating an illusion of information and culture. The installation is modular, and its paneled paintings will be exhibited parallel to three individual upcoming shows in Paris, Barcelona, and Berlin.
CV Summary
Education
2017 MA, Philosophie und Kunstgeschichte University of Kent, Paris, France
2012 BFA, Interdisziplinäre Kunst Cooper Union, New York, NY
Solo Exhibitions
February 2020 Andreas Reins Project / Silvestre Preciado/Anna Nezhnaya Duo-Ausstellungen, von Suzy Royal kuratier Berlin, Deutschland
January 2021 Duo-Ausstellungen, Galerie Charraudeau Paris, France
December 2020 Silvestre Preciado/Anna Nezhnaya Duo-Ausstellungen, von Haimney Galerie kuratiert Barcelona, Spanien
February 2020 The shooter’s horse, Privater Sammlerraum Berlin, Deutschland
January 2020 The shooter’s horse pt.1, 547 West 27 St. / Suite 51 New York, New York
May 2016 Timely bones, Arredondo/Arozarena Galerie, Mexico D.F.,Mexico
March 2014 Sickman Jetman, NoMiNIMO Galerie, Guayaquil, Ecuador
October 2013 GRIDLEAK, Fernando Luis Alvarez Galerie Stamford, CT, USA
April 2012 The Piebald Proceeding, Cooper Union 6th fl Galerie New York, NY, USA
Selected Group Exhibitions
November 2020 Shau Fenster Galerie Berlin, DE
November 2020 Haimney Galerie Barcelona, Spain
February 2020 Art N23 Group show, Art N23 Galerie The Biscuit Factory, London, UK
December 2019 ARTFORO Kunstmesse Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
December 2019 Context Kunstmesse 547 West 27 St. / Suite 51 space, Miami, USA
September 2017 Chelsea New York offenes Atelier 547 West 27 St. / Suite 51 space, New York City, USA
July 2015 Cartagena Satelite Kunstmesse Cartagena, Colombia
February 2014 Showroom Collective 2 Quito, Ecuador
January 2013 Palm Beach Kunstmesse Palm Beach, FL, USA
January 2013 Art Miami Kunstmesse Miami, FL, USA
October 2012 Affordable Kunstmesse Spirit Del Art Gallery, Chelsea, NY
In my work I’m interested in the silent language of gestures. The fragility of perception, stories within objects and materials and the presence of thought that they carry.
I work with left behinds, traces as clues, like tags, not wanting to be forgotten. Traces of situations indicating movement, attention/intention and the lack of it.
About one thing leading to another. Taking it step by step. Trying to get it, letting it get there. Like a sort of whisper game (telephone game).
I’m occupied by the way we project emotions and thoughts into objects, materials and shapes. In this I try to shift the gaze so the objects rather are looking back at the viewer, creating situations of meeting yet confrontation. It’s about arrangements and compositions where the objects speak for themselves and to each other in relation to the viewer, opening up for different ways of looking at and reading what’s around us.
My works are intimate depictions of ways of viewing and dealing with our everyday life surroundings. I want you to want to come closer.
GlogauAIR Project
I work with everyday life materials, scenes and objects from the streets. In this period I will continue my work with arranging, composing compositions and my work with collecting.
I work a lot with what you call simple and found materials. I will let things catch my eye. Objects and pictures. And build up my archive of observations.
It’s about painting but it’s also painting with surfaces and structures that only time develop.
My practice takes place at the walks and in the studio, where spending time with and getting to know my material is a big part of the process.
Berlin is a place that has given me lot of strong scenes and I’m really looking forward spending more time there and to be in a constant process.
Clara Gross is GlogauAIR resident from July, 2020 to September, 2020
Clara Gross is an sculptress from New York City. She is interested in the human body as the boundary between the self and the wider world. It is her understanding that we come to know the world around us through what we see, hear, smell, touch or do not touch, and in turn come to know ourselves; where our bodies start and end, what is us and what is not. As an urbanite, most of life has passed in the highly constructed, man-made environment of the city.
Meet the Artist
For her project in GlogauAIR she took long walks around the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, where the residency is placed, absorbing images, shapes, colours… she found appealing. After those walks, she would come back to her studio at GlogauAIR and draw sketches of those memories. From those sketches, she would later on make sculptures and experiment with video making, resulting in a collection of impressions an record of her own experience in Berlin.
Clara Gross is interested in the human body as the boundary between the self and the wider world. It is her understanding that we come to know the world around us through what we see, hear, smell, touch or do not touch, and in turn come to know ourselves; where our bodies start and end, what is us and what is not. As an urbanite, most of life has passed in the highly constructed, man-made environment of the city. This has informed Clara’s sense of who she is in the world. She inhabits the space between walls, buildings, and city blocks. These negatives spaces have captured her attention. The negative spaces become activated, positive spaces through our dwelling in them.
Clara’s sculptures reference the shapes and forms of buildings. They exist mainly at a small, model-like scale. This size allows her to address the material and spatial relationships between forms and reference the large scale of architecture in a tangible way. She often works with construction materials such as wood, metal, or plaster in order create a tactile connection with my subject matter.
She enjoys the quiet moments, when the light cast a shadow on the wall just right or when a wire fence touches the brick facade next door or how the space of an alleyway frames a view of a cloud in the sky. There is joy for her in these moments, and humor too.
Nana (Hwanhee Kim, 1980, South Korea) & Felix (Felix Nybergh, 1985, Finland) are an artist duo working together since 2012. Originally trained as a painter and a photographer respectively, they carry out projects in a wide range of different media, often in series, such as drawings, photographs, texts, video, three dimensional works, sound installation, etc.
Their work always stems from personal experiences and the need to contextualise them within the larger political and social reality we live in. The connecting thread within their admittedly eclectic projects is a yearning to understand their own place within an perpetually redeveloping, industrialised, man-built world. They often employ a photographical language, in a straightforward documentational manner, mixed with a touch of irony.
In their first two projects “SoMe” and “The Zone System” they explore how photographs are deployed in order to manipulate the public. Both projects focus on authoritative images, such as those used by law enforcement and the advertisement industry. By mimicking, recreating and repositioning, the projects expose the absurd nature of the image. The duo’s recent projects “Let There be Motorways” and “WEAST” have been carried out between the years 2015 and 2018, when they lived in South Korea. Conditioned by the peculiar history of this country both projects deal with a bizarre version of cultural appropriation. Nana & Felix have examined how a national project has been developed based on a foreign, misinterpreted and misunderstood imagery. Their response to such imagery resulted in producing a series of works disguised as a traditional art.
As visual artists, they aspire to expand the understanding of the ways their lives as both artists and citizens unfold within the society we live in. All of Nana & Felix’s projects, both past and future, always try to challenge their own prejudices, processing them with honesty, irony and humility.
We are currently working on a long-term project called 7hrs of Future. The project consists of a series of comparative works that take the shape of reinterpreted landscapes that portray actual, possible and alternating social and economical realities of Korea and Finland.
During our stay at GlogauAIR we will be working on two different works.
Koti Ikävä (Home Sick/Sad) is a large-scale drawing consisting of 35 individual drawings. The drawings loosely follow the shape of the map of Seoul, depicting a landscape that exists somewhere between a city and mindscape. We have been working on this piece since a year and aim to finish it during our residency.
SEL2020HEL is a series of monochromatic date paintings. For every day of the year 2020, we will produce two small paintings in pair, depicting only the date of the day on top of a solid colour. The background colour of each painting corresponds to the air quality readings of Seoul and Helsinki. The colours of our paintings follow the internationally most used air quality index, the USAQI, which illustrate the air quality both in numbers, ranging from 1 (perfect) to 500 (hazardous) and corresponding colours, ranging from green through, yellow, orange, red, violet to burgundy. Across the paintings, tying them together, we write the corresponding date. In Korea, the date is written YY/MM/DD and in Finland DD/MM/YY. The first day of this year will thus spell out as follows: 2020.01.01.01.2020. This mirroring effect ties the two cities together, producing an entirely new landscape.
CV Summary
EDUCATION
Nana (Hwanhee Kim)
2011-2014 MA in Fine-art Photography, Aalto University School of Arts and Design, Finland
2003-2004 MA in Fine-art, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK
2000-2003 BA in Painting, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK
Felix (Felix Nybergh)
2011-2014 MA in Fine-art Photography, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
2007-2011 BA in Photography & Visual Communication, IDEP-Abat Oliba CEU, Barcelona, Spain
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2017 “WEAST”, Gallery Doll, Seoul, South Korea
2017 “Progress”, H2O, Barcelona, Spain
2017 “107-1502”, K2 Art Lounge x Gallery Jinsun, Seoul, South Korea
2016 “Progress”, Space Opt., Seoul, South Korea
2016 “House of Cards”, Artist Residency TEMI, Daejeon, South Korea
2014 “The Zone System”, Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
2013 “Ways of Seeing”, Photographic Centre Peri, Turku, Finland
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019 “291 Report Part 1”, 291 photographs gallery, Seoul, South Korea
2018 “The Way Home”, Suwon Art Center, Suwon, South Korea
2018 “Petites Anotacions Sobre El Retrat”, Centre Cívic Ateneu Fort Pienc, Barcelona, Spain
2017 “291 Report Part. 1” Space 291, Seoul, South Korea
2017 “Blind Date”, Space Willing & Dealing, Seoul, South Korea
2017 “Pingpong in Mak/MAK+BIO+JECT”, Place Mak, Seoul, South Korea
2017 IHME Contemporary Art Festival, Helsinki, Finland
2016 “Blind Date”, Space Willing & Dealing, Seoul, South Korea
2016 “Sensible Reality”, 2016 Artists Residency Festival, Seoul, South Korea
2016 “2015 Platform Artists” Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, South Korea
2016 “Preview”, Artist Residency TEMI, Daejeon, South Korea
2015 “New Present”, Mänttä Art Festival, Mänttä, Finland
2015 “Paradise Reopening”, Paradise Inn, Incheon, South Korea
2015 “Non-Parallel Evolution of Unrelated Beings”, Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, South Korea
I engage in the body, which I view as a machine, attracted to moments of breakdown. Illness and pain are the raw materials comprising my personal alchemy. A feeling of discovery ensues when the two coalesce into an image. Inert and organic materials originating in my own and foreign bodies are the elements with which I work. Similar to a chemical reaction, they undergo a transformation to come together into a lyrical image that sometimes loses its source entirely a process of abstraction.
Similar to producing a sound which is reflected back as an echo, my work turns to parallel worlds which respond in poetry, painting, and body art. These are the realms which I visit from time to time and from which I always return to photography, as I am deeply rooted in its tradition and history.
Although I am a photographer, I rarely make documentary works. I work mainly with existing photographic materials which become the working tools in my experimental laboratory in which images are constructed and deconstructed. I frequently make use of X-rays, road maps, and photographs from books and printed periodicals. I consider them puzzles or codes I seek to decipher. Paradoxically, the decoding process mostly creates a new secret. Over the past few years, scanning has become my major work mode. While the camera is the natural extension of the eye and body of the subject who gazes, the scanner maintains an objective distance, without a stance or hierarchy, remaining simultaneously unemotional and sensuous.
Throughout my years of making art, I make frequent use of archaic manual processes which have become almost irrelevant. Art enables me to engage in unnecessary actions with their technical clumsiness as I long for materiality in a world in which it is absent. In my new series, I use a simple office stapler and hundreds of staples to create precise and orderly circles. The prosaic, characterless material encounters an abstract, ritual, impractical action. In many senses, the work distills my action mechanisms: identifying existing material whose functionality originates in the non-art world; appropriating, abstracting, and transforming it. The material loses its original function as it creates a singular, unique, and poetic new world.
One day, about a year and a half ago, I noticed there was something wrong with my cell phone display: all the images, colors, and icons were suddenly jumbled. I took photos of these glitches and disruptions and decided to blow up the images by hundreds of percent, replacing their familiarity with a menacing, almost cinematic effect. A different materiality surfaced, leading me to explore an entirely new medium: I started looking into embroidery, more specifically digital embroidery, as I was more interested in contemporary mechanisms than in crafts. I started looking for an expert in the field of digital embroidery. It was important that while working with large-scale machines, I would be capable of controlling each thread individually. During a recent visit to England, this research led me to Jacky Puzey – together we selected the fabrics, threads and degree of stretching of the fabric, to create the first pieces of this series.
This would be the first project I would like to focus on during my residency. Not long ago, I have reached out to Rolf Siebert of the Stickerei Berlin Company, specializing in this type of digital embroidery. The GlogauAIR residency would provide me an opportunity to work closely and personally with these local experts, and to continue this dialog, collaboration, and material exploration for the creation of new works for the digital disruption series.
In many of my works I use materials I find in my surroundings, which I put through various material and visual transformations. I respond to my surroundings, and therefore any change in location generates new insights and ideas. To find these materials I regularly visit flea markets, and explore newspapers and magazines, medical charts, and even people – actual bodies around me. In the series titled Bodies, for example, I take photographs of bruises on bodies of people around me. Printing these images on a paper that is not meant for printing, I am able to lose control of the final image and let the printer create its own ink contusions, resulting in abstract images of body-machine colorful internal bleeding. This series is also connected to a recurring subject in my work – that of pain, sickness and corporal features, and specifically the relationship between pain and pleasure.
These days I am working on a new series of works related to these issues and practices, which I would like to develop and execute during the residency. To this end, I intend to bring my scanner with me, which I use as a camera to explore different objects and images. Lately, I have been working with charts and images produced by medical imaging devices – EKG diagrams, X-rays, angiograms, etc. In Berlin, I would like to gain access to similar materials, which would surely have their own local features. I intend to peruse the same practice dynamics and generative processes – whichever medical objects I encounter will dictate the character of the works I will create, and one work will generate the next.
On a final note, I am very excited for the opportunity the residency would provide for a close encounter with German contemporary art. I feel a connection, a common language, with many German artists, some of them (such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff, and Florian Maier-Aichen) being great sources of inspiration for me. I am also intrigued by the encounters your program brings about between artists of different cultures, which I perceive as enriching and vital to my practice and artistic process.
CV Summary
Lives and works in Tel Aviv
Education
2013-2015 MFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel
2009–2012 BFA, Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Kfar Sava, Israel
1999–2003 B.Des,(Design) College of Management and Academic Studies, Givatayim, Israel
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2019 Epidermis, Hamaabada Le Zilum (Photography Lab) Gallery, curator: Dr. Smadar Sheffi
2019 Out of Place, The Lobby Art Space, Tel Aviv (with Raafat Hattab), curators: Leor Grady, Orit Shershevski
2017 My Madonna, Tel Aviv Artist’s House, curator: Vera Pilpoul
2013 Knife in the Water, Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv (with Liraz Pank), curator: Reuven Kuperman
Selected Group Exhibitions
2020 Winners of the Air Land 3.0 / Inside Land Prize, Museum of Contemporary Arts/ Ex Officine Ferroviarie di Barge, Torino, Italy
2019 Reflections, Neve Shechter Art Center, Tel-Aviv, curator: Shira Fridman
2018 Steel City, Ken HaKukia Art Space, Tel-Aviv, curators: Gilat Nadivi and Vera Pilpoul
2017 The 5th International Photography Festival, Portfolio view of 10 artists, 10 artists Tel Aviv
2017 Traverse Video Festival, Toulouse, France, curators: Simone and Pierre Dompeyre
2017 The Core Project, RUA RED Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, curator: Matthew Nevi
2017 Capture the Moment, Galleri Norrsken, Stockholm, Sweden
2017 A Village You Are and to a Village You Will Return, Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, curator: Raafat Hattab
2017 Empire II, Castello 1610/A, Venice, Italy, curator: Vania Balogh
2016 AVI-Art Video International Festival, Jerusalem
2016 The Unknown, The Different and The Bizarre, Beit Michal Art Center, Rehovot, curator: Carmit Blumenson
2016 In Between, Florentin 45 Contemporary Art Space, Tel Aviv, curators: Gilat Nadivi and Vera Pilpoul
2014 Revealment and Concealment, Bialik House Museum, Tel Aviv, curator: Dr. Smadar Sheffi
2014 Confessions, The Artists’ Residence, Herzliya, curator: Karni Barzilay
2010 Secret Art, Beit Mani, Tel Aviv, curators: Doron Pollak and Esti Drori
My work as a fiction-writer attempts to give legible shape to time, grief, desire, and dislocation. I grew up in Berkeley, California, in a family of women. One of my moms, Dawn, died when I was 19 from breast cancer that spread to her brain, becoming a presence of memory in our house, and I tried to trace the ephemera to its source. I wanted more than anything for the relationship to continue, and that meant for the knowing of my mom to continue past her death. I didn’t find answers, exactly, but I kept telling stories about what I did find, and what it could mean about me.
In turn, my characters often come from complicated families of women, where questions around biological family and gender are differently embodied than in a straight, heteronormative family. In my first novel, ‘Rosie’, the titular main character must confront what she didn’t know she didn’t know. The rules of physics appear to be different in her house: she attempts to stop time within her family, but speed it up when she passes over to the world of her friends. The sensual world does not stop for Rosie as one of her moms dies; it warps. I wrote in the first person present tense in an attempt to ground Rosie in a trap, forcing her to push against the limits of her own description. My next novel-in-progress puts the subjunctive in conflict with the indicative as a way to explore fantasy, obsession, and desire.
What I am most interested in is what my characters do and do not know about themselves—and how their own self-knowledge may come as a surprise. Learning can live in the head before it sinks into the body, or it can grow in the body like a malignant seed, impervious to a rational knowing. What might it feel like to write from the inside, to write of a sensation before it becomes a knowing?
My project is a novel-in-progress. The novel follows a young woman through a failed relationship that leads her to a job—an internship as part of a research trip to the Farallon Islands outside of San Francisco. The head researcher on the project is Rebecca’s ex-boyfriend’s father. What ostensibly starts as a choice of impulse turns into something concrete, and Rebecca is increasingly unable to avoid her body, a body which slips and slides between gender lines as she feels its weight on this new ground. A child of two moms, she is somewhat at odds with this all-male team on the islands—and not.
What follows is a relationship with the head researcher, a man named Michael, and a space between the imagined and the consummated. I hope to write into the tension between the subjunctive and the indicative, asking: Is she living in that indicative moment or in the subjunctive moment? At times, in this new and drastic place, the answer seems to be: she can’t not be there, in the indicative moment, because of where there is. At other points in the novel, she will have disguised herself, nearly successfully, in the imagination of what could be or what would have been.
CV Summary
BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2015, studying under Heidi Julavits, Justin Taylor, and Justin Torres.
Worked in the film industry in LA.
Assisted screenwriter Eric Roth on projects including the feature films ‘DUNE’, from the classic Frank Herbert novel, and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, adapted from the David Grann book, as well as the television adaptation of Marlon James’ ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’.
Worked for playwright and director Marja-Lewis Ryan on the 2019 sequel to Showtime’s ‘The L Word’.
Shadowed director Denis Villeneuve on the set of ‘DUNE’ on location in Budapest.
Returned to ‘The L Word: Generation Q’ for the second season as writers’ assistant and co-writer of Episode 206.
Wrote first novel, ‘Rosie’, which agent Julie Stevenson of Massie & McQuilkin put on submission to US publishers in March of 2020.
