Past Residents
Michelle-Marie Letelier
Michelle-Marie Letelier is interested in exploitation of minerals, working across topographic changes of a landscape, juxtaposed with the speculation of resources within the current economic framework. She spent her early life in Chuquicamata, the biggest open-pit copper mine in the world, in the Atacama Desert. This served as a starting point in her practice, documenting the town’s burial process through video and photography. Since settling in Berlin, Letelier has focused on copper and coal: minerals which have also become objects themselves in her drawings, paintings, objects and installations. Letelier’s work carries heavy socio-political overtones, especially in times of unveiled globalization, the increasing scarcity of raw materials and the crisis of the neoliberal model.
Michelle-Marie Letelier (born 1977, Rancagua, Chile) obtained her BFA at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Her recent solo exhibitions include Die Feinfühlige Zone, Die Ecke Gallery, Santiago and Doomed Scape,Perlini Arte Gallery, Padua. Her group exhibitions include Magic Block, Stiftelsen 3.14, Bergen and To Seize Matter and Leave a Landscape, X Video and Media Arts Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago. Her videos have been exhibited in several screenings and festivals across the world. In 2005, Letelier participated in the Mercosur Biennial and in 2012 she was awarded the first edition of ORA International Art Prize. Letelier lives and works in Berlin.
Events & Exhibitions
Salon: Michelle-Marie Letelier and Akansha Rastogi
July 8, 2014
Past Resident2014: Canada Council for the Arts
Michel de Broin
Michel de Broin’s work ranges from assemblage to video and photography. His multifaceted production deals with energy flows, entropic devolution, and the forms of visual, spatial and technological paradox that derive from these antithetical forces. Most of his works are retooled everyday appliances, found objects that disclose an ironic re-utilization not only of the mechanic universe but also of tropes of Conceptual Art and Minimalism, which in his hands take on a critical dimension. Although universally recognizable, their new behaviour defies their functions and uses. Crafting unforeseen relationships between waste, productivity, risk and consumption, De Broin defamiliarizes established modes of signification in everyday technical environments. A mid-career survey of his work was mounted by the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal in 2013. De Broin has held solo exhibitions and projects like La maîtresse de la Tour Eiffel, Paris; Reciprocal Energy at Musée d’art contemporain Val-de-Marne, France; Reverse Entropy at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Disruption from Within at Plug In, Winnipeg, Canada; Shared Propulsion Car at Exit Art, New York, Épater la Galerie at Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany.
Events & Exhibitions
Brooklyn Commons: Vito Acconci and Michel de Broin
April 15, 2014
Residents from Canada
Past Resident2014: Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community Visual Arts Department
Manor Grunewald
Manor Grunewald is first and foremost as a painter, although he is also active in the fields of sculpture, installation and prints. His work is characterised by the constant analysis of the development of the pictorial in our daily environment. He finds and collects the sources of his images everywhere in daily life: in newspapers, advertising, books, comics, digital media and even illustrations of biological microcosms and macrocosms. His image archive serves as a source of inspiration, and his found pictorial material is often altered, partially on purpose and in some cases arbitrarily, by copying, enlarging or collaging. The artist thus creates new pictorial information, which is largely free of cognitively controlled processes and which reveal the unfamiliar, allowing this to become the content of his painting.
Manor Grunewald’s works have been exhibited across Europe and in the United States. In 2011, he was nominated for the Young Belgian Painters Prize at BOZAR. Recently, he has completed solo projects at Arco Madrid, Volta New York and Volta 9, Basel. Grunewald has presented recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent and Chaplini Gallery, Cologne. He will take part in a group exhibition with Evan Gruzis and Christian Vetter at Super Dakota Gallery, Brussels in April 2014.