Past Residents

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Past Resident
2021: Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria

Artist

Anna Witt

Anna Witt’s artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political. She creates situations that reflect interpersonal relationships and power structures as well as conventions of speaking and acting. Her public experimental arrangements often physically draw passersby by repeating imitation of specifically coded gestures and developing complex choreographies, thus giving the participants an opportunities for individual articulation and authorship.

Anna Witt has exhibited work at Belvedere 21, Vienna; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; and KW Institue for Contemporary Art, Berlin, among others.

Events & Exhibitions

2021 Fall Open Studios

November 13, 2021

Homecoming Outdoor Screening

August 20, 2021, 8–9:30pm

“Trecce in Fiamme/ Braids on Fire (2 channels HD video 2021) is a video installation in which one part is focused on a conversation and, the other imagines the women of Forcella as almost divine creatures capable through sisterhood and solidarity of becoming present in a society which often puts them apart and closes them away, diminishing us all: in fact, the artist has realized one of the videos letting them to perform as heroic women like in classical frescos where the public spaces of their daily lives became the shared spaces in which to affirm their bold struggled lives. From this process Anna Witt came to imagine a set of performances in which the care for the souls in purgatory in a practice of faith evolves into an inspiring conversation between the women of today with the histories of women of the past, despite the great period of time that might at first appear to separate them. Here is an open conversation between mothers and daughters, between the past and the present, that asks what needs to be done, what may we learn from the past, and what the values are of lives which for too long have been lived in the silence of the “narrative of established history”, lives that actually form and make the strength of society and of future generations.

Anna Witt, Braids on Fire, 2021, 2-channel HD Video, 15 min.

How does automatization and artificial intelligence affect the working situation in an industrial town like Toyota city? What are its effects on the human condition and what does labor mean to each one personal? Factory workers and employees of the car industry in Toyota city came together to discuss their personal experiences and expectations towards the future of labor, automatization and artificial intelligence. In addition to the discussion, imaginative utopian and dystopian aspects are expressed through elements of body movement, sound and performance. The workers extracted movements of their daily working routines and transformed them into a collective choreography. In an act of creativity, they experimented with acoustic instruments and created a reverse process of production by dismantling working clothes. By carefully cutting of piece after piece of cloth from each other’s bodies, they created a playful yet intense moment of liberation. The work was developed in an experimental collaborative process of the artist and the participants together.

Anna Witt, Unboxing the Future, 2019, 3-channel 4K video, 29:09 min.

Kagran and Kaisermühlen are areas in Vienna’s 22nd district that concentrate a piece of the city’s history. Formerly a working-class neighbourhood and stronghold of council housing, it was one of the last bastions of the Socialist Party in its fight against Austrofascism. What interests Anna Witt most about this history is the vibrant utopia, the belief in the collective and in solidarity. The work of the visual artist, who was awarded the Otto Mauer Prize in 2018, is performative and participatory – this allows her to delve into questions that are important to her: How much community still exists in our society? In what way are the residents of a “Gemeindebau” connected nowadays? For Beat House Donaustadt Witt uses an ultrasound scanner to record their heartbeats. At the start of the Wiener Festwochen, the residents open their windows, letting their individual rhythms drift out and join to form a collective sound. The sound of the city.

Anna Witt, Beathouse Donaustadt, 2019, collective performance, 20 min.

Anna Witt is following a group of young people in Leipzig while developing a manifest for a potential youth movement. The young adults spent several months realizing the project in close cooperation with the artist. During their conversations, they are discussing their personal ideas of social utopias and are expressing their own feelings within the prevailing systems. By questioning and deconstructing consisting norms and values of our society, they are following their ideas of these concepts and their meanings to articulate the youth movement’s inherent purpose. According to their own imagination and sensations, they translated their manifest into physical forms of expression and performative interventions in the public space. The project has been developed in significant contribution by the group, not just as participants but as coauthors from the beginning throughout the whole process. Utopian approaches are openly express without comment and provoke the viewers to position themselves. Fathoming authorship and hierarchies within participatory concepts play a particular role in Anna Witt’s artistic practice. In doing so, the artist creates fictional spaces to enable a certain distance when questioning society and own positions in a playful way. In collaboration with Maria Bujanov, Phillip Borchert, Anja Engelhardt, Belve Langniss, Blandia Langniss, Chiara Rauhut, Lena Schubel

Anna Witt, The Radical Empathiarchy, 2018, 2-channel HD video, 20:10 min.

The video project Care is about two geriatric nurses in Japan. A group of amateur dancers developed a piece of choreography based on the work routines and experiences of two young Indonesian nurses working in dementia care. The dancers, influenced by Butoh and improvisational dance, were in some cases already around eighty themselves. They performed their personal interpretation of the care work as an intervention in the public space of the Maebashi city center, which is feeling the effects of an aging and shrinking population. On a textual level, the nurses explain what motivated them to leave Indonesia and look for work abroad. We learn of a massively aging society in which the care of the elderly—a task traditionally performed by daughters and daughters-in-law—is not a topic of public discussion. The problem and those involved in it do not receive any attention or recognition. The dancers in the video Care interpret the personal experiences and movements of the Indonesian nurses, whose existence in society remains largely invisible. Closeness, physical contact, self-surrender, allowing oneself to be carried, empowerment, and disempowerment are important themes of interpersonal relations, which always concern the dignity of the individual and are thus politically charged.

Anna Witt, Care, 2017, HD video, 18:12 min.

Residents from Austria

Marianne Vlaschits

Austria

Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria

Studio #218

Ulrike Königshofer

Austria

Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria

2024

Irina Lotarevich

Austria

Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria

2024

Donate

United States

Past Resident
2021: Artis

Curator

David Everitt Howe

David Everitt Howe is a Brooklyn-based critic and curator. His work explores how gender and sexuality are constructed and performed, as well as the ways in which they’re shaped and controlled by art institutions and other institutions of power. Currently, Howe is Curator-at-Large at Pioneer Works as well as Arts Editor of its online editorial platform, The Broadcast. His writing regularly appears in Artforum, Art in America, and frieze.

David Everitt Howe has curated shows at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Participant Inc., New York; and Abrons Arts Center, New York, among others.

Events & Exhibitions

2021 Summer Open House

July 28, 2021, 3–9pm

A wide-angle shot of a woman in a bathtub pumping breast milk, surrounded by videos of scrolling lists of fears.

Patty Chang, Milk Debt, 2021, video installation.

Four performers wearing matching blue jeans, black tops, and wigs perform a dance move while viewing the camera.

Alexandra Bachzetsis, Escape Act, 2019, performance, installation.

Five female performers enact various movements underneath a massive installation of hand-dyed parachute fabric.

Tamar Ettun, Dead Sea, 2019, performance, installation.

Two large projects of dancers whose bodies writhe together are projected into two synchronized video channels.

Gerard & Kelly, Schindler/Glass, 2019, video installation.

A woman pulls her head back while swinging to the side in a performance.

Gerard & Kelly, Clockwork, 2019, performance within an exhibition.

Residents from United States

Laura Lappi

Finland, United States

Alfred Kordelin Foundation

Studio #201

Ailyn Lee

United States, South Korea

Anonymous

Studio #210

Angel Lartigue

United States

Vision Fund

Studio #217

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Czech Republic

Past Resident
2021: International Visegrad Fund, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA

Artist

Vojtěch Novák

Vojtěch Novák describes his methodology as ‘always responding’. “Like a flipped coin seeking its third side,” he positions himself between the interpermeating roles of author and viewer. To this end, Novák’s artistic practice consists in layering narratives to form gesamtkunstwerk–total artworks spanning performative colloquies, happenings, curating and theater directing. The latter includes his stage design, his play on environment, and how he stages works of art.

Vojtěch Novák has exhibited work at Manifesta 11, Zürich; documenta 14, Kassel; and OFF-Biennale Budapest, among others.

Events & Exhibitions

2021 Summer Open House

July 28, 2021, 3–9pm

Vojtěch Novák, Forget Fear - Folly Folks, 2019, terrazzo made of shungite, metal, copy of a book with garnets, waxed tv screen, single-channel video, 29:06 min.

Vojtěch Novák, Forget Fear - Folly Folks, 2019, terrazzo made of shungite, metal, copy of a book with garnets, waxed tv screen, single-channel video, 29:06 min.

Vojtěch Novák, Samizdat Contrefaçon, 2018, installation view at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art; Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague; and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 95 × 66 in. (241.3 × 167.64 cm).