STUDIO GRANT HOLDERS

Madeline McLinden, Baltimore 

Madeline McLinden (she/they) is a queer visual artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, that works primarily with photography, filmmaking and text based artworks. They will be graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Film at the Maryland Institute College of Art in early December of 2022.

Madeline has received many scholarships and awards, some of which include the Leonard L. Grief Scholarship in both 2021 and 2022, The Netherwood/Riser Memorial Scholarship for Photography in 2022, and the GO-A Opportunity Award in 2022 to fund their summer internship with Guggenheim Fellow, Angelo Madsen Minax, to assist with production of his new film in San Francisco, California. Madeline has also had their short documentary film, DO US PART, premiere at the MICA-JHU Film Festival in 2022.

Their art practice centers around themes of documentation and archiving as well as the physical effects of the passing of time. They work with experimental methods such as shooting with expired film, creating light leaks and processing color film as black and white film and manipulating negatives in the darkroom.

During my residency at Air BKN, I plan on creating a new site specific project that delves into the intricacies of flesh and soil through a series of analog photographs of my human form and the landscape. The soil in Björkö, Sweden is overflowing with history. I plan to learn more about the soil, land and water of Björkö, Sweden in order to guide my artistic approach of using found elements of nature. Through using my body as a vessel to become closer to the sea and forest, I will also manipulate my film negatives. I am my art and my art is me, thus I plan to take my negatives and immerse them in the land and water, just as I will do with my own body.

Where the sea meets the forest, I would like to come alive again. To mold my body into the earth. I want to dig my feet and fingers into soil and smell the deep fresh blue water. I want to merge with the forest green. I want to connect back to mother nature. I want her to plant roots in my soul.

AiR BKN STUDIO GRANT

Studio:  5 + 35

Dates: Dec-Jan

Louise Shaw,  Henley on Thames

I am a multi-disciplinary artist based in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, UK.

Working across made objects, site-specific installation, sound and video I choose the medium as a vehicle best suited for travelling the terrain of an idea. Each medium invites different ways of exploring, an experiential process that embraces a less linear, more holistic perception and learning that evolves through the making.

Creating site specific work, interactions and interventions, experiences for people to bump into outside of the gallery confines, is increasingly important in my practice.

Driven by curiosity, threads that connect my work weave through ecologies and natures; human, non-human and the complexities of relationships in between. A touch existential I guess.

Sensitivity to environment and site are vital to my process. Ideas grow from an intimate sensory encounter with place or time.

Whilst at Bjorko Konstnod I plan to take full advantage of extended time away from day to day and the dominant influence of man, to be a speck in the landscape - to just be. To open up my senses, dig deeper into the stuff of the place. To work with what’s there - the aqua, flora, fauna, twilight, the cold and time.

AiR BKN STUDIO GRANT 

Jan Wallyn, Brussels

Jan Wallyn (33) was 8 years old when they met their first love: sound. As a teenager, they translated their classical music training into digital music production. After a decade of combining both musical and choreographic practice, Jan started focussing on sound design.
At age 24, they started at the open art-house Zinnema as artistic director, later as general director.

Eight years later, Jan quit their position at the Brussels based arts house, and decided to devote their time on where it all began: sound.
Throughout the last years they’ve been making sound sculptures starting from a very simple prompt, processing sounds and non-musical recordings to their essence and create musical language with them.

Jan will be making a sonic portrait of Björkö: “I want to start a series of sound sculptures of different places in the world. Björkö is a very interesting environment for me to have my first research and practice to create a series of geographical sound sculptures. Its rural location and history as a fishing island is something I want to capture sonically. Conversations with locals, recordings of nature, human activity, and its silence are all inspiring triggers to me. The results can sometimes be meditative, sometimes visceral, other times rhythmical. The goal is to create a sonic exhibition.”

Katarzyna Łukasiewicz

Katarzyna Łukasiewicz is a polish photographer, anthropologist, culture animator, and educator. Her projects have usually a documentary approach. She's interested in human and socio-cultural environments and often uses anthropology in her research. She graduated from Polish National Film School in Łódź, Polish Culture Institute and Pedagogy Faculty at Warsaw University.

In black and white medium format analog photography and analog prints, I would like to work with the subject of silence. According to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, through silence, and in silence, it is possible to achieve a complete image of the song of life. Silence shows what is present and what is absent, what is covered and what is uncovered. I would like to picture and reflect on silence in the surroundings: landscapes, human gestures, and objects. I have chosen the theme of silence, which I would like to explore precisely in the country and society known for silence, solitude, and the smell of trees.

Simultaneously, being in the place where forest meats sea, I will also experiment with the painting and subject of landscape.

www.katarzynalukasiewicz.com

Beili Liu, Austin, TX

Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates site-responsive installations and performances that address themes of migration, cultural memory, labor, social and environmental concerns. Working with commonplace materials and elements such as thread, needle, scissors, feather, salt, wax, and cement, Liu manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural narratives.

Liu has exhibited extensively across the globe, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Poland, China, Taiwan and across the United States. She has presented solo exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Museum; Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museo di Villa Bernasconi, Como, Italy; Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai, China; Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco, CA; the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX; and Women & Their Work, Austin, TX, among others. Significant group exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Art Museum, LA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, MI; Asian Art Week, NYC; Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, TX; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; and internationally at the Hamburg Art Week, Germany; M.K. Ciurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania; Zhejiang Museum of Art, China; Musée de la Dentelle in Caudry, Montrouge, France; Asian Art Week, London, UK; and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Kraków, Poland. Liu has created public artworks in Beijing, Jilin and Shanghai, China, Bremerhaven, Germany, Taiwan, San Francisco, CA, Dallas and Austin, TX.

Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024), the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022), the Fulbright Arctic Chair, Norway, a Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Award (2021-2022), the Brian Wall Grant for Sculptors (2022), NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship (2021-2024), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016), the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium. Liu received the Distinction Award at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2011), and a San Francisco Mayor’s Award (2008) for her contribution to cultural exchange.

 Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003) and is the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts and a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Liu's current research focus centers on the environmental crisis and examines the complex ecological, geopolitical, and environmental issues through the lens of handcraft, labor, and materiality. During the BKN residency, Liu will examine the unique local natural landscape of the northern archipelago of Stockholm, "where the sea meets the forest," and engage with local cultural groups and communities. Liu will creative a series of on-site performances/installations, documented through digital photography and videography.

AiR BKN STUDIO GRANT LENS 22
Studio: 11
Dates: Nov 24-Dec 21

Jane Marchant, San Francisco

Jane Marchant is a writer, photographer, and collage artist from the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her BA and MFA from Columbia University’s nonfiction writing programs, where she also focused on analogue photography.

Her identity as a multi-racial daughter drives her art, and visual experimentation centers her form as she combines analogue photographs, found materials, research, oral history, and collage into unified narrative. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Catapult, Apogee, Columbia Journal, Facility: A Magazine about Bathrooms, and elsewhere, as well as anthologized in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century (2Leaf Press). Her book art has been exhibited with the Center for Book Arts in New York City and ACCI Gallery in Berkeley, California, and she has received support from Ucross Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, Art Omi, Catwalk Institute, the John Anson Kittredge Fund, and others.

While at Björkö Konstnod, she will continue working on her book project, "An Extraordinarily Condensed Encyclopedia of Botany of the San Francisco Bay Area," a memoir taking the form of a colonial florilegium. Analogue photographs, pressed flowers, typography, and design qualify it as an interdisciplinary work of literary book art, and while in residence she will print a selection of exhibition-quality photographs, as well as curate the narrative arc of the book’s imagery

AiR BKN STUDIO GRANT LENS 22
Studio: 35
Dates: Nov 1-Dec 21

 https://janemarchant.com

Scott Hunter, Scotland

Scott Hunter is a visual artist and researcher operating in the environmental humanities who adopts a phenomenological approach to studying the landscape. Intrigued by ecological resistance and intelligence, his current project focuses on how nature reclaims barren landscapes and the ecologies that emerge in post-industrial sites. Integrating photographic fieldwork with camera-less imagery, he works with site-specific materials to provide deeper insight into the entanglements between humans, materiality, and the environment.

Recent project Am I The Wasteland? formed part of his MFA in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art, receiving the FEUVA award for outstanding student work and awarded with a solo exhibition at the esteemed Summerhall venue in Edinburgh. Pushing the boundaries of photography, his research explores the aesthetic and scientific importance of visually representing the Anthropocene.

Comprising experimental photography, soil chromatography, and found objects from the landscape, his fieldwork draws from astute observations of the local terrain. Recent projects include recording increased precipitation directly onto photosensitive paper, scientific photographic representations of soils, and utilising organic matter -like mosses and algae- to make analogue photo developers.

Working directly with raw materials, Scott considers the origin of each material and their symbiotic relationships within the construction of images. By embedding the materiality of the landscape into the work, he asks whether a photographic practice can mediate between industrial and ecological activities.

During his time at BKN, Scott will conduct a site-specific investigation of the surrounding area, combining photographic fieldwork with soil chromatography and in-situ cameraless work using materials sourced ethically from the landscape. The study elaborates on his current Darkroom Ecology project that explores nature-based solutions to harmful chemicals used in analogue photography. By utilising the residency's darkroom facilities, he intends to expand this process beyond black and white negatives to include wet prints. In addition, he will replace silver-containing fixers with saltwater to provide a non-toxic alternative to the disposal of heavy metals in water systems.

To complement this research, Scott's Darkroom Pedology project builds a library of soil chromatograms from diverse sites to enable comparison between areas
considered pristine; and those deemed contaminated. In Björkö, he will extend the library to include pioneer species -such as lichens, mosses, and algae- to broaden our awareness of how ecological successions may emerge in such landscapes and develop into climax communities(forests) through time. Fascinated by the relationship between the wilderness of the forest and the agency of the sea, he will use his time at BKN residency to reflect, experiment with new fieldwork techniques, and develop a new body of work.

 Renn Simmons, Portland, Oregon

"Renn Simmons is an Ecological Translator currently based in Portland, Oregon, USA, who uses the channels of art, ritual,poetry, and Sacred Activism to explore the heavy and healing experiences of being intimately connected to all things. By moving between mediums that layer and expand upon one another–with a focus on experiential photographic processes, time-based, and ephemeral works that engage alternative and experiential Earth-based processes and methods–her work seeks to connect humxns to the physical realities of Climate Change and Environmental Violence, while offering tonics in the form of connection, quiet, returning to natural rhythms,
and finding beauty in the shadows. Layers of process are built on top of one another, interweaving and calling back to one another, transforming and emerging from emotions felt and remembered; hazy dreams; violence, then and now; and prayers whispered alone in the depths of night.

Her work seeks to firmly locate itself in the land from which it evolves and emerges through a co-creative process with the Earth, pointing to the themes present within Sacred and Shadow Ecology, climate grief and mourning, time, decay, environmental destruction, beauty, transience, objectivity, and communal/ individual healing processes. Ecological research, spiritual practice, fieldwork, and knowledge that dismantles the mythologies around settler colonial notions of wilderness, all weave together in a desire to create antidotes that combat facism, environmental violence, and white supremacy.
During her time as a resident with BKN, she will be focusing on continuing to expand her plant-based and experiential photographic practices, which includes using Seaweeds and Ocean Water from different parts of the world to develop film and make chemigrams/anthotypes, creating and photographing ephemeral sculptures using invasive/native plants and landscapes, and creating dialogues between landscapes/waterscapes within the analogue and digital realms.

She also will be expanding on her current body of work 'Wavelines,' which uses the lines left by waves on coastal shorelines as visual representations of Climate Change. This series lives within the restraints of only using local Seaweed or Seagrasses and Oceanwater from the local area within the developing process, and making 3 sets of images, removed from one another only in that the water temperature they are developed within varies by 1.5°C/2°C/2.5°C--the projected global temperature changes the Earth is on track to experience depending on how much action is taken in the present moment to prevent further Climate Change. " RS.

Thomas Wågström, Stockholm

Svartvit subjektiv dokumentärfotografi

Min släkt kommer från Stockholms skärgård och jag är därför grundad i den världen.
Jag tillbringade alla sommarlov på en liten ö söder om Blidö och har både direkt och indirekt använt mig av skärgårdsmiljön i flera av mina projekt/böcker. (Ex. ”Observationer”)

Jag har precis sammanställt och släppt boken ”Case Closed” som är en sammanfattning av 45 års fotograferande. Men också ett avslut och en början på någonting nytt.
Ser residenset som en möjlighet att komma vidare genom att gå tillbaka till grunderna, den analoga fotografin.

Representerad med en stor kollektion på Moderna Museet och
bl.a. på Nationalmuseum och i Nan Goldin Collection. Har haft ett tjugotal separatutställningar, bl.a. på Fotografiska 2015-16 och Konsthallen i Hishult 2020. Var en av ett drygt trettiotal konstnärer som visades på Moderna Museets utställning ”Svenska förvärv 2021” i början av året.

AiR BKN STUDIO GRANT LENS 22

Studio: 3

Dates: 24 sept - 28 oct

Gerhard Kowald, Austria

"I ´m based in Salzburg, Austria and studied painting and art education at the University "Academy of Fine Arts" in Vienna. I worked as a teacher until recently, teaching art, photography and media. Since the 1990s I also work as a freelance photographer developing my own (long-term) projects. My photographic education was self-taught as well as through several workshops at Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg and a master class at Galerie Anzenberger in Vienna Austria. Among my teachers were Laura El-Tantawy, Klaus Honnef, Tamarra Kaida, Martin Kollár, Andrew Phelps, Reiner Riedler, Simon Roberts and Herman Seidl.

In my current work, I focus my interest on the representation of structural change in suburban and rural regions. Another focus is on social and humanitarian issues such as labor migration and homelessness. Since the beginning of my photographic work, I have been interested in the human-altered landscape and the language and particularity of architecture, especially anonymous architecture. I try to capture people's lives with a critical-ironic but also emphatic eye.

I am very excited about my stay in Björkö Konstnod and look forward to interacting with the residents. I am very curious about the environment, the regional architecture and the local people. A first idea for a program during my stay: I would like to interact with the residents of Björkö. I am interested in their living environment and traditions and would like to learn more about the conditions of how they live their lives." GK

Ami Skånberg Dahlsted and AnneLaure Vernet

Skånberg Dahlstedt and Vernet are coming together at BKN to do research and allow for their practices to interact.

AnneLaure Vernet visual artist, videographer and photographer, Anne-Laure Vernet has conducted her artistic practice alongside a militant feminist commitment and theoretical research in the field of art sciences revealed through the prism of gender.

Currently Senior Lecturer in Art Sciences and Plastic Arts and member of the CREM (Center for Research on Mediations-University of Lorraine), co-founder of the University Gallery 0.15//Essais Dynamiques, her theoretical research focuses on different aspects of the question of creative processes in art, such as: the social construction of the exclusion of women artists from the art world; the relationship between individual psyche and society in the creative process; and finally reception in art and its impact on the creative process.

These works are carried out in connection with her own artistic practices, all taking part in the elaboration of a plastic work which falls within the assembly, and also within the installation. In addition, she has developed part of her photographic prints for herself in a long-term work on the natural landscape, which has been the subject of acquisitions by the Cabinet des Estampes of the National Library, as well as from collectors such as Jean-Pierre Seguin, founder of the Public Information Library of the Center Pompidou (Paris).

Her pictorial, photographic and videographic research respond to each other in a poïèsis where slowness and attention to the most tenuous open up the infinite landscapes of the beats of the memory in the present. As listening and waiting, the trace of encounters and the paths offered are played out there, in fragments, driftwood of a very old oceanic feeling

Maja Andersson, Stockholm

Konstnär som utexaminerades 2016 och har sedans dess bott i Stockholm. Genom att kliva in i stämningar och känslor låter jag min kropp gestalta och bli ett redskap för det som inte alltid går att sätta ord på. Min kropp blir en dialog genom att skapa bilder antingen genom ett fotografi, video eller performance.

På Björkö konstnod kommer jag arbeta med projektet Kroppkakor. För 5 år sedan gick jag från att vara högfungerande till lågfungerande, kroppen blev min fiende när den egentligen försökte rädda mig. Kroppen tog kontroll  och min vilja fick underkasta sig. Projektet Kroppkakor har sin utgångspunkt i en kropp med utmattningssyndrom.

Under sin vistelse inledde Maja Andersson en samverkan med Zoey Hart som bland annat resulterade i ett videoverk.

Studio: 3

Dates: 9-19 juli

Lucas Brouwer, France/Netherlands

installation  and preparatory work for Ein stein Walk part of the summer exhibition Isle of Bliss

In collaboration with Juliette Veckens.

Studio 3

Duration: May 30-June 14

Exhibition: July 2-Aug 31 2022 >>>

Annika  Schuh, based in Freiburg, DE

Coming from a psychology degree, I ended up sculpting after getting in touch with art therapy in a further training.

Now I work on installative objects, sculptures, and recently also photos and performances. I use to work intensely with one material for long time periods and explore what it can bring up. Lately I have been working a lot with latex milk.

I smear the viscous/squishy milk upon a clay negative and peel it off once it has dried. This is how a bumpy and spiky skin is formed. Skin is a great example of the complexity of our world for me. It actually is the most versatile organ of a human or animal organism.

On the one hand it is a protection against environmental influences and it serves as an enveloping organ for the demarcation of inside and outside as well as the maintenance of homeostasis (internal balance).

On the other hand it is very permeable, transports molecules and is often the contact point to everything that surrounds us. It is the largest organ of sensory perception in terms of surface area and skin contacts in body contact are vital and carry actual social bonds.

Also, paleness or reddening and swelling of certain skin areas due to altered skin blood flow can represent special communication signals.
These very different properties of skin, as an example of boundaries, interest me.

During the residency I will continue to work with latex and try to work out the property of the contact surface and sensory perception of the skin, so that it does not only function as a border between inside and outside. Everything influences each other and will never be free of contact. To implement this I can imagine auditory, visual or haptic elements being incorporated.  Formally, I would like to delve further into photo and video.

Studio: 3

Dates: Feb 14 - March 13
Studio 15 tentative (March 13-15)

Mira Aasma, based in Stockholm

"Mira Aasma is a sound and video artist who mixes experimental pop music with collecting field recordings, video clips and photographs. She grew up in the outskirts of Gothenburg, in a house by the forest. Spending most of her time outside - around the stream, by the ocean and in the mountains, nature became the foundation of everything she creates.

Raised in a samba percussion group, with an Estonian grandmother introducing her to choir music, and in a home filled with CDs such as Sade, Enya and Cesaria Evora, she explored the magic of music through athmospheric voices and progressive rythms - which still make up the core of her creations.

After being part of bands, percussion groups and choirs, she grew into a passionate and restless creator taking control over her ideas through music production and composing. Moving on to studios, Europe tours, songwriting camps and producing music for other artists, she’s landed in creating Aasma - a kind of drag, a character representing a part of her that is always there. The one that lies down beneath the trees to reload, that’s enchated by the morning dusk, the one takes every chance to be among mountains.

The Aasma team - today based in Stockholm - includes creators in visual art, fashion, tech, light design and sound design, that constantly work together lifting each other’s visions."

På BKN arbetar Mira Aasma med ett nytt material där hon bjuder in olika musiker. Inspelningen sker i en av Björkös många redargårdar, Per-Andersgården, detta tacklare samverkan med Björkö-Arholma Hembygdsförening.

Studio: 15

Dates: Jan 25-28

Studio: 15 & 11

Dates: Feb 9-13

https://aasma-music.com

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