Past Residents

Country
Year
Residency Program
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Latvia

Past Resident
2022: TMU - Trust For Mutual Understanding, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Vita Liberte

Artist

Krišs Salmanis

In his work, Krišs Salmanis employs animation, video, photography, and his own body. The artist attempts to uncover paradox and a quest for truth, as well as subtle irony and existential sadness, by frequently employing minimal form.

Krišs Salmanis has exhibited work at the 55th Venice Biennale; Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga; and Art in General, New York, among others.

I spent three months at the A4 residency in Chengdu, PRC. These works document my attempts at living like a local.
Krišs Salmanis, Noone looks me in the eye but the cameras, 2019, photograph, 16 × 12 in. (40.64 × 30.48 cm).
I witnessed the 70th anniversary of the China Communist party.
Krišs Salmanis, Flags vs. roadsigns, 2019, photograph, 16 × 12 in. (40.64 × 30.48 cm).
Chengdu prides itself for having the most laid-back way of life in China.
Krišs Salmanis, I walk quickly.., 2019, photograph , 16 × 12 in. (40.64 × 30.48 cm).
Chengdu also prides itself for having the spiciest cuisine in China.
Krišs Salmanis, ..but I eat slowly, 2019, photograph , 16 × 12 in. (40.64 × 30.48 cm).
My attempts were not always successful.
Krišs Salmanis, At cross purposes, 2019, photograph , 16 × 12 in. (40.64 × 30.48 cm).

Residents from Latvia

Jānis Dzirnieks

Latvia
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre
2024

Ginta Tinte Vasermane

Latvia, The Netherlands
Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Stichting Stokroos
2022

Līga Spunde

Latvia
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Jeffrey Rosen, Misako & Rosen Gallery
2023
Germany, Belgium

Past Resident
2023: Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community Visual Arts Department, Tony & Sissi Moens

Artist

Felix Kindermann

Felix Kindermann’s work addresses the relationship between humans and their environment, inter-human communication, and the relationship between individuality and collectivity through sculpture, sound art, performance, photography, video, and printmaking. By (de)constructing and (re)assembling objects, architectures and languages, Kindermann examines reciprocity. The artist is interested by the physical, mental, and social dimensions of the human body, which he reflects by assembling self-reflexive entities from fragmented parts.

Felix Kindermann has exhibited work at Museum Ludwig and Simultanhalle, Cologne;  KANAL- Centre Pompidou, Brussels; and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, among others.

 

Events & Exhibitions

2023 Spring Open Studios
April 21–April 22, 2023
Artists at Work: On Sonic Politics
November 29, 2022, 6–7pm
2022 Fall Open Studios
November 18–November 19, 2022
In staging the choir Ghent Singers as a moving sculpture, Felix Kindermann‘s "Choir Piece" questions our relationship with the term togetherness, mirroring today‘s Zeitgeist along with its societal distortions. Through rearrangement, fragmentation, and techniques of acoustic distortion, the work creates a feeling of alienation, destabilizing the interrelated appearance and effect of the choir as a familiar cultural asset, blurring the lines which are dissolved through the play with essential opposites like harmony and disharmony, the individual and the collective.
Felix Kindermann, Choir Piece, 2019, performance.
"Pairings" continues Kindermann's exploration of order and chaos, while shifting his attention to the disruptions of perfection in digital processes. The shoe-stacks are 3D-prints, unnaturally joined together and covered with digital noise and sharply cut apart, like a 3D-puzzle revealing its machine-production process. Kindermann scanned some of the singer’s shoes from his performance "Choir Piece" and re-assembled them as pairs and groups. Like a disrupted reality, the intertwined images of the scan force the printer into its own interpretation, creating unforeseeable digital noise. Referring to the singers’ missing bodies in times of pandemic all fragments echo each other as separate parts of a larger whole.
Felix Kindermann, Pairings, 2021, poly Lactic Acid, 125/8 × 75/16 × 121/8 in. (32 × 18.54 × 30.73 cm).
"Choir Piece (Virtual Edit)" presents the voices of the Ghent Singers choir as they performed “Composition for Separated Musicians”, written by American composer Natalie Dietterich, commissioned by Kindermann for his most recent performance Choir Piece. Kindermann and Dietterich researched to which extent a classical composition can endure deconstruction and fragmentation, while sustaining the inherent harmony of the piece. Guided by a set of rules as well as by intuition, each performer improvised their individual score, entering into dialogue with the surrounding space, with fellow performers and with the audience. The modularity of the piece was reinforced through the performers’ movement, whose choreography appeared as a moving sculpture appropriating and confirming the space. Kindermann reconfigures the choir, conventionally a symbol for collectivity, as an ambiguous but potent presence hinting at the friction field between individuality and social cohesion. The effect on the audience is immersive, allowing for personal association but not for indifference; stimulating contemplation but refusing escape. In his profound research, the artist perpetually claims the result of his orchestrated performances as the departure point for a new manifestation. Thus, "Choir Piece (Virtual Edit)" comes to be as a disembodied sound installation, retaining the fundamental modularity and altering it into new existence.
Felix Kindermann, Choir Piece (Virtual Edit), 2019, sound installation, dimensions variable.
Kindermann’s bronze sculptures "Holding Breath" come as flat as the image. His models seduce our mind to slide down the ladders, pulling our eye to the floor as if to stare into infinitely deep water but the same time the solid material refuses our entry. As in John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men (1937) where the musty pool plunged into the evening sun as a metaphor for the protagonist's futile hope to escape the working class, Kindermann's pools point to the inequality in today's society as the private pool remains symbol of pleasure and status.
Felix Kindermann, Holding Breath (Green Pool), 2020, bronze, 161/2 × 131/8 × 211/16 in. (41.91 × 33.27 × 6.86 cm).
Functioning as an acrostic poem, four musical tempi are shifting horizontally, creating the words Fear, Hope, Hate Love in the vertical center line. The series of four silkscreen prints deals with subjectivity of human emotions versus the limitations of language trying to find common ground.
Felix Kindermann, Fear, Hope, Hate, Love , 2016, silkscreen print, 393/8 × 279/16 in. (100.03 × 70 cm).

Residents from Germany

Lukas Marxt

Germany, Portugal
Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria
Studio #218

Szu-Ying Hsu (Ida)

Taiwan, Germany
Ministry of Culture, Taiwan
Studio #302

Matthias Garff

Germany
KdFS Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen
Studio #214
Hungary

Past Resident
2022: International Visegrad Fund

Artist

Szilvia Bolla

Szilvia Bolla’s work explores the interaction between humans and artifacts by combining photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice, which she describes as cryptophotographic, is the result of light-sensitive crystals reacting to chemicals in photographic darkroom experiments. Interested in matter as a lively agent, the artist engages with new materialism and feminist corporeality to evoke survivalist narratives, and analyzes the relationship between the human body and technology.

Szilvia Bolla has exhibited work at Trafó Gallery, Budapest; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw, among others.

The installation is a sensual body machine with organs turned inside-out that becomes a target of the external world. Corporeal and exposed, it attempts to seek possible forms of survival within fictional and real bio/eco/psycho-spheres. It comes to matter through its own performativity, struggle to navigate the complexity of the profoundly human, nonhuman and technological, and ultimate relief in hybrid materiality. It reconstructs itself not as an organism or entity but as a series of open-ended systems functioning within other massive systems.
Szilvia Bolla, Oh, my howling bladder speaks to me at dawn, 2022, 3D printed PLA, metal, thermoformed recycled perspex and silicone.
Prevail is a site specific installation of artefacts referencing ornaments found in Eastern-European architecture, focusing on Hungarian Art Nouveau (reliefs either of organic patterns or depicting characters and narratives) as tools of symbolic thinking or a system of speculative storytelling.
Szilvia Bolla, Prevail, 2020, thermoformed, engraved perspex, mirror and hygienic gel.
Exoskin is a series of sculptures and text speculating on the analogy between the skin and image surfaces. The works draw on membrane structures, whether human or nonhuman, fictional or real, through organic abstraction and ornaments as tools of symbolic thinking. Beyond the human skin, my main fields of interest are observing its sensitivity to light and its resemblance to the nature of photographic images. As a shielding, yet vulnerable layer in its colour, texture, accumulated marks and blemishes, the membrane records and represents a vital organ.
Szilvia Bolla, Exoskin, 2018, metal and luminogram UV print on perspex.
The project Alagya created together with Aron Lodi aims to interpret the nature of artefacts with a post-human approach through a distinctive play between sculpture and text. Alagya embraces identity, hybrid materiality and technology to learn about what it means/how it feels to be a dweller of a world in which matter, tool, human and information are irrevocably intertwined.
Szilvia Bolla, Alagya in collaboration with Aron Lodi, 2022, metal, print on satin and charcoil.
Part of the series titled Exoskin.
Szilvia Bolla, Render me like the future renders a haunted heart, 2021, luminogram UV print on perspex, mirror and metal.

Residents from Hungary

Klára Orosz

Hungary
International Visegrad Fund
2024

Nikolett Balázs

Hungary
International Visegrad Fund
2023

Tamás Páll

Hungary
International Visegrad Fund
2021