The Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, together with two partner institutions, Leitrim County Council Arts Office and Botkyrka Konsthall in Stockholm, is launching LOCIS: a two-year program of artistic residencies and cultural exchanges between Poland, Ireland and Sweden.
LOCIS is a word of Latin origin which derives from locus, meaning a place or locality, but also a centre of a certain activity. The word LOCIS is etymologically connected with terms such as: local, locality, localization, location, locator… all of which are central to the main idea of the project, whose aim is to activate artistic processes and practices in different rural, sub-urban and urban contexts, engaging artists who are working in or with these specific sites. Therefore, LOCIS represents a research and artist-in-residence program which will develop a set of artistic initiatives addressing the theme of place, site, location and topos, understood through the plurality of their potential environmental, social, political, economical or cultural connotations.
LOCIS is designed as a knowledge-sharing project which seeks to create opportunities for younger artists to work together, regardless of their place of residence, and to enable them to establish collaborative relations and dialogue with internationally renowned artists/architects who will also be involved in the project. Each residency-program engages younger artists from Poland, Sweden and Ireland, not only to work together, but also to work with emerged contemporary artists.
In all three countries, LOCIS will be developed as an artist-in-residence program lasting three non-consecutive weeks, and will be concluded with a final exhibition and seminar.
Partner institutions:
SWEDEN: Residence Botkyrka is a context-based residency program for internationally active artists, curators and architects who are interested in working site specifically. It explores new forms of art in the public space and supports projects that are hard to carry out without a longer stay. Residence Botkyrka wants to create good conditions for artistic freedom and develop local participation. Residence Botkyrka is run by Botkyrka Konsthall and is situated in Botkyrka – a part of Greater Stockholm and one of Sweden’s most international municipalities with people from about eighty different countries, speaking more than a hundred languages. Botkyrka Konsthall pursues issues of co-creation and how the interaction between people can promote social justice and change. Certain subjects and themes keep reoccurring, for example; climate change; globalization; and the social role of music in our society. More info at:botkyrkakonsthall.se
IRELAND: Leitrim County Council Arts Office provides for the development of the arts and artists in County Leitrim in the Northwest of Ireland. It develops and co-ordinates programmes to encourage individuals and communities to become involved in the arts and provides professional development opportunities to individual artists. For the first edition of LOCIS, the Arts Office will be collaborating with the Leitrim Sculpture Centre located in the town of Manorhamilton in Co. Leitrim. The Leitrim Sculpture Centre supports research and experimentation in both the production and display of compelling and challenging new work and in the acquisition of traditional and contemporary skills and knowledge. Its program includes exhibitions, artists’ residencies, workshops, training, research, masterclasses, talks, symposia and additional projects that explore the local landscape and alternative and sustainable models of arts practice through trans-local networking and collaboration. More info at: www.leitrimsculpturecentre.ie
Funding from the EU program Culture 2000 will enable the realization of the LOCIS project, which connects artists and cultural operators residing in different rural, sub-urban and urban contexts of Ireland, Poland and Sweden.
LOCIS 1
Artists:
/ Patrycja Orzechowska
Visual artist, specializing in photography, collages, installation, graphic design, film and art in public space. Graduate of the Department of Painting and Graphics, at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts, multiple scholar of the Ministry of Culture, the Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and the President of the City of Gdansk. She lives and works in Gdansk. Her works were presented in the Arsenal gallery in Poznan, in the Gallery of Photography in Gdansk, BWA in Wroclaw, The Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, the Centre of Contemporary Art in Vilnius, the Platán Gallery in Budapest, HISK in Gent, and many others, as well as during many art festivalsk, such as: Transphotographiques in Lille, The Photomonth in Cracow, the Supermarket Sztuki, and Survival in Wroclaw.
She is interested in the choreography of the body and inscribing it into various structures and constructions, as a form which serves both: the attempt of restoring the proper order of things in our social and family life as well as searching for harmony in the urban tissue. In her practice she often refers to a variety of performing arts, cooperating with modern dancers, gymnasts and actors, she creates artworks with the human figure as the main motive. Human bodies, subjected to an innocent training by the artists, become structured compositions of disturbing shapes. In her recent work she is really interested in the relationship between people and objects. This relation often tends to be obsessive, amorous and sentimental. Simultaneously working on the leftovers, the ready-made objects, the human body, she casually cultivates physical and mental recycling without any ecological pressure. Doing collages from old newspapers and books (Monuments / Deadline. Never Ending Story / Kinderturnen / Greetings from Eternity), sculpting the body like clay (Gymnastic Studies / Sculptures just now! / Homebody) building new forms and meaning of the collections of clustered items (Future Perfect / Skeletons / Wall / My Small Glasses), the artist still has to deal with the appealing materiality and the hell of things.
/Jonas Nobel & Uglycute
(member of Uglycute, design and architecture collective based in Stockholm)
Jonas Nobel (b. 1970) studied at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, and now lives and works in Stockholm. His interdisciplinary practice involves both art and design, as one of the founder members of Uglycute, which merges art, design and architecture. Jonas Nobel has created a permanent installation for Restaurant Riche in Stockholm, and has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the previous Moderna Exhibition in 2006 at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2007, his book, “The memory of this experience will fade and you will eventually die Iʼ m sorry Iʼ m so very very sorry” was designed by Research and Development.
Uglycute is a design and architecture office based in Stockholm, Sweden. Founded in 1999 by Andreas Nobel, interior designer, Fredrik Stenberg, architect, Markus Degerman and Jonas Nobel, artists. Uglycute are working to expand the concept of design by crossbreeding it with our different professions and trying to analyze its impact on society by not only practicing but also writing, teaching and organizing workshops.
More info at: http://www.uglycute.com
/ Arek Pasożyt (Parasite)
Born in 1987, photographer, performance artist, painter. He studied Painting and Artistic Education on the Fine Arts Department at the Nicolas Copernicus University in Torun, graduated from Artistic Education in 2011. From 2006 to 2010 he leaded and co-funde the Gruba Najgorsza Group – a team of activists, art debutants, protesting against the inner relations between galleries and curators and undertaking various forms of institutional cirtics. In 2010, as a part of his “Parasite” happening, he iniciated the Bojówka (Guerilla) group constisting of voluntary participants that had nothing to do with art on a daily basis, which performed mild sabotage during vernissage events. As one of his solo art practices performed in the period 2010-2011, entitled “Parasite Painting”, Arek Pasożyt made copies of famous paintings by such art masters as Lucien Freud, Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans or Damien Hirst.
/ Cathal Roche
Cathal Roche was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1975. Since moving to the West of Ireland in 2002, Roche has developed a reputation as an innovative improvisor and sound artist, exhibiting and performing throughout Ireland and the UK. Specialising in extended solo saxophone performance, he has collaborated with improvisors Phil Minton, David Toop, Clive Bell, Elaine Mitchener, Lauren Kinsella, Colm O’Hara, David Lacey and blackmetal vocalist Atilla Csihar among others. Since 2006, Cathal has worked closely with Irish composer Ian Wilson to develop a number of improvisational works for saxophones and ensemble including ‚re:play’ and ‚The Book of Ways’ with the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, ‚Therefore I am’ with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and ‚The hours’ with legendary Irish bassist Ronan Guilfoyle, drummer Matthew Jacobson and the Contempo String Quartet. Other collaborations include original solo performance works, installations, video pieces and inter-disciplinary projects.
His solo performance work has been featured on both British and Irish radio and television. Irish Art’s Council commissions include ‚Encounters’ for solo saxophones and multiple CD players (2009), ‚The Message’ for George Mason University, USA, (2008), ‚Guidance’, solo saxophone and live video projection for Leitrim County Council, and a suite for saxophone Sextet featuring Julian Arguelles, commissioned by the Sligo Jazz Project.
Roche continues to explore new ground as a member of the cross-arts improv group ‚Hereinafter’ which he co-directs with his partner, artist Kate Wilson. Dublin City Jazz Orchestra.
As an educator Cathal facilitates improvisation and installation projects for 5 -12 year olds as Artist in Residence for Leitrim County Council. He teaches jazz improvisation and woodwind at the Sligo Academy of Music and Roscommon County Youth Orchestra.
/ Maja Hammarén
(1978) is an artist and writer
In her works she explores the space between instructions in a broad sense ( as a controlling architectural structure in the public, a media story, the apparatus surrounding us which we are part of ) and the bodies that meet with the instructions.
In 2012 in Eleven Years Later, Hammarén together with 80 people made a re-enactment of the Schillerska events during the EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, when police special unit stormed a school and brought 78 protesters living there out to lay face-down on the asphalt schoolyard for hours.
In GIBCA, the Göteborg International Biennal for Contemporary Art in 2013, Hammaren linked the shared ideological meaning of popular games with the movements from Schillerska in the form of signs with scores in the public leaving to the audience to perform the movements – or not. During the opening days the movements were performed by hired laborers from Young at work, a company that sells cheap labor for cleaning and garden work.
With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union
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Maja Hammarén
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Patrycja Orzechowska
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Arek Pasożyt
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Cathal Roche
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Jonas Nobel