Past Resident

Slavs and Tatars

In residence: November 28 - December 6, 2011

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010) and Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would've, could've, should've (JRP-Ringier, 2011). Their work has been exhibited at the Frieze Sculpture Park, the 10th Sharjah, 8th Mercosul and 3rd Thessaloniki Biennials. After devoting the past 5 years primarily to two cycles of work, namely, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance) and the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz, 79.89.09), Slavs and Tatars have begun work on their third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic, for The New Museum Triennial as well as solo engagements at Secession, Vienna, MoMA, NY, and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in 2012.

Upcoming Residents

Georges H. Rabbath

In residence: February 2012

G. H. Rabbath Ph.D. is a writer and associate professor in human sciences based in Beirut. His main interests include the relations between scientific discovery and contemporary art practices and the dynamic logical and predictable shift of art's locus in contemporary artworks, asnwell as the performative exploration of the 'illusion of decisive agency' that still motivates artistic practice and blurs the limits between explicit and non-explicit symbolic levels in contemporary artistic production. In 2009 he published 'Can One Man Save the (Art) World'. In 2010 he curated M. Obaidi's latest show in Art Dubai 2010 and published 'Mr Obaidi and the Fair Skies® Corporation'. He is working on his next book 'Ten Days'. G. H. Rabbath has been appointed by the Ministry of Culture to curate the Lebanese Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Aneta Szylak

In residence: June 2012

Aneta Szylak – a curator and writer, co-founder and currently Director of Wyspa Institute of Art – has just been appointed Artistic Director of Alternativa 2010-2012. After co-founding and running the Laznia (Bathhouse) Centre for Contemporary Art (1998-2001) she pursued her career as an independent curator and researcher. Since 2004 she has been responsible for programming Wyspa – the intellectual environment for contemporary visual culture – in the Gdansk Shipyard. In 2005, she received the Jerzy Stajuda Award "for independent and uncompromising curatorial practice". Szylak's exhibitions are characterised by a strong response to cultural, political, social, architectural and institutional particularities.

Hiwa K

In residence: June 2012

Hiwa K. - Visual artist and musician born in Iraq, living in Germany. His major interest circles around the notion of event, performativity, as well as the figure of the artist as an amateur. Since 2005, he has been developing a series of projects involving paradoxes of cultural competence, participation, dissemination of knowledge and distribution of the event.

Sandra Skurvida

In residence: August 2012

Sandra Skurvida is an independent curator and scholar based in New York City. Her research and curatorial projects are determined by the specific socio-political conditions: OtherIS (2011-ongoing) is a curatorial platform of video art relating to the US-sanctioned countries; Avant-Guide to NYC (apexart, 2009) redressed historical referents of art in the city within the present; Custom Car Commandos (Art in General, 2009) cross-sectioned the auto industry in crisis with the image industry; Soap Box Event by Pia Lindman (Federal Hall National Memorial, 2008) practiced performance of free speech; among numerous other projects since 1995, when she curated the Third Annual Exhibition of Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania (1995) in the post–Soviet conditions at the emergence of global networks.