Past Residents
Past Resident2011: Foundation for a Civil Society
Alban Muja
Alban Muja was born in Mitrovica, Kosovo, in 1980. He currently lives in Prishtina, Kosovo, where he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts. Muja’s artistic practice is mostly influenced by the social and political transformation processes in his home country of Kosovo, but also of the region and beyond. Muja investigates history as well as the socio-political themes and links them to his condition and social position. His work covers a wide range of media including video installation, short films, documentary films, drawings, paintings and performances, and has been extensively exhibited internationally.
Past Resident2010: Danish Arts Foundation
Christian Schmidt Rasmussen
Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen (b. 1963 in Copenhagen, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. He graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in 1992.
In his most recent exhibition, Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen presents a series of new paintings installed upon black walls, upon which small texts are written. A diary written by a vampire, who is the artist himself, is also a part of the exhibition. Schmidt-Rasmussen presents us with stories from his own neighbourhood in Copenhagen, which represents a classic terrain vague, as well as the rest of Copenhagen and Denmark. The paintings communicate atmospheres in which the everyday and the trivial is illuminated by the poetic presence of color and glitter, but also by a melancholic darkness. In his work he addresses the relationship between the immediate and the distant world.
Residents from Denmark
Claudia Kapp
“… The works of Claudia Kapp deal with moments of a modernism that was initiated as early as the nineteenth century but which by the 1950s and 1960s had begun to exert a sustained influence in those areas serving as a source of identity in the social and urban context. This influence on everyday perception and modes of behavior seems to have been almost completely incorporated by the collective consciousness of the present, meaning that it is hardly seen or reflected upon. The central agents of these works are light, moving image (video), rhythm, music, mirror—sometimes used in cooperative and performative actions. … Since this is all fixed in social contexts and mediated in installations, Claudia Kapp manifestly follows the formulas of minimal and conceptual art, yet playfully alienates and reinterprets them. In so doing, she uses standard materials, making the works seem superficially simple, familiar, and unobtrusive. But as ambivalent as their origin, their grace and mode of action oscillate between a conceptual, emotionally poetic gesture and a vexing assumption of a quotidian relationship. Not least there is a frequent change between proximity and distance, between unfamiliarity and threat, between attraction and aggression. She thus consistently shifts patterns of perception and, with the help of acoustic and visual tranquilizers, succeeds in shaking our feeling of familiarity. …”
(Gregor Jansen in: Dear International Mary / Claudia Kapp, Ed. Susanne Pfeffer /Künstlerhaus Bremen, Revolver Publishing by VVV)