IASPIS Open Studios Autumn 2022

Welcome to IASPIS Open Studios Autumn 2022!

For this edition of IASPIS’ signature event, thirteen artists and duos from five continents share installations, drawings, photographs, design, film, sculptures, performances, and much more. Alongside the Stockholm grant holders there will be a special participation by grant holders in Umeå and Göteborg, and the International Dance Programme.

Oona Nelson, Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Dunne & Raby, Rahel Shawl, Isshaq Albarbary, Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Sara Kaaman, Jenny Magnusson, Geoff Robinson, Funduk (Matteo Locci & Başak Tuna), Ángel Manuel Ramírez Roque and Mona Namér give us an insight into their ongoing processes.

It is impossible to group all the practices presented here under one comprehensive topic, so there is no attempt to do that. It is rather the singularity of each artist and duo what makes Open Studios an ever-changing representation of the multiplicity present in the Swedish and international contemporary art scenes.

Coordinated by Victoria McCarthy
Graphic design by Evelina Mohei

Grant holders in Stockholm:
Oona Nelson (USA)
Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren (SWE)
Kemang Wa Lehulere (SAF)
Dunne & Raby (GBR)
Rahel Shawl (ETH)
Isshaq Albarbary (PAL)
Catherine Anyango Grünewald (KEN/SWE)
Sara Kaaman (SWE)
Jenny Magnusson (SWE)

Grant holders in Umeå:
Geoff Robinson (AUS)
Funduk / Matteo Locci (ITA) & Başak Tuna (TUR/ITA)

Grant holder in Göteborg:
Ángel Manuel Ramírez Roque (CUB)

International Dance Programme:
Mona Namér (SWE)

Public programme

1.00 pm Doors open

1.20 – 1.30 pm Welcome address by Mika Romanus, Director General, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Foyer)

1.30 – 1.45 pm Mona Namér: Screening (Dance Studio)

2.00 – 2.30 pm Ángel Manuel Ramírez Roque: Presentation (Residency kitchen)

3.00 – 3.15 pm Mona Namér: Screening (Dance Studio)

3.00 – 4.00 pm Kemang Wa Lehulere: Performance, in collaboration with Lefifi Tladi (Foyer)

3.30 – 6.30 pm Sara Kaaman: Informal talks (Studio 8)

4.00 – 4.40 pm Dunne & Raby: In conversation with Martín Ávila (Studio 4)

4.20 – 5.00 pm Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren: In conversation with Yuvinka Medina (Studio 2)

4.00 – 7.00 pm Rahel Shawl: Informal talks and Ethiopian coffee ceremony (Studio 5)

5.30 – 6.00 pm Geoff Robinson: Sound performance (Foyer)

5.15 – 5.45 pm Mona Namér: Screening and presentation (Dance Studio)

6.00 pm Bar opens (Foyer)

6.00 – 6.45 pm Jenny Magnusson: In conversation with Anna Öberg and Magnus af Petersens (Studio 9)

7.00 – 7.30 pm Funduk: Performance (Archive)

7.30 – 9.00 pm DJ Karani (Foyer)

The studios are open 1 – 9 pm.
The public programme schedule might be subject to changes.

Oona Nelson (USA) – Studio 1
Originally from California but currently based in New York, Oona Nelson splits her time between her own art practice and ORT Project collaborative. Her approach is a collage of materials and mediums which result in detritus objects, installations, and photographic-based assemblages or digital prints. With a decidedly dark sense of humour, Nelson is focused on exploring and critiquing aspects of consumption, abundance, and decay. While trying to balance the grotesque and the beautiful, she often mixes in personal subject matters with art history, cult of convenience, environmental threats, and distorted value systems. Nelson has a Bachelor’s Degree in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Masters Degree in New Genres from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally.

Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren (SWE) – Studio 2
Based in Stockholm, artist duo Weronika Bela and Ivar Hagren take their point of departure in the history of photography, often through personal micro-stories. Their preferred medium is analogue black-and-white photography, employing both traditional and experimental techniques in the dark room. Recently, they have been researching the photographic material company ORWO who held a monopoly over photographic darkroom material in the Eastern bloc market before ceasing operations in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bela & Hagren have also continued to work in the project Meteorologiskt/privat, a photographic in-depth study of Weronika’s paternal grandparents’ life and work at a weather station in the Polish city of Przemysl. Hagren has a BA from HDK-Valand and a MA from Konstfack, and Bela has a BA and MA from Konstfack. Their work has been exhibited in Sweden and internationally, including Poland, Finland and Greece.

Kemang Wa Lehulere (SAF) – Studio 3
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Kemang Wa Lehulere seeks to develop new narrative modes and forms of political action through sculpture, drawing, performance and writing. Throughout his career he has created dialogue with the historic legacy of Black South African artists, journalists, and musicians, such as Gladys Mgudlandlu, Ernest Mancoba, and Nat Nakasa. During his residency in Stockholm, he will focus on explorations around clay and its material possibilities. Kemang Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of Gugulective, an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and is a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg. He was awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013 and is the winner of the 2015 Standard Bank South Africa, Young Artist Award. He has exhibited his works in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.

Dunne & Raby (GBR) – Studio 4
Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussions and debates amongst designers, the industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. They are currently working on new sections of their ongoing project, An Archive of Impossible Objects, investigating ways of undoing the human through the design of a series of objects for a fictional festival. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are University Professors of Design and Social Inquiry and co-directors of the Designed Realities Lab at Parsons/The New School in New York. Their work has been exhibited at MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Design Museum (London), and is in several permanent collections worldwide. Dunne & Raby received the inaugural MIT Media Lab Award in 2015, and in 2021, they were awarded the title Royal Designers for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts.

Rahel Shawl (ETH) – Studio 5
Based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Rahel Shawl seeks to use architecture as a tool for meaningful design and construction while also having a positive impact on the environment – bringing to life architecture that is human centred and genuine. She dedicates her time engaging with young people to promote and share knowledge of architecture, and passionately engages in the advocacy for equity in design practices through her initiative @abRen. Shawl is the founder and Principal of RAAS Architects and blends her industry know-how with her passion for people and identity. She is a graduate of Addis Ababa University, and a 2017 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. Shawl has received numerous accolades, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007, the Association of Ethiopian Architects (AEA) best Architecture Piece Award in 2017, and the Abyssinia Award for Social Engagement in the fields of Architecture and Engineering in 2017.

Isshaq Albarbary (PAL) – Studio 6
Isshaq Albarbary’s research-based practice deals with authenticity, imitation, camouflage, anonymity, normalisation, and naturalisation. While at IASPIS, he will delve into his project that peels away the disembodied layers that come together in making residency permit identity cards. It considers the ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges of capturing the emotions, silences, subjectivities, experiences, and politics that exceed the material image of the ID card itself. Isshaq Albarbary holds a Master of Fine Art and Design from HKU, Utrecht, and was a 2017/2018 fellow at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst). He was coordinator of Campus in Camps, an educational programme that activated collaborative critical learning environments in Palestinian refugee camps. Albarbary has shown his work at the Van Abbemuseum, the Serralves Museum, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago. His work has been included in the São Paulo Biennial, the Qalandya International in Palestine, documenta 14 in Kassel, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Catherine Anyango Grünewald (KEN/SWE) – Studio 7
Catherine Anyango Grünewald is an artist and lecturer born in Nairobi, Kenya, currently based in Stockholm. Her works use the materiality of drawing to explore meaning, exploiting the physical properties of the pencil and the eraser to render events with realism, but also to explore unseen dimensions. They tackle the historical and contemporary systemic oppression of characters who have been marginalised and underrepresented. During her residency, she expanded on her drawing and experimental animation practice, exploring the ‘observer effect’, defined in physics as the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. She was a teacher at the Royal College of Art in London and is now a Senior Lecturer in Illustration at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm. She illustrated, adapted, and created several graphic novels and in 2019 she was awarded the Navigator Art on Paper Prize.

Sara Kaaman (SWE) – Studio 8
Sara Kaaman makes publishing, teaching, drawing and writing. Her background as a graphic designer is leading her to investigate publishing technologies as/and world making, and the relationships between bodies, publications and public action. As an educator she is using tactics from embodied pedagogy and performance to compost conventions of rational logic, order and legibility. She likes to make language move by setting up conditions for collisions of meaning, using words, mark making and voice. She preferably works in collaborations, currently active in the collective constellations MMS (a research group), Girls Like Us (a queer feminist magazine) and Wake Up! (a collective publication process). During the Open Studios she will serve a table of content of current investigations and works in progress.

Jenny Magnusson (SWE) – Studio 9
Based in Göteborg, Jenny Magnusson works with site-specific sculpture, internalisation of space, place, artefact, and materiality using her body as an instrument. She returns to and reuses material, objects and artefacts for her sculptures, each created in one place in order to be returned. During her residency she has been working with the part of her sculptural practice that touches on the choreographic, by analysing what is hidden in the movements of laying, stacking and leaning through practical experimentation. Magnusson recently produced a public artwork, Luta–Lägga–Stapla (Lean–Lay–Stack), commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden for Voksenåsen, Oslo. She and photographer Patrik Elgström comprise the artist duo Skymmer och Ser; they are currently working on a book which they plan to publish later this year. Her work has been extensively exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Sweden and internationally.

Ángel Manuel Ramírez Roque (CUB) – Studio grant holder in Göteborg
Based in Havana, Cuba, Ángel Manuel Ramírez Roque uses recycled objects, texts, and images in order to build a visual language that unveils everyday life in Cuba. With a clear and precise iconoclastic sagacity, his prints and woodcut objects bring forward his particular sense of humour and sarcasm. Ramírez Roque is currently working in two series, The Children of the Beast and The Chaos of the Crown, with an intention to achieve pieces that will conceptually enhance and deepen a combination of both series. He graduated from the Higher Institute of Art in 1982 and from the National School of Art in 1977, both in Havana, Cuba. His works are part of numerous private and public collections in Cuba, Argentina, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and Austria.

Geoff Robinson (AUS) – Studio grant holder in Umeå
Geoff Robinson is a Narrm/Melbourne-based artist who creates process driven, situation-based artworks that engage the temporal qualities of sound and performance with the spatial conditions of physical sites to unravel the durational layers of place. His practice investigates the transformation of sonic experiences into form and the alternate relationships that occur when multiple sites and contexts are juxtaposed. His recent projects include: Tributary Project (2020-2022), with Ying-Lan Dann, Ben Woods & Saskia Schut, Bus Projects & Composite, Melbourne; Durational Situation / Umeälven / Birrarung (2021), Re-Think Festival, Umeå; and I am asleep in your night yet to come (2021), Freedom of Sleep, Disclaimer & Fondation Fiminco, Paris. He holds a BA and MA from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and finished his PhD in Fine Arts at the Monash University in 2018. He has participated in residencies and exhibitions in Finland, Estonia, South Korea and Australia.

Funduk: Matteo Locci (ITA) & Başak Tuna (TUR/ITA) – Studio grant holders in Umeå
Matteo Locci and Başak Tuna are co-founders of the practice Funduk, working and living between Rome and Istanbul. Their research is based on a performative investigation of urban environments made of three elements: a design approach towards material exploration, a situated performative approach to explore contexts and social networks, and a theoretically driven debate that reflects on the knowledge generated from the performances. During their autumn residency, the artists have been developing new research on the threshold of miscommunication and licking. During the Open Studios, they will present their research as the interactive media installation Xenotongue files in the archive. Matteo Locci is an architect and multimedia artist, co-founder of the Roman collective Ati suffix. Başak Tuna is a critical spatial practitioner graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven. They teamed up in 2019 as a duo and later as a trio in the Funduk collective with curator Maximilian Lehner.

Mona Namér (SWE) – International Dance Programme
Mona Namér is a Moroccan-Swedish dancer, choreographer and creative director based in Stockholm. Namér merges her experience and breadth of knowledge and uses them to create a repertoire of new expressive narratives in movement and visual art. She is active in different fields such as dance and film productions, theatre, directing, teaching, commercial work and photography. Her work explores identity, human behaviour, surrealism, rituals and a sense of floating inside and outside of your own body. Namér is currently working on an upcoming performance titled Birth Liquid, which explores the stages of birth, chaos and stillness, an extension of the dance film A Bath in My Mother’s Womb that she directed last year — that premiered at Göteborg Film Festival 2022, won Best Experimental Short at New Generation Indie Film Awards in Los Angeles, and will shortly be broadcasted on SVT.