More information
www.anabial.com
Instagram: @ana.bial
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Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Works as an art educator and researcher at the intersection of art, education and public policies. In addition, he dedicates himself to his master’s degree in Public Policy and Human Formation at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), investigating Public Art and the memory of the Experimental Unit at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) in the 1960-70. Among the most recent works, we highlight the following: collective curatorship of the exhibition A Utopia do Não, at Paço Imperial (2019); the experience in the art education team of the exhibitions Luzes do Leblon (2019), Brincadeira de Criança and Glauco Rodrigues e os arredores da Praça XV (2018); the experience in monitoring at the course Laboratório de pesquisa e prática de Texto em Arte at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, EAV (2019).
During his residency at Despina, Anderson intends to meet with local curators and educators to explore the relationship between experimentalism, contemporary art and its pedagogical power in order to think of new singularities, groups, laboratories and the creation of emancipatory curatorial practices for the development of educational programs in/with museums.
More information
Instagram: @andernauka
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Lives and works in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais (MG). He is currently doing his MA in Art, Culture and Languages at UFJF (Federal University of Juiz de Fora – MG); also holds a postgraduate degree in Scenography and Expography from UVA (Veiga de Almeida University – Rio de Janeiro).
Brandão develops practical-theoretical research in the area of construction of objects and poetic actions, seeking to reach intimacies through the communication of the sensitive. He uses traditions as raw materials, subverting them and proposing encounters and sharing of personalities as concepts. His work is materialized by ambiguities, dysfunctions, hazards. The object is the body and the dialogue is the matter.
His first artistic action was the installation “Ex-votos” (2016), which consisted of a plaster feather mat built in the streets of the city center in Juiz de Fora. This work travelled to many cities and it was last shown at the Gaia Gallery – UNICAMP (University of Campinas – São Paulo) in 2019.
More information
www.franciscobrandao.com.br
Instagram: @franciscob_
Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon
Lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. Vogel studied music at the Zürich Academy of Fine Arts and his passion for the visual arts came upon in Florence (Italy), where he had some inspiring encounters with local artists. Having seen an exhibition about the Vorticism movement – held in 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice – he was introduced to the works of French artist Henry Gaudier Brzeska. That has become a strong influence to start his own way of thinking and to create works of his own.
In 2016, Vogel started working in a studio space in an old industrial complex in Zürich, where he could immerse himself in an intense period of practical work and research. Held in Zürich in 2017, “Notes From the Underground” was his first solo show, which brought together a series of intuitive abstract paintings. Since then, he has had the possibility to show his works in selected spaces in Zürich. In 2018, he was awarded during a juried collective show at the Onishi Gallery in New York (USA). In 2019, he presented works in Venice at the Misericordia Archives and in London at the London Biennale.
In his practice, Vogel seeks to reveal the existence of the subconscious by transposing it into paintings. For him, the act of creation is like an improvisation performance guided by the expression of rhythmic emotions. He believes that innovation can only be achieved by the quality of sincere personal conviction. Every start of a new work is therefore a beginning of an expedition to the inner self and a revelation of an emotion, beauty, ancient information and perhaps an answer to modern life.
More information
www.mateivogel.com
Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon
Lives and works in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in the many ways the world can be experienced in the absence of a physical body. Through installation, (textual) correspondence, drawing and video, her work call into question the binaries of transcendence/immanence and real/virtual.
Through devices — both tangible and intangible — Voghell utilizes a personal mythology pointing to an experience beyond the lived world, but drawn from a very real subject. Her work emerges from the desire to define the peculiarities of the elemental and phenomenological forces surrounding us in order to better manipulate and reinvent them.
Her work has been featured in various screenings and exhibitions including “harbinger” at Eastern Bloc (2015), at FME in Rouyn-Noranda at Center l’Écart (2015), at Le Lobe in Chicoutimi (2016), at Paris Variation Fair (2017) and more recently at Calaboose Gallery in Pointe-Saint-Charles (2019) and Vicki Gallery in Newburgh (2019). Her work has been included in publications such as Nut II, ETC MEDIA and Cigale. She also curated the “Episode Laurier” event in June 2018.
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In partnership with Despina, contemporary art center Diagonale (based in Montreal, Canada) and Le Conseil des arts de Montréal have awarded Mégane Voghell with a full grant to participate in our residency programme in November 2019.
Voghell’s residency project addresses fibers, or more precisely thread as matter and as a conceptual notion. Considering the undeniable importance of thread and textile as a tool for feminist bonding throughout history, the idea is to highlight its relational potential in an applied and reflexive way. More precisely, the project draws its sources from an online relationship between two young women (myself Montreal, Canada and “X” , Limoeiro, Brazil) and attempts to seal its resolution by recovering traces of its unfolding in time.
The conversation thread, just like the sewing thread have the potential to be strained, to bind elements and others, to hold together or to break. Both threads act as subtle binders but are actively creating an object or a larger subject that they hold together. In this context, pieces of clothing or a relationship between two individuals are the results of these threads which contains them through time and space. The story to be investigated at the Despina center is that of the relationship mentioned above, but could also be that of a badly sewn and holey vest, result of a lack of time and space.
More information
www.meganevoghell.com
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by Frederico Pellachin
Partners
Born in Sweden, lives and works in Copenhagen (Denmark). Per is an artist, curator, art historian and boat builder.
As a curator, his interest is to give openness to both artists and audiences in relation to the subject and interpretation, letting the theme of an exhibition break down itself, or asking the artists not to focus too much on the given subject. The reason for this is not to hide something or create some kind of mystique, but to create an uncertainty that in turn generates questions and plays with the audience’s habits of thought.
In his role as a writer, Per has worked as a critic and as an essaist on contemporary artists for a Swedish encyclopedia. In both of these forms of writing, he primarily tries to immerse into the frameworks that the individual artist sets up for their practice, conveying them for the reader in an uncomplicated and comprehensible way.
Two years ago, he finished his biggest writing project – The Glorius Ways of Unproductivity -, a book based on 50 works by the Danish group Fluxus and intermedia artist Eric Andersen. The book was created in close collaboration with Andersen himself and is more of an artistic work than a biography. The book takes form of a textbook in intermedia, that means: a textbook for all levels of education, on how to use all forms of material and media, to create all possible forms of expressions.
During the residency at Despina, Per hopes to find local artists which might be interesting to present for a Scandinavian audience and exhibit them in one of the two projects mentioned bellow:
1) A follow-up of his most recent curated exhibition: The World’s Last Exhibition. The background for this exhibition theme is the apocalyptic rhetoric that both right-wing and left-wingers use and which overflows the media images we are served every day: terrorism, environmental catastrophes, pandomics, the ever-present risk of economic collapse, etc. Part one was a pure video exhibition; while the exhibition he is planning now to work on should include all forms of expression. The basic idea is that the exhibition appears as the-pre-apocalyptic-party.
2) Another exhibition idea that he wants to explore is the selfi-adapted-art. The form of art that is very profitable to show at art institutions and museum. An art that gets the audience to photograph themselves in front of the works, and then share the pictures on social media, thus creating a free promotion for the exhibition.
Recently, Per has started a new creative writing project, a project that links his practice as a boat-builder with his practise as an artist and an art writer. For this, he intends to study the traditions of different Brazilian wooden boats.
More information
http://www.perbrunskog.info
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Born in Norway, lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work deals with sound and video- based installations. Key-words to her practice are: reality-perceptions, communication and the idea of the Other as a condition for understanding one’s own identity.
Stine often engages strangers who perform a certain physical activity to partake in her projects, and this is also her intention for the work to be developed during her stay in Rio.
The residency project
There are specific methods when creating a cinematic narrative, for the course of events to be ”read” the intended way. Apart from the dramaturgy, the cinematic techniques such as footage, editing, sound, light, point of view are all essential to the story’s logic and readability.
Since film and staging of reality are a big part of our everyday lives, Stine is interested in how these reality-presentations affect our own perception of reality.
During the residency at Despina, she will twist and manipulate the traditional cinematic techniques of narration, by capturing and staging everyday activities from the local area around the residency, creating a fragmented, complex, incomprehensible narrative, that might be representational to the real.
More information
www.stinekvam.dk
Pictures Gallery
to be posted soon
A freelance curator who lives and works in Aberdeen, in the North East of Scotland. She has recently established her own curatorial platform Fertile Ground, where she works with a context, specific approach and focuses on new comissions. Projects will often involve collaboration across disciplines and attempts to remain sensitive to site – previous projects have taken place at a food bank, a library and an industrial estate.
She is currently working as one of the Shadow Curators for the Peacock Associates: Curatorial Fellowship Program, run by Peacock Visual Arts Aberdeen. Up and coming projects include: Climate reflections: Human Stories of Hope and Fear – in partnership with the Scottish Communities Climate Action Network, the Environmental Justice Foundation and supported by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute (November 2019) and States of Living; Architecture, Body, Object, with artist Zsa Zsa MacGregor (January 2020). Her current research areas include oil cultures, arts ecologies and feminist practice.
During her residence with Despina, Rachel researched the urgencies of the current socio–political context of Rio de Janeiro, primarily through oil. Her research positions oil as a substance that goes beyond material, into political and cultural environments. The stories told around oil are powerful; it promises modernity and wealth for all, it informs national and political identities and changes geographical boarders. These narratives often hide the reality for people, landscapes and more than human species such as the Guanabara Bay. Rachel used the residency to meet artists whose practice relate to oil; its political, social and ecological concerns.
More information
https://www.fertileground.info
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by Frederico Pellachin
Born in Australia, lives and works in New York (USA). Hilton draws on diverse inspirations from his interaction within the world, filtering and processing aspects of contemporary life that fascinate him into scenes of abstract figuration.
He harnesses the restraints of the picture plane to activate a freedom from within, playing with this energy, constantly pushing and pulling forms, twisting positive and negative spaces with convulsing shapes and lines to engage a visual language that weaves genre within a sexualized dark humor.
Although displaying an outward looking vitality, the works are entrenched within the development of an intimate, interior language that tends to cross-pollinate, exchanging mannerisms, habits and turns of phrase.
More information
https://www.markhilton.co/
Pictures Gallery
by Frederico Pellachin
Lives and works in London, UK, where he teaches Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art with the University of the Arts London and practices as a Fine Artist. Having achieved a 1st class degree in Fine Art (Printmaking) from the Cambridge School of Art, he completed his Masters Degree at Central St. Martin’s School of Art and Design in London in 2008. He is a contributing member of “Saturation Point Projects”, an editorial & curatorial collective of reductive, geometric and systems based artists where he continues an on-going series of published artist interviews.
His work is primarily grounded in a systems based drawing practice which explores how a very simple set of initial rules can generate highly complex structures & compositions. Often he uses the iteration of an identical line as a starting point but the final outcome is always based on certain mathematical principles that underpin each piece.
His residency at Despina is a continuation of a body of work he developed on the Tasarim Bakkali artist residency in Istanbul in 2018, in which he sort to “explode” his drawing practice into 3 dimensions. Here in Brazil, the intention is to create a number of installational works using coloured thread to connect a series of predetermined geometric wall based drawings. The Istanbul works were all realised in black thread, but the structures that emerge at Despina will be rendered in a movement of 3 colours, each blending and merging into the others.
On his return to London he will be curating a large group exhibition at Arthouse1 gallery entitled “Iterations”, further exploring the manifold ways in which artists use repetition of form to generate elegant and beguiling works of art.
He has recently had solo exhibitions in Istanbul, Vancouver and London and has been in numerous group shows including “8 Lines” at Platform A Gallery in Middlesborough, “Momentum” at Angus-Hughes gallery London, “In Line” at the Griffin Gallery London, “Static/Kinetic” at Alice Black Gallery London, and “From Centre” at the Loud & Western Building, London.
This residency was made possible by the generous support of a Staff Development Fund from the University of the Arts London.
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by Frederico Pellachin
