Second edition of LOCIS started at the turn of June/July 2014.

In the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń will meet two young Polish artists – Liliana Piskorska and Dagmara Pochyła, Phoebe Dick from Ireland and Emma Houlihan from Sweden. They will cooperate leading by Irish artist, Seamus Nolan:

”My work uses ideas and actions to facilitate the production of meaning within the everyday experience. I interrogate collective behaviour and instigate or infer alternative narratives in the relationship between, artist and art institution, public and private space, as well as systems of class, ideology and history.

As part of LOCIS I will mentor or direct the inquiry of the participating artists, facilitating a critical understanding of the development of the work, the context of its production and/or its presentation. The intension will be to make new a visual performative or process based interrogation of form and subject. With regard to an outcome, while a final artwork may or may not exist, the process should engage the artist and his or her chosen audience in a dynamic which challenges both the artist and the audience. The project will consider the specific conditions of each individual’s arts practice, and the complexities and contradictions of the actual performance of a work of art.” (Seamus Nolan)

/ Seamus Nolan

‘Seamus Nolan, adopts a methodology of “formal repositioning” to reflect the nature of the institutions under which he operates. Self-conscious of his own role as an artist within a geography of cultural and political institutions, he uses his position and the exceptional privileges these institutions grant him, to reflect back upon them.’ (Jonah King 2012)

Recent work includes: ‘10th President’, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin. A proposal for the President of Ireland to temporarily hand over office to a deceased victim of institutional child abuse. / ‘Newtopia, the state of human rights’, Mechelen, Belgium. / ‘The Trades Club Revival’, which revived a traditional Working Man’s Club in Sligo. / Flight NM7104 – The attempted hijack of a Ryanair flight for St. Patrick’s Day for Terminal Convention, an off-site exhibition and seminar situated in the abandoned Airport terminal building at Cork Airport. / A refusal to participate. Ireland’s recent international art event Dublin Contemporary 2011./ An attempt to sell the derelict house of Barbara Luderowski the founder and co-director of The Mattress Factory Pittsburgh. / Corrib Gas Project Arts Centre, a solo show which looked at the Corrib Gas Pipeline and the North Mayo community affected by its development; / Every action will be judged on the particular circumstances – A collaboration with the five peace activists acquitted for disarming a military aircraft at Shannon Airport / Hotel Ballymun which transformed part of a residential tower block on the outskirts of Dublin into a boutique hotel.

/ Phoebe Dick

Phoebe Dick is an artist, printmaker, worker with words. Between 2004 and 2008 she studied at National College of Art and Design. In 2007 she took part in Erasmus Program (Traditional Print, Art Academy Poznań, Poland). She took part in “The Art of Change-Making”, a course run by Crawford Arts Participation and Development Programme, Cork, The Institute for Social Sculpture, Oxford, and The Knowmads Creative Business School, Amsterdam. She also attended a “Protecting Place” event in Rossport this way where people who had been involved in the Corrib Gas Pipeline Campaign shared their experiences and advice with people involved in other community campaigns, particularly The Anti-Fracking movement. She is involved with The Leitrim Sculpture Centre as a Volunteer and Facilitator in the Print Studios. She loves meeting people and socialising, and tries make time for practicing guitar and ukulele often.

/ Emma Houlihan

Emma Houlihan is a cultural producer and artist whose practice involves public projects, collaborations, participative and curatorial practice. Houlihan creates a discourse between art and community by engaging directly with people and places, collaborating with members of Dublin’s parkour community, or helping residents of Greensboro, North Carolina re-arrange their homes. Her work is concerned with the connections and bonds that come out of these exercises, actions which tease out the transformative dimensions of collaborative practice. International residencies include PLATFORM (Vasa, Finland), FRAGMENTED CITY (Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy) and Elsewhere Artist Collaborative (Greensboro, NC, USA). Exhibition’s include How do you Know? (Blanspace, Oakland, CA, USA), Too early for Vacation, (ev+a, Limerick curated by Hon Hanru),alt_cph (Copenhagen, Denmark) and City of Ideas (Galway, Ireland). She was awarded the Emerging Artist Award 2007/2008 from the National Sculpture Factory, Ireland and is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award, 2009. Emma currently lives and works between Dublin and Stockholm.

/ Liliana Piskorska

Liliana Piskorska was born in 1988 and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Toruń in 2013. Currently she is a PhD student at the Faculty of Fine Arts under the supervision of Elżbieta Jabłońska. She has taken part in over 40 individual and group exhibitions in Poland. In 2011 she studied at the University of Warsaw as an exchange student. In 2012 she took part in a one-year-long program in CoCA in Toruń called Przeprojekt, which focused on collaboration with Toruń-based artists. Since 2013 she has been a member of an artistic/self-education group centered around the Gallery by Vistula River. She focuses her artistic research on notions such as feminism and the idea that “The personal is political”, but she sees them from a perspective derived from posthumanism, ecofeminism and the situation of minorities. Her artistic activities have very analytical character; they are related to current social and cultural situation. She uses media ranging from sculpture and drawing to performance and happening; she very frequently uses herself and her own body to create works of art.

/ Dagmara Pochyła

She was born in Toruń in 1983. In 2007 she graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the Department of Art Education, specializing in the Intermedia Art. The master’s thesis entitled “The impact of new media on the structure of film narration”, based on the “Qatsi Trilogy”, written under the guidance of Ph.D. Bernadetta Didkowska, has been directly related to the area of my artistic pursuits. Her diploma work was realised in Professor Wiesław Smużny’s studio. This interactive video installation entitled “Being of projection/projection of being” has been presented during the post-competition exhibition of the 4th edition of the Samsung Art Master at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, during the post-competition exhibition of the Start Point at the Klenova Gallery in the Czech Republic, as well as during the exhibition of Diploma of the Year 2007 (in the form of documentation) in the Wozownia Gallery in Toruń. She mostly uses video, installation and performance media in her productions. In her early works she was focused on new technologies and new media, their influence on the forms of interpersonal communication and the intrinsic nature of these changes (“Being of projection/projection of being”, “From the left to the right”). The performance actions were touching the question of the relation between an individuality and intuitively perceived unity of the world, the interdependence of entities (“Message”, “Who is your master”). There are also topics of parallelism and duality within the individual, distortions of the space and time perception, and attempts of capturing the “in between” states (“Not found yet”, “The queen is dead/long lives the queen”). She is currently moving within the mottos of post-humanism, she examines the nature-culture relationship, traces human animalism (Sacral Plexus, Promise, Mandatorium), which is somewhat a development/deepening of her previous interests.