Artists in Residence – A Powerful, Bonding Experience

Anna Soucek

“The artists worked hard and produced good works of art,” recalls Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, one of the first to have been invited to Austria by KulturKontakt Austria. “And if they didn’t, they at least spent an interesting three months here. That is something every artist deserves!” Today, Perjovschi is probably Romania’s most well-known contemporary artist. The KKA residency was one of his first journeys abroad after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The Artists in Residence programme, which has been in existence since 1992, offers young artists studio space, accommodations and a monthly scholarship of 1,000 euros. Despite the political and social changes that have been taking place in Europe and the slow dissolution of the East-West dichotomy – in the art world as well – the importance of the residency programme has by no means diminished. Since there are hardly any exhibition spaces available for young, experimental artists in their homelands and the opportunities for selling their works or receiving funding are few, the opportunity to concentrate on their own work for three months – with a secure income, a studio to call their own and the perspective of an exhibition at Galerie ArtPoint –  is a well-deserved luxury for the successful applicants.

This is also evidenced by a survey taken of current and past Artists in Residence. “I left Moscow in a phase of artistic crisis,” relates Artist in Residence Haim Sokol, who visited Vienna at the beginning of 2011. “The residency was a wonderful opportunity to relax, to think, to work in a new context and to begin something totally new. I was so happy with the unbelievably spacious studio that at first I could hardly bear to leave it for a minute.”

One advantage for the development of artistic projects is, of course, that there is no pressure from the host to produce results. Whether the artists spend three months at the drawing table or over a video cutting program, researching in libraries, dancing hip-hop, visiting museums – or alone in their studio creating a one-hundred-part graphics installation, is left entirely to their own discretion. Usually the ambition to produce new, often Vienna-specific works for the concluding presentation wins out.

For the Serbian artist Boba Mirjana Stojadinović, who also spent three months in Vienna in 2011, the long-term effects of the residency were different: “Unexpectedly, the KKA residency gave me an opportunity for exchange that has extended beyond the temporal and geographical framework of my sojourn in Vienna, because since then I have become acquainted with several people who were also Artists in Residence in Vienna. That alone is a powerful, bonding experience.”

www.kulturkontakt.or.at/air

Anna Soucek, who was born in Vienna, studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and completed a curating programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked on exhibitions at the South London Gallery, Künstlerhaus Wien and elsewhere. Anna Soucek is a co-founder of “forum experimentelle architektur”, a forum for experimental architecture, and is on the staff of the ORF radio station Ö1 (Kunstradio, Leporello, Diagonal).