#residentintroductions

Rabea Edel, Writer & Journalist http://rabeaedel.com, Germany

I'm a writer, novelist and conceptual journalist from Berlin. PEN member since 2014. As a writer I published several novels. As a journalist I organize the »Urban Journalism Salon« as an interactive new offline event to connect journalists and their readers, to get them involved into discussions about nowadays topics in a more direct and personal way. In Beijing I'll work on my third novel, that questions in an abstract and dystopian way among a poetical shoreline the current situation of Europe. And I would like to get in touch with everyone - other artists, journalist, writers, the people in my neighborhood, the city and country itself. I would like to get lost in a new surrounding to find myself back within a new environment and with a lot of new questions and maybe stories to tell.

Tezz Kamoen, Drawing, the Netherlands http://www.tezzkamoen.com

Living in a neo-liberal, western society is as a start point in my practice. I ruminate on the individual’s position in society; success and failure; commercialism; and societal relationships. When feelings as being uncomfortable and shame arise, it catches my interest. This has its outcome in very investigative and diary like drawings. My practice is self-reflective and psychological, displaying a stream of consciousness that is raw, urgent and fractured. My work is packed with information and focuses on different layers, in mixed media, combing dazzling figures, objects, colors and obsessive notating.

Joy Long, Sculpture, Australia www.joyivill.com After researching the psychological and emotional events in the early life of artist Louise Bourgeois, I felt inspired to draw upon my own life experience to inform my work. During 2015, as I travel through the UK, Paris, Berlin, Venice, France, and Beijing, often staying at artists’ residencies, I am creating a series called “Homesick”, this multi-disciplinary body of work incorporates embroidery, applique and painting in order to subvert the imagery and content within long established needlework practice. My work depicts unexpected images, together with poignant and often humorous text. The intention is to expand the field of portraiture and self-portraiture by marrying it with biography and autobiography.

Virginia Samper and Blanca Ulloa, Multidisciplinary, Spain http://www.virginiasamper-blancaulloa.com   Our practice is based on research subjects involving the interpretation and re-contextualization of both contemporary and historical myths and symbols. Through these, we explore the spiritual manifestations that intertwine in our world defined by an increasing technological and individualistic gradient. We attempt to deduct from the embedded prejudices that lie around religious imagery and try to reposition these signifiers in the cultural context.

Erica Sklenars, Video/performance, New Zealand http://www.ericasklenars.com Erica Sklenars works predominantly in the mediums of performance and video, creating both solo performative video art, and collaborative audio-visual performance installation.

Her solo work is an ongoing series of personal performative videos that reconfigure contemporary understandings of objectivity, gender and contemporary feminisms with the subversive tactics of marginalist comedy. Many of these themes also overlap into her collaborative projects involving live video performance, where the artist uses sampled and re-contextulized footage combined with original content. Here the artist works with various musicians and sound artists to create immersive performance installations under the name Lady Lazer Light.

Andrew Sunderland, Sculpture/Sound/Print, UK www.andrewsunderland.com I am a london based artist working with fabrics, sound, technology, and sculpture.

Johanna Tinzl, Visual artist***Research based/Public Art/Performative Interventions/Installations***Video/Sound/Objects/Text, Austria http://www.johannatinzl.net,

Johanna Tinzl was born in Innsbruck (Austria) in 1976. The artworks Johanna Tinzl develops are based on a conceptual approach especially analyzing the relationship between social and political structures that evolve from the notions of power in everyday life. Her ideas progress following site-specific researches  which she later integrates into performative or installative formats. Her works include a wide range of media such as video, sound, object and text.

Mathias Becker, Germany, Puppeteer, Director http://www.manufaktor.eu I am a young director, puppeteer and performance artist from Berlin who is working with a wide range of puppets, objects and materials which are extending the human body. How does this body change and under which circumstances? This is a question which is really interesting for me. My theater approach is to work in a non-hierarchical process and to find an international visual theater language. I´m really looking forward to go to China and I hope to be inspired by Beijing and also by interesting people I´ll meet.

Julie Forgues, Canada, Photography http://monpunctum.ca For the past decade, my photographic work has explored how the in-between of a landscape is a place in itself, a site that is in limbo between what was (space) and what will be (place). My work postulates the idea of an in-between landscape where nature and culture are in an indeterminate state, in a transformational process. This midpoint should be understood as a site, as an in-between space/place that belongs neither to nature nor to culture. Being an integral part of our conceptions of landscapes, they are thus crucial to ourunderstanding of the before-place and the after-space, hence of the idea of the in-between itself. My work therefore makes this process and this in-between visible. In Beijing, before place / after space = in between will propose three different layers to my ongoing research into the understanding of in-betweens. Since a place is a space with value, this work will analyse (1) how the act of taking a photographic image of a space can transform it into a place; (2) when this photographic image is given importance and put in in an artistic context, it in its turn adds another layer of value to the cultural transformation by the artistic voice; (3) by engaging the spectator in the site itself + taking an image + bringing their images into an artistic context juxtaposed with the artists’ image of the same place, the value of the in-between itself then becomes a place.

Perla Krauze, Mexico, Visual Art http://www.perlakrauze.com/ I am a visual artist from Mexico City. The work is multidisciplinary and it deals with themes such as time, memory and dualities. The objective during the residency is to do a time based Project which explores traces of time and memory through walks and journeys. Work that experiments with the rural and urban, the ephemeral and permanent, the natural and the artificial. My interest in Cabinets of Curiosities and the archaeological, will be traduced through installations with various media. Will collect found materials through walks, journeys along the city of Beijing as well as other rural areas in the country. These imprints, photographs, videos, drawings, traces of ‘found and made objects’ will become part of a larger cabinet of Curiosities.

Being Beijing and China such a contrasted city/country where ancestral meets technology and modern times, it becomes a perfect place to encounter continuous change within the rural and the urban in a quite vertiginous way. Almost with an archaeological process, my work begins with journeys/walks through various sites and landscapes, with the objective of recollecting anonymous objects, materials with no trademark, fragmented elements of nature and urban traces which I extract from its place of origin, which then carefully classify, stamp, date, register, and organize them installing them in various ways: drawing, photography, video, objects, silicon or paper imprints of these traces and marks.

These elements become part of “collections or cabinets of curiosities”. Almost anything, twigs, rubble, asphalt fragment, stones, blocks, ceramics, old textiles, all enable me to trace memory and time of a specific site. And after, they find a new “place and order” in the studio or exhibit space, having a new reading of these collected materials.

Sometimes “place” or site come to my encounter. In the middle of my path, the non-site is suddenly transformed into the ‘exhibition space’, where the rural or urban landscape invites me to have a brief encounter. I do these site specific interventions choosing any small place, which I then modify with the insertion of another precarious small object: a pavement crack and its empty hollow space where I “plant” artificial flowers, and which only a document such asphotography or short video can register its short life.

Engel Leonardo, Dominican Republic, Sculpture, installation, architectonic intervention http://www.ramosmederos.com/ Working with various media like sculpture, installation, site-specific interventions an ready-mades, addresses issues related to climate, nature, traditional crafts, architecture and popular culture of the Caribbean. His works has particular interest in objects, their gestures, creation and production processes, as well as its psychological and sociological discourse implicit.

Engel Leonardo works from constant processes of research and observation of their environment. From the city of Santo Domingo, where he lives and works, to the peripheral urban centers and remote rural communities of the island visited in their multiple trips, making their life experience and artistic production closely linked. He is currently working on a series of urban interventions that abstracts architectural elements of the almost lost modern tropical style houses from Santo Domingo, and on a series of pieces related to vernacular architecture and popular decorative objects and furniture. Residency Statement The aim of this residence program would be to make a research about the production of objects in China, from traditional craft practices to industrial objects of mass consumption.

Industrialization, globalization and the integration of models and international trends have significantly impacted the local lifestyle and traditions. The imported products trade, manufactured on a massive scale has changed the tropical and Caribbean environment, from architecture, furniture and domestic ware to clothing and accessories.

These phenomena have led to significant changes in the dynamics of local craft production. The development and application of functional and decorative craft has declined significantly due to the ease of acquisition of imported industrial products, threatening the permanence and continuity of the craft traditions of the island and the region.

Much of the contemporary aesthetic of the Caribbean and neighboring countries has been influenced by industrial objects of mass consumption and of easily acquisition imported from China, utensils, decorative items, accessories, toys and hardware, made of plastic, glass or cheap porcelain, is managed to get that the Made in China label be placed above the traditions and local industries, becoming an important element of the Caribbean and regional popular culture.

The research proposes an approach to anthropological museums, workshops and traditional craft fairs as well as factories, markets and fairs of industrial objects of mass consumption. These visits will be documented through drawings and photographs, that will create a taxonomy of Chinese objects that will be compared with the imported objects typically used on this side of the world.

This catalog will serve as a basis for creating sculptural and conceptual pieces through hybridization, exaggeration or abstraction that poetically express the aesthetic relationship that brings together these two distant nations.

Chihung Liao, Taiwan, Installation art http://www.designchihung.com/ Born and raised in Taiwan, earned my Bachelor of Fine arts degree from University of Oregon where I focused on the creative making and installation. I developed my works conceptually from thinking and questioning on where we are reflected from culturally as well as geographically, and looking at our relationships with the surroundings and built environment while at the same time thinking about human presence, humanity, self-awareness, personal experiences and stories.

Isa Schmidlehner, Austria/Germany, Painting http://meyerkainer.com/artists/Isa-Schmidlehner/Isa-Schmidlehner-works.php Isa Schmidlehner is a painter living between Berlin and Vienna.

Bevan Shaw, New Zealand, Painting http://bevanshaw.co.nz/ I am a visual artist from Wellington, New Zealand and I am exploring the process of how ideas change over time, through the mediums of painting and video. I am interested in perception and the relationship between structured pattern and free forms. I like to experiment with this by using bright colour, patterns and brushstrokes.

My residency (March, April, May) will be used to research aspects of traditional Chinese painting and create a new body of paintings responding to the architectural environment in Beijing.

This will also involve taking site-specific sound recordings in Beijing, as well as documenting the studio painting process with digital photographs to reveal how the paintings change over time.

The work produced during the residency will be shown in an open studio exhibition at Red Gate towards the end of the residency. The digital photographs and sound recordings gathered will be used to create a video work to be shown alongside the residency paintings at Toi Pōneke Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand in October 2015.

Ilona van Weeren-Kieft, Netherlands, Printmaker http://www.ilona.vanweeren.com As a printmaker I have specialised in woodcarving and non-toxic etching. During my 2 months stay in this residency program I will explore other kinds of printmaking: monoprint, lithography and/or silkscreen. This is the 5th time I am working as an artist-in-resident in Beijing.