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: Artadia
Theaster Gates
If pressed to describe Theaster Gates’ work in one word, it would be ‘transformative.’ In his performances, installations and urban interventions, Gates—an artist, musician and ‘cultural planner’ as well as director of arts program development for the University of Chicago—transforms spaces, relationships, traditions and perceptions.
Exploring architecture as a tool for mediation and meditation, Gates draws from both urbanism and art to provide what he terms ‘moments of interstitial beauty’ in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. His most recent project, ‘Temple’, comprises two neighboring houses whose interiors he completely rebuilt of donated and repurposed materials to create spaces for workshops, exhibitions and other public events on topics of race, art and politics.
Gates’ work is funded by the Joyce Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the African American Art Alliance. In 2010 alone, he has performed
and exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Armory Show in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Brunno David Gallery and Pulitzer Museum of Art in St. Louis, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He also completed residencies with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wis., Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon, and Artadia New York. He is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design for 2010-11.
Theaster Gates, Single Structure and Foreclosure List, 2010, 96 × 48 × 120 in. (243.84 × 121.92 × 304.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Pulitzer Museum Project, St. Louis.
Theaster Gates, The Story of Yamaguchi, 2007, 960 × 72 in. (2438.4 × 182.88 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.
Theaster Gates, To Speculate Darkly, 2010, 226 × 48 in. (574.04 × 121.92 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Milwaukee Art Museum.
Theaster Gates, Temple, 2010, 264 × 216 × 144 in. (670.56 × 548.64 × 365.76 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Whitney Biennial, New York.
Residents from United States
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.
