Residents 2023/24

Shima Asa

Shima Asa is an Iranian artist/curator based in Montreal. Her artistic practice focused on the materiality of sound and narrative. In her works, she listened to human voices and silences and explored the spatiality of aural experiences through elemental matter and structural designs. She joined the CCC research-based master's program at HEAD Geneva, where she conceived the theory of exhibition as a listening-scape and wrote her thesis on how the forms of listening/being there can cultivate modes of inhibiting a work of art. Taklif: Ideas of femininity, her recent work as co-curator evolved from collective reflections on alternative ways of describing/ascribing experiencing/experimenting with feminism. Taklif was homework, a platform for listening.

Alizé Rose-May Monod

Alizé Rose-May Monod (CH/FR) is a Bern-based artist, researcher, curator and cultural worker. They work situational and multimedia. The choice of the medium depends on the context of production: video, installation, textile, text, curation... Their work revolves around (the practices of) relationships. They propose alternative spaces of gathering and community, for the purpose of collectivi­zation of queer experiences. They are a collective member of Queer-Feministischer Raum (Bern), where they organize queer parties and concerts. They often collaborate, f.i. in an artist duo with Anna Marcus or in DJ-duo Sap­pho's Drama. Since March 2023, they have been taking care of the art space Cabane B* (Bern) with a curatorial project called INVITATION. They have been artist in residence in Cairo, Egypt and in Genova, Italy.

Andrea Palášti

Andrea Palášti is a Hungarian/Croatian/Serbian artist and educator based in Novi Sad [Serbia], who works across artistic, curatorial and pedagogical boundaries experimenting with ways of knowledge production. Her projects are made visible through photo-exhibitions, historical and scientific research, illustrative lectures and participatory workshops as means to encourage a nuanced understanding of our world. Working with different communities in diverse informal group actions, she is experimenting with cross-discipline presentations acting as: a misleading tourist guide, a more-than-human fitness trainer, a dilettante freshwater ecologist, an ignorant art[ist] teacher, an unlicensed press photographer, a quasi primatologist, a noted expert on Dalmatian pyrethrum, an accidental historian, a passionate archive researcher and a perfect dinner-party hostess. She is part of the collective Danube Transformation Agency for Agency [Vienna-Novi Sad] and a team member of  MMC LED ART [Novi Sad]. Since 2016, she has been lecturing at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, where she teaches Elements of Visual Art, blending her collaborative artistic research projects with educational strategies.

Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan

Aryakrishnan Ramakrishnan is an artist and curator based in Cochin and New Delhi, India. They completed their MA in Visual Arts from School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University, Delhi, 2014. Their ongoing project Sweet Maria Monument is a monument for a transgender activist and performer who was murdered in 2012 in Kerala, India. The project was showcased in various spaces including Clark House Mumbai (2017) and Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018) and Queer Art Festival, Vancouver (2022).

Halim Ramses

Halim Ramses is a visual artist & cultural practitioner based in Cairo, Egypt. Halim's practice explores establishing intimate spaces for critical discourses. As part of Halim's artistic practice, he facilitates the Re-imagining Egyptology Program which is a space for artists from diverse disciplines to come together and collaboratively work, discuss, share resources and create projects that navigate through the gaps and the silences in archives. The program is a collective exploration of attempts of challenging official and colonial understandings of Egyptian history and to disrupt the normative imagination of Egyptianness.

Tali Serruya Gorzalczany

Tali Serruya Gorzalczany (b. 1985) is a south-american multidisciplinary artist and researcher working on the political potential of collaborative artistic practices when developed for and with individuals facing different forms of social oppression. Trained in theater directing at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts of Paris (CNSAD) and in contemporary artistic practices at the Art and Design School of Geneva (HEAD - HESGE), her work is not restricted to a defined format but responds to situations, encounters, urgencies, possibilities. Collaboration, horizontality, transculturality and transdisciplinarity are thus at the heart of her practice. Since the beginning of her career, she has taken part in a large number of international artistic residencies and has presented her work in cultural institutions such as Capacete (Rio de Janeiro), Villa Bernasconi (Geneva), Lambert Collection (Avignon), Art Sonje Center (Seoul), Pasaje 17 (Buenos Aires), TOAST (Manchester), among others. 

Cheshmak Shahsiah

Cheshmak Shahsiah is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Iran who works with various mediums such as prints, videos, and performances. They began their artistic journey with graffiti in 2003, and later took part in a number of group art projects in Tehran. They have worked with several groups and collectives in Iran, the United States, and Germany. Cheshmak's interest in artistic processes and experimentations led them to pursue an MFA at the University of New Mexico. They are currently living in Tehran and working on a community art space project called Kargah while researching the politics of mourning as a mood of organization for potential collectives to emerge.

Kay Zhang

Kay Zhang is a sonic artist who explores around the topics of in-betweenness through sound, performance, curation and research. Their curatorial work lends itself with 'learning by doing' methods, experimentation which are intertwined with transdisciplinary art. They work within various projects and coordinate different platforms and have an interest in intercultural identities, queer feminist theories and sound ecologies. Kay is dedicated to explore and engage by using sound performance knowledge, curating experiences through works of sound art (field recordings), collective listening and care practices. Kay is a founding member of Kollektiv international Totem (KIT), River Oracle, The Alchemists' Bruit and ARKA. Kay fosters collaborations from all disciplines, trying to create bridges (in)-between them.

Ella Elidas Banda / Ozhopé Collective

Founded in 2017, Ozhopé Collective is a group comprising two artists (Ella Elidas Banda and Massa Lemu), two photo/videographers (Tavwana Chirwa and Augustine Magolowondo), and a writer (Emmanuel Ngwira). Ozhopé’s main concern is to collaboratively produce art that inspires conversations and invites people to critical thinking around social, economic, and political issues of everyday life. The group’s name derives from the word “wosopé”, a Yao term which translates as “all of them”. The word was uttered by an enthusiastic boy in reference to the artists who were busy with their work. It was subsequently adapted to “ozhopé” whose root speaks to the collective ethos that propels the group’s collaborative practice. Ozhopé has shown on Lake Malawi, in the streets of Lilongwe city, at University of Malawi, at the Art Collective Bureau in Cape Town, the Boda Boda Panafrican Video Art Festival, City Salts in Basel, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Nicolle Bussien

Nicolle Bussien is an artist based in Bern and Zurich. Her artistic practice is influenced by her involvement in the field of anti-racism, particularly in the (post-)migration society context of Switzerland. Nicolle's collaborative and multidisciplinary projects are questioning the hegemonic power structures of society and their representation. Her work has been included in exhibitions internationally, for example at ZKM (Karlsruhe), The Kitchen (New York City), unframed Festival (Berlin), etc. and in various spaces in Switzerland, e.g. Kunsthaus Centre Pasquart (Biel), Kunstmuseum Solothurn and Kunstraum Aarau.

Ghalas Charara & Camilla Paolino

Ghalas Charara & Camilla Paolino are respectively coming from Beirut and Milan. Ghalas and Camilla met in Geneva in 2016 within the framework of the CCC Research-based Master Program at HEAD-Genève. They engaged in several projects rooted in the alternative art and cultural scene of Geneva (TOPIC, one gee in fog, Théâtre de l'Usine, CANALE MILVA, etc.), interweaving a network of practices (artistic, curatorial, performative) and initiating a set of collaborations and shared reflections. Among others, they have organized reading groups on feminist epistemologies and the subversive potential of poetry and fiction, as well as listening sessions revolving around diverse audio archive materials. Moreover, they developed a range of voice and sound practices (from augmented audio-book recording, to co-producing sound pieces for exhibition contexts, to curating sound exhibitions on radiophonic platforms), alongside the practice of co-researching and co-writing, performed together on a regular basis. All these projects and collaborations have been fueled by a shared interest in womxn's spoken words and dialogical practices (above all those echoing, resounding, and surviving within/through archive recordings), as well as in related practices involving writing, such as transcription and translation.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born in Middletown, Conn. USA) is a poet, writer, translator, educator, and performer. She's author of Body to Mineral (Publication Studio Vancouver 2016) and On Endings (Delere Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Another Gaze, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, FlashArt, Nero and other magazines. She gave performances at Gavin Brown in Rome and Hyper Maremma in 2019. She regularly leads text/translation/narrative workshops inside and outside of academic institutions. She has been writer in residence at the New York Center for Book Arts and at the Bread Loaf Conference, as well as an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Mass MoCA, and MAMbo, Bologna. Her translation of Autoritratto by Carla Lonzi will be published in 2021 by Divided Publishing. She is based in Bologna, Italy.

Lena Ditte Nissen

Lena Ditte Nissen is a German/Danish artist and filmmaker, whose work takes the form of performances shown in both institutions and public space, installations, and experimental films with a focus on the intersection with documentary filmmaking. In 2019/20 Lena was a fellow at the international Art & Theory program at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, where she started to work on her research project on the entanglements of her family with the national socialist regime in Germany, in which she focuses on female perpetrators. With this project, she was selected for the Berlinale Talents program 2021 and is currently a participant of DOK ART, a development program for first feature documentaries.

Kadija de Paula

Kadija de Paula is a Brazilian/Canadian artist and writer who combines food, text and performance to create situations and happenings that question the value of labor, resources and social practices. Often in collaboration with others, she makes social experiments, domestic works, and other kinds of actions that challenge the limits of life and art. Her works have been presented at Kunsthaus Dresden, the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Huset for Kunst og Design Holstebro, Bamboo Curtain Studios Taipei, Food Culture Days Vevey, Q21 MuseumsQuartier Vienna, 32 São Paulo Biennial, amongst others.  Laureate of l'institut Français at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, Kadija was also an artist in residency at KulturKontakt Austria, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw, Arbeitsgemeinschaft Zürcher Bildhauer, and Capacete Rio de janeiro. She currently lives and works in São Paulo.

Marnie Slater

Marnie Slater (born in Aotearoa, New Zealand) is a visual artist who lives in Brussels. Marnie’s work engages with multiple formats, including sculpture, collaboration, editing, performance, painting and installation. She is part of the All the Cunning Stunts, co-curator of Buenos Tiempos, Int. and a team member of Mothers & Daughters – A Lesbian* and Trans* Bar*. Marnie was a core tutor on the Master of Voice program at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and is currently teaching on the AdMa program at St Lucas School of Art, Antwerp, where she is also undertaking a research project on process tools for queer and feminist art making.

Olivia Abächerli

Olivia Abächerli is researching the political potential of “intimate fiction”, practicing proto-archaeological fieldwork, and examining where the utopic tilts into the dystopic, or the other way around. Proceeding from drawing as a tool of invention, projects develop into more complex narratives, a practice of layering film and animation, abstract organisational forms or support structures. Used media are often simultaneously analog and digital, e.g. coding, metal, plasticine, internet radio, wood and plants. In 2018, she was awarded the Unterwaldner Preis für bildende Kunst. Abächerli has exhibited in project spaces in Athens (GRC) and Arnhem (NL) and in various spaces in Switzerland, e.g. Museum Langmatt (Baden), Kunsthalle Luzern, Nidwaldner Museum, Kunsthaus Langenthal or Shedhalle Zug.

Felipe Castelblanco

Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary Colombian/American artist working at the intersection of socially engaged and Media art. His work explores participation, institutional forms and new frontiers of public space, enabling coexistent encounters between unlikely audiences. His work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and festivals in Europe, Asia, North and South America, including the Quebec Biennial (Canada, 2019) and the Queens International (New York, 2016). Felipe Castelblanco holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and is currently a PhD Candidate at the ECAM Graduate School at the HGK in Basel and the University of the Arts Linz. He has been the recipient of several international awards, including the Starr Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (UK, 2015) and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (USA, 2018). In 2014 he served as a Cultural Emissary for the U.S. State Department to the Philippines.

João Enxuto and Erica Love

João Enxuto and Erica Love are artists and writers collaborating on projects about how new technologies reshape work, institutions, and economies connected to Contemporary Art. Together they were fellows at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program for 2012-2013. They have presented work at the Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of Art, the New Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Walker Art Center, and other international venues. Enxuto and Love's writing has appeared in Art in America, Mousse Magazine, Walker Artist Op-Eds, Wired Magazine, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and elsewhere. They were awarded a Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2017 and they are currently working on a film project about the future of creative labor in the cities where they currently live and work.

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt lives and works in Johannesburg. Her artistic practice and research have been pre-occupied with spatial realities and imaginations, particularly in the post-Apartheid context of South Africa. This has included researching the impact of bomb attacks in Cape Town in 1999 (‘Fresh’ Residency, 2001), to the ways in which histories are written into the contested and often violent urban fabric of Johannesburg.  She completed her MA FA with distinction (2004), which involved collaborations with sign-writers on a series of paintings for ‘mothballed’ buildings in Johannesburg, including the former Trades Hall which was the site of a miners ‘revolt’ in 1922. She was involved in building the artist’s collective Joubert Park Project at the Drill Hall in 2004, which aimed to build artist collaborations and networks that addressed the site and its role as a military base and courtroom during the 1956 Treason Trial in the city centre. In 2014 Dorothee Kreutzfeldt co-published the book Not No Place: Johannesburg Fragments of Spaces and Times with Bettina Malcomess, which evolved out of five years of research. In all these different projects and initiatives, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt returns to the details, re-inventions and stresses of spaces, to questions of who built them, how they are adapted and become unreadable structures or fictional memory. Dorothee Kreutzfeldt lectures in the Fine Arts Department at the WITS University (since 2011). She is represented by Blank Projects, a gallery based in Cape Town. Her latest collaboration, City Without A Sun, consisted of a series of paintings with artist Blake Daniels.

Fadwa Naamna

Fadwa Naamna is a curator and researcher based in Amsterdam. She was a Curatorial Research Fellow at De Appel (2017/18), her research focusing on the 'give and take' economy of the contemporary art system, the influence of funding modalities and the policies on designing cultural and artistic production. Previously, she was an assistant curator at Beit Hagefen Arab Jewish Cultural Center in Haifa (2014–2016). Fadwa Naamna graduated within the Art and Geography departments at the University of Haifa and is an alumna of De Appel Curatorial Program (2016/17) in Amsterdam.

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal writes essays about art, satire about Los Angeles, and opinions about housing justice, which you can find in Art in America, FENCE, and the L.A. Times. She is the editor of Art Los Angeles, a biannual newsprint publication on the words in its title. She co-founded the L.A. Tenants Union and authors the widely-shared Two-Evils Voting Guides for local and national elections. She's currently working on a novella about a mall you can live in, and a book of essays called Little World Machine.

Airi Triisberg

Airi Triisberg is an independent curator, writer and educator based in Tallinn. She is interested in the overlapping fields between political activism and contemporary art practices, issues related to gender and sexualities, illness/health and dis/abilities, self-organisation and collective care practices, struggles against precarious working conditions in the art field and beyond. Her practice as a politicised art worker is often located at the intersection of political education, self-organisation and knowledge production. One of her ongoing research interests is focused on historical and contemporary moments when the experiences of living with illness or disability have been politicized in order to express social critique. In 2015 she curated Get Well Soon!, an exhibition presenting artistic re-articulations of social imaginaries rooted in the radical movements of the 1970s. Another strand in her practice has been focused on precarious labour and art workers organising. In 2010-2012 she was an active member in the art workers movement in Tallinn. In 2015 she co-published the book Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice together with Minna Henriksson and Erik Krikortz. Currently she is engaged in anti-racist organising.