Past Residents
Past Resident2015: Artadia
Mequitta Ahuja
Mequitta Ahuja’s current series Performing Painting, depicts the artist enacting staged allegories of painting. Ahuja takes as her point of departure, the 14th century frescoes of Giotto depicting interior scenes and adjacent landscapes. In bold, simple shapes, Ahuja presents elements as archetypes, depicting scenes and narratives as allegories for historical ideas about painting. While she develops her ideas from Western art history, her substitutions to that tradition are pointed; picturing herself, an African American and South Asian American woman, as the archetypical artist.
Mequitta Ahuja’s selected exhibitions include Portraiture Now at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Marks of Genius at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, State of the Art, Crystal Bridges; Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum; The Bearden Project, The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Houston Collects African American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston has participated in artist in residence programs at the Core Program, the Maryland Institute College of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy and upcoming at the Dora Maar House. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Mequitta Ahuja, Seated Scribe, 2015, Oil on canvas, 80 × 84 in. (203.2 × 213.36 cm). Courtesy of the artist
Residents from United States
Past Resident2015: Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport of Austria
Siggi Hofer
Slogans such as, “To Your Health”, “My Luck is in Hand”, and “My Father is an old Donkey” permeate Siggi Hofer’s practice. They are almost always clumsily written sentences in English that seem familiar, but remain strange. His “dancing words” veer away from pictorial order and abandon all rules of writing. In this way, Hofer as a non-writer defines writing in a new way.
Siggi Hofer (born 1970) graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 1998 and since then lives and works in Vienna. His artistic work was awarded with several grants and prizes including the Schindler Residency, Los Angeles, 2000; the Strabag Kunstforum Art Award for painting, 2006; the Msgr. Otto Mauer Award, 2009; the Paul Flora Award, 2010; and the Award for Art Practice of the City of Innsbruck (category: Sculpture), 2012.
Siggi Hofer, 1992, 2014, Oil pastel on paper, 40 × 40 in. (101.6 × 101.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist
Residents from Austria
Past Resident2015: Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation
Naveen Mahantesh
Naveen Mahantesh’s practice lies at the intersection of art, architecture and the city. He is involved in creative research with a love for urban life and an interest in providing alternative perspectives on the everyday in the city. Past projects have included working with teams of artists and curators engaging with ideas of placing art in the public realm while considering the city as a studio. His projects provide alternate perspectives for the banal routines, take inspiration from urban myths, and engage within the ecologies that the city thrives upon.
Naveen Mahantesh (born in 1985) is the principal architect of CRESARC based in Bangalore. His projects and propositions have been a part of Sarai-Reader-Exhibition’09 (2013) and Insert (2014), curated by Raqs media collective; Mediating Modernities (2013) at Srushti School of Design; design for change at TEDx-R.V.Vidyaniketan (2013), Bangalore; and FOA-FLUX-art|life|technology Symposium at Swissnex (2015). He received a grant from KHOJ (2013) for his collaborative project Ecologies of the excess, and as part of 080:30, he received a grant from India Foundation for the Arts Project560-Found space (2014) project that intimately situated art within the fabric of Bangalore City. He has been a City as Studio fellow(2013) at Sarai-CSDS., and a Visiting Faculty and critic for architectural design at design institutes in Bangalore including R.V School of Architecture and SIT, Tumkur.
Events & Exhibitions
Salon: Rikke Benborg and Naveen Mahantesh
July 21, 2015
Naveen Mahantesh, Placement 1.0 - 080:30, 2013, Intervention. Courtesy of the curator
![a ‘sadabahar’ [the name translates to ‘always prosperous’] plant grow in the limited resources of a brick wall crack](https://iscp-nyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/sada1-500x350.jpeg)
