Past Residents
Past Resident2010: 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.
Events & Exhibitions
The Power to Host
June 15–July 29, 2011
Dušica Dražić, Dead-End Street, 2009, Installation, Dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by K. Freino.
Dušica Dražić, The Winter Garden, 2010, Installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by D. Dražic.
Dušica Dražić, Prelom - Breach, Break, Breakage, Failure, Fraction, Infraction, Rupture, Split, Layout, 2008, Installation, Dimension variable. Courtesy of the artist. photo by G. Micevski.
Dušica Dražić, One Home In Rydygiera 45a, 2006, Installation, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by D. Dražic.
Dušica Dražić, Young Serbians, 2006, Video performance. Courtesy of the artist.
Past Resident2010: North Rhine-Westphalian State Chancellery
Nadja Verena Marcin
Nadja Verena Marcin (Germany) is a performance artist who lives and works in New York City and NRW, North Rhine-Westphalia. Internationally recognized as an emerging New Genre artist, her work focuses on human behavior, elemental emotions, and psychological responses linked to role-playing through video, performance and photography. Sourcing autobiographical experience, Marcin drives situations from ordinary to absurd while probing beneath the surface of human interaction. Inflated by playful, vigorous images, poetical texts, and handmade props, she exposes ambiguities depicting the constructive/deconstructive potential of man’s characteristic, often dialectic moods. Marcin confronts elemental emotions and unleashes psychological mechanism, exposing truths about morals, history, gender and politics inherent to Western culture. Her practice reveals a sharp analytical distance, correlating with high subjective empathy, condensed in a rigorously conceptual form.
Born in Germany, Marcin holds a MFA from Columbia University, New York, and graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts,
Münster, Germany. Her work is widely exhibited in museums, art spaces/galleries and distinguished collections worldwide, including: Qui Vive? Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow MOMA, Russia; Salon/Screening, ICA Philadelphia, PA; Uncontrollable Flesh, Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Short-Term Deviation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Kaunas Biennale, National Museum, Lithuania; Videonale 11 & 10, Kunstmuseum, Germany; Mediations Biennale, Poland; Models of Self-Reflection, AZKM, Germany; European Attitude, Zendai MOMA, China; FIFA-Festival pour Film sur L’Art, Quebec; EJECT-Ex teresa arte actual, Mexico; and Jumpnights, Ludwig Museum, Germany.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Everything Is Nothing, 2008, HDV video/film, 12:24 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Elephant, 2009, HDV video installation, 1:97 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Hotel, 2010, HD video/film, 12 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Nadja By Breton, 2010, Performance, 23:48 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Nadja Verena Marcin, Street, 2007, HDV video and performance, 6:02 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Past Resident2010: KUD Mreza Association for Arts and Culture, Alkatraz Gallery
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.
Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak. Courtesy of the artist.
