Past Residents
Past Resident2017: OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Damir Avdagic
Damir Avdagic is an interdisciplinary artist who uses performance, video and text to address issues of historical memory and identity. By collecting and performing dialogues that are circumscribed by a single historical event, Avdagic reflects on how history is passed, consciously or unconsciously, to the next generation, and its effects on cultural identity, nationality and the self. The historical background for Avdagic’s body of work is the civil war in former Yugoslavia (1991-1995) from which his family fled in 1993 to Norway.
Damir Avdagic (born 1987, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina) obtained a degree from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and holds an MFA from The University of California in Los Angeles. Avdagic has exhibited internationally at Another Space, Copenhagen; KALA Art Institute, Berkeley; Fotogalleriet, Oslo; and Entree Galleri, Bergen, Norway, amongst others. He is the recipient of several grants and prizes, including The Fulbright Scholarship, the NORAM scholarship from Norway-America Association, and BKH’s Photo Art Prize.
Past Resident2017: Artist Protection Fund Fellow
Şener Özmen
Şener Özmen questions the certainty of existing conditions and situations, authoritarian structures and existing taboos. His subtle and poetic works focus our attention not only on the perception and the changes in the context of art, but refer mainly to the critical problems of social reality in which the artist positions himself and offers his opinion.
Şener Özmen was born in Idil in 1971. He graduated from the Department of Painting Education in the Faculty of Education at Çukurova University. He has had several solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions both in Turkey and abroad: Germany, France, England, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, the USA, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Swiss, Sweden, Holland, Spain, Yugoslavia and Austria. His articles on exhibitions were published in BirGün Newspaper, Artist Magazine, Sanat Dünyamız, Radikal Kitap and Siyahî. His works have been shown in Centre Pompidou, The Worldly House at dOCUMENTA(13), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Istanbul Modern, and Kunsthalle Fridericianum. Özmen has been awarded an Institute of International Education Artist Protection Fund Fellowship and is in residence at Montclair State University, participating in ISCP’s residency program.
Residents from Turkey
Past Resident2017: Bureau VerbeeldingsKracht
Gracia Khouw
Gracia Khouw’s works explore language, both visual and auditory. She creates minimal geometrical arrangements in which our comprehension of letters and their symbolic meaning are disturbed. Khouw’s images float between purely geometrical designs and readable letters and symbols.
Gracia Khouw attended the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, and the Design Academy Eindhoven. Khouw has exhibited at art spaces internationally including at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and at the Rotterdam Contemporary Art Fair, and her work is part of private collections around the world. She is represented by Galerie Hein Elferink.