Current Residents

List Grid

Current Resident: Mar 1, 2025–May 31, 2025

Studio #203

Akeema-Zane

Akeema-Zane (she/her) is an artist and researcher working in the mediums of literature, film, performance and sound. a²z is the arm which houses some of the artists’ music/sound practice which includes deejaying, composition and scoring/sound design.

Akeema-Zane has exhibited work at Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; Recess Art, New York; and Weeksville Heritage Center, New York, among others.

In centering the historical contexts of The Great (Black) migration, The Harlem Renaissance and the collaborative spirits of James Weldon Johnson and Aaron Douglas, artists Akeema-Zane and Rena Anakwe immerse themselves in the Southern landscapes of Savannah, Georgia and Wilmington, North Carolina to invoke the text “Go Down, Death.” What emerges is a survey of the synergy between land and it’s cycles of death, as well as the rest that is needed for regeneration.

Akeema-Zane, Our Mourning Due, 2022-23, moving Image, 9:25 min.

Void Spa is an immersive installation replicating a contemplative cave experience with darkness, harsh ambient sound, geomancy, and tactile stimulation. This project examines how rites develop within post-industrial subcultures, especially through sensory design. It also rejects the extractive and appropriative use of Black and Brown spirituality within luxury wellness by reflecting instead on protected or disrupted traditions from their syncretic adaptations and media representations.

Akeema-Zane, Void Spa, 2023, installation.

From the Bronx to Trinidad, Maryland to New York, Tehran to Chicago, 9 entities emerges to illuminate three artists’ documented pasts and interpretations of discovering their private as a public history. Through mining what emerges as a map of publics, the artists discover a question of conception and draw on a shared obsession- mothers. How do we imagine the arrangement of things coming together to give notion to our sense of selves and our current realities?

Akeema-Zane, 9 Entities, 2022, video, 19:39 min.

Sonic Escape Routes seeks to explore the following: what is the spiritual core and where is the liminal space for a people whose freedom to thrive remains in question? and what are the varying routes that anchor us toward flight or resistance? Through a collaborative sound and visual performance, the artists aim to assert and embed their own personal narratives and histories to traverse the archives of Weeksville in order to answer these questions.”

Akeema-Zane, Sonic Escape Routes: Shall We Fly? or Shall We Resist?, 2020, video, 49:39 min.

Residents from Trinidad and Tobago

Kearra Amaya Gopee

United States, Trinidad and Tobago

Vision Fund

2024

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Turkey

Current Resident: Mar 1, 2025–May 31, 2025

SAHA Association

Studio #204

Artist

Cem Örgen

Cem Örgen draws on his industrial design background to explore the histories, functions, and processes of materials through a lens of subjective and contextual movements. By uncovering collective memory from hidden, rushed, and isolated settings, he examines the moral dilemmas and unease triggered by everyday stimuli. Through a diverse range of media, Örgen reflects his hyper-situational values, creating works that embody affective states and processes with meticulous material control. His pieces, spanning sculpture, drawing, assemblage, text, and sound, appear simultaneously organic and artificial.

Cem Örgen has exhibited work at The Pill, Turkey; Les Urbaines, Switzerland; and IMALAT-HANE, Turkey, among others.

cemorgen.com