Opening reception: Tuesday April 23, 2024 | 5:00 – 8:00pm
On view:
Mon April 22 – Thu April 25 | 11:00am – 6:00pm
Fri April 26 | 11:00am – 2:00pm
Location: Residency Unlimited
360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)
Residency Unlimited presents the works of six international artists who spent the last three months developing their practices in NY. They are: Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman (Canada), Sophia Bakos (Canada), Hoda Kashiha (Iran), Ana Likar (Slovenia), Kejoo Park (Korea/Germany), Tharini Sankarasubramanian (India).
Displaced from other societies and their ideological frameworks, each of the featured artists respond to a new context around them. Analogously to transposing music, artists may restate their works at a different pitch level. If we’d rather consider (visual) language, transposition offers the opportunity to reconfigure content from a source language to a new one, with room for (creative) in-between space.
Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman expands her series Praises Unsung from wall work into a sculpture installation on the perspectives of eldest daughter within the context of South Asian and African households. Sophia Bakos introduces a textile-collage new body of works titled Softener that makes use of repetitive stitching patterns and pencil-drawn iconography along with photography, needle-felted bows, and found objects that help her confronting her personal battle with disordered eating. Hoda Kashiha introduces playful canvases that portray the uncertainty between real life and her imagination, incorporating pop culture and comic cartoons. Ana Likar presents a video, which is currently a work in progress, on witch trials titled Marina Češarek Gallery that seeks to challenge the validity of coerced confessions, aiming instead to honor the memory of those oppressed and their acts of defiance. Kejoo Park presents works of a newly developed series Visible-Invisible where she relies on multimedia in order to pay homage to a Beuys environmental intervention. Tharini Sankarasubramanian introduces a body of works that explore subjects and symbols from the Shakta Tantra philosophy, such as serpents and goddesses.
During a residency, there may be repetition and continuity of previous processes, there are new movements and transformations, but there are mainly transpositions, that in the context of nomadic ethics, as proposed by Rosi Braidotti*, “indicates an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, filed or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities.”
*Braidotti, Rosi (2006), Transpositions: Polity Press
Click below to see images from the opening reception
This program is supported by The Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Canada Council for the Arts and artlinks.