Past Residents

Residents Map

Past Resident
2010: Foundation for a Civil Society

Dušica Dražić

Dušica Dražić works with installation, performance and photography and carries a special interest in art in public space. Focusing on the search for abandoned, forgotten spaces in the urban structure of modern cities and exploring the transformation of these spaces, she rethinks them in terms of cultural continuity, symbolic irregularities and individual actions. In Dražić’s production, concept and form are of equal importance in opening the work to multi-layered interpretations, that is, for developing new ways of seeing. Dušica Dražić explores the ambivalent interrelationship between a citizen and a city, their mutual support and protectiveness and at the same time isolation and destruction. Dražić searches for spaces without order, spaces of irregularity, difference, flexibility and intuition. Dušica’s works deal with micro-histories of a locus and are also an act of narration.

Dušica Dražić was born in 1979 in Belgrade, Serbia, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from the faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 2004, and finished an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2006. Since 2006 Dušica Dražić is also a part of the collective “usually4” with K. Freino (PL), S. Hopkins (UK/KEN) and Teresa Luzio (P). In 2010 Dražić received the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award (Serbia) and the Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award (Italy) and was granted a DAAD scholarship in 2005/2006.

Elisabeth Byre

After working as the curator of the independent gallery space Projekt 0047 in Berlin, Germany in 2005‐06, Elisabeth Byre independently curated several exhibitions and events at museums, kunsthalles, independent spaces and biennials in Norway, Sweden and Turkey. During the last three years, her curatorial practice focused on performance art, often in relation with media- based art such as film, video and photography. Recent projects and exhibitions include Everyone Got Something Great  (co-curator Susanne Ø. Sæther) at the National Theater, Oslo, Norway; Lessons in the Art of Falling ­ Photographs of Norwegian Performance and Process Art 1966-2009  (co‐ curator Jonas Ekeberg), at Preus National Museum of Photography, Norway; StorytellerOrganizing Time and Space, 0047 Oslo, Norway; Ghost in the Machine (co-curator with Susanne Ø. Sæther) at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway; and Animotion, Galleri F15, Moss, Norway. With Curatorlab (Konstfack, Stockholm). She was invited by Raqs Media Collective to participate in Manifesta 7 to create a response to Raqs’ exhibition The Rest of Now.

Byre holds a curatorial degree from CuratorLab (a postgraduate residency program organized by Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden), and an MA in Film Science from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Byre is currently the director of the BFA program at the National Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway and works as a curatorial consultant for KORO/ Public Art Norway.

Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak

‘The work of Nika Oblak and Primož Novak draws parallels between a society driven by personal needs and capital and their own role as artists in the contemporary art market. Infused with humor, their work adopts the visual tactics and seductive constructions commonly employed in the mass media to lure the consumer.’ (Yasmeen Baig-Clifford, Move – new European media art, 2009) Oblak & Novak have exhibited in the Sharjah Biennial 9, UAE; Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Japan Media Arts Festival; Transmediale Berlin, Germany; and most recently in Biennale Cuvee, Linz, Austria.