Open studio: Some Sort of Tenderness

23 Mar 2024 2-6pm

Overview

Join us, at the end of our winter residency season, to meet seven of our current artists-in-residence and get an insight into their practices.

This drop-in afternoon offers the chance to meet our current residents and experience new, existing, and in-development works by Anna Housiada, Aki Inomata, Petra Matić, Merve Mepa, Tahmineh Monzavi, Hyekyung Son, and Takuya Watanabe, which will be installed across the Delfina house.

Participating Artists:

Anna Housiada (Greece) produces work that stems from both academic and artistic research and which revolves around the experience and expression of social and ethnic identity. Anna understands her practice as a rhizome, growing across questions of belonging, through participation and collective production of knowledge, writing, crafting and cooking, creating intersections with the potential to activate a historical, critical and political dialogue.

Aki Inomata (Japan) makes works in collaboration with other species; investigating the relationships between animals and human beings and the creations that emerge from them.

Petra Matić (Croatia) is a curator, artist, and activist. Oriented around the social and spatial politics of collective actions, hospitality, and conviviality, Petra’s current research examines the socio-political histories of the Non-Aligned Movement and its constituent choreography of movement, exchanges, and solidarity. Strongly rooted in anti-colonial practices and mutual aid, she makes welcoming spaces for communities facing violence and displacement and participates actively in anti-racist knowledge exchange. She is the founder and director of Jutro, a cultural organisation working across contemporary art, heritage, and human rights.

Merve Mepa (Turkey) focuses on intra-actions, ruptures, gaps, and interplays between theory and practice. She synthesises historical, scientific, and marginalised knowledge to create work within a complex system of diverse elements of production and labour. Research-practice synergies facilitate this process. This, intertwined with tradition, labour and technology, fosters a space for discussing diffractions within a complex system.

Tahmineh Monzavi (Iran) is a socially conscious photographer. She began her professional career as a documentary photographer in 2005 and has developed her own style to work across artistic and documentary photography.

Hyekyung Son (South Korea) in her practice focuses on the contradiction of the capitalist system, which essentially valorises itself through the exploitation of surplus-value, and the necessity of the overcoming of the contradiction, which is metaphorically structuralised. Hyekyung studies and researches the laws and principles of the capitalist system, and presenting this through the basic unit of the wealth in capitalist society; the commodity. Through her work she seeks to take and hold a materialist and dialectic approach.

Takuya Watanabe (Japan) is a visual artist. He makes video installations that unveil the intricate interplay of power and vulnerability woven into contemporary society. His work delves into a myriad of complex issues, spanning labour and violence to immigration and vulnerability. Through research and interviews within communities, he identifies subtle physical and linguistic gestures expressed in dialogues as a form of “representational object.” By doing so, he visualises the complexity of social structures and forces that underlie these communities’ experiences. Recently, he has been exploring social interactions beyond human society to include plants as other beings.

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