STUDIO AiR BKN

Maria Heine, Copenhagen

My interests are in people and the environment. Maybe this stems from starting as a photojournalist in an urban environment forced to heed people and their pollution. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to see an environment without people. Or maybe it’s because these two things continue to surprise me in the best and worst ways.

In my analog photography practice, this broad interest has become suddenly personal. Me and my environment. A reflective moment to take stock of my self. That 26-year-old self living in Copenhagen, DK.

At BKN, I will continue looking inward with Far Away—a deeply personal project on my own psychological and artistic processes. In which attempts at emotional growth are bound to my development as a photographer and writer. More specifically, the documentation of my dissociative tendencies will come face to face with learning traditional darkroom techniques and the refinement of my prose. Creating a mixture of thoughts, feelings, stories, coping mechanisms, cameras, film, light, chemical baths and paper working to close the distance I place between myself and the world.

Deville Dewil (YIP Wui Ying), Hong Kong

Dewil is a  multidisciplinary artist. The work revolves around trauma, nature, culture, religions, beliefs, and their intertwining conflicts and connections. She wishes to bring reflection and imagination to other in her journey of repeatedly questioning and overcoming her own life themes.

Dewil specializes in multifaceted mediums, such as watercolor, acrylic, photography, installation arts, expressive arts and performance. Human bodies, forces of nature, stones and minerals are important elements playing strong emphasis in her current projects.

During the stay at Björkö Konstnod, site-sensitive exploration and community engaged visits will be conducted and eventually lead to her production of site specific artwork.

She planned to make a mixed media site specific installation with the natural materials, painting, photography, and poem writing. Yet the media and final art forms are subject to change according to the local availability as she wishes to use natural materials and local supplies as much as possible to fully engage in the local environment. Her artwork aims to find harmony between human and nature, as well as to bring different cultures together through the arts. Her artwork will also connect with the local context to demonstrate how artistic and social practices can stimulate engagement and positive change in communities, and making art more accessible and approachable to different communities.

Studio 3: August 1-31

Instagram: @deville.dewil / @deville.colour / @deville.diary

https://devilledewil.com

Mai S Keldsen, Copenhagen

My work during the residency at Björkö, will be directly inspired by the surroundings near the darkroom that I will be working at. I will be making photographs of the surrounding area and when printing I will use materials that I have collected while photographing. I have therefore prioritized darkrooms that are situated in places where the landscape seems to have a strong influence on the people who live there and vice versa. I have also wished for darkrooms where I will get to be in contact with a local community of both photographers and non-photographers (through artist talks, presentations, introductions or the like), since getting to know and understand the places where I am working is an important part of the project.

My practice reflects on historical and spiritual aspects of landscapes through a playful and conceptual photographic method and deals critically with questions of position, storytelling and sustainability.

In 2018 I received the Caspar David Friedrich Prize, and since 2022 I have been a teacher at Fatamorgana, the Danish school of art photography.

MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2020) and studied at Maumaus Escola des Artes Visuais in 2016. My work unfolds in photography, artist-books and installations.

Ekaterina Sisfontes, Stockholm

"Jag är en konceptkonstnär som arbetar med många teman och material.

I mer än 20 år har jag ställt ut på den internationella arenan. Jag deltog i många biennaler av samtida konst, bland annat som kurator för speciella projekt. En stor skulptur för ett offentligt utrymme är särskilt attraktiv för mig samtidigt använder jag av teknik som är mest lämplig för det tema som jag vill ta upp. Det kan vara allt från foto, teckning, målning, video, performans eller annat.

Som konstnär önskar jag forska bland luckor i allmänna mänskliga teorier om den omgivande världen. Jag ställer frågor till mig och min publik genom att undersöka misstag och felaktigheter i den allmänna mänskliga uppfattningen om den. Det gör jag genom skapandeprocess där formen är lika viktig med innehållet." ES

På BKN kommer hon att arbeta med ett tillfälligt offentligt verk för utställningen Rännil/Trickle..

Hon är medlem i Studio 44 och grundare av Duo Contradiction.

Studio: 35

Date: 15-30 maj

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.”

Studio 1

Dec 19 2022 to Jan 12 2023

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

Sibylle Feucht, Bonn

The questioning of the image as a depiction, as a visual narrative and as a supposed construction of reality is a central aspect of my artistic practice. The image, in my case this often means the photographic image, has long since left the representation of reality behind and consciously intervenes in the construction of the world (perception) in different areas and changes it. The world of images in which we live take possession of our thoughts, feelings and expectations and determine how we see the world. – There are hardly any places where we have not already been through pictures before we physically enter them for the first time. This creates a certain uniqueness and one-dimensionality of perception. In and with my work, I try to give back aspects of blurring to these actual shortenings of perception, to question familiar concepts of thinking and perceiving and to add other, new ones to traditional narratives.

Project  Dark Matter

My fascination for the darkness and for the night goes together with the fascination for what can be seen or perceived and what stays in the shadows, of what we know and of what we can only guess. Day and night, light and darkness are different reference systems that have their own narratives that seem to be ubiquitous and globally the same. – The day and the light are connected to the live, the new, the hope, whereas the night and the dark are connected to death.

Only through the invention of gas- and electrical light at home and in public space this changed a bit by expanding the hours of light into the darkness. We are now living in an era where we are so much used to have light whenever and wherever we want that experiencing darkness becomes a rare event. Usually, it is necessary to travel to remote places or go to the mountains for that.

During a residency in Slavutych/Ukraine in 2018 I experienced this darkness within a city. On one side the streets have been much less lit by lamps then we know it from our cities in western Europe and on the other side only half of the apartments were occupied, therefore at night half of the windows remain dark.

To understand this darkness and what it did to me I started to experiment with taking images of and in the darkness. During the Corona lockdowns in Germany, that also constituted a form of darkness I continued to work with the material generated in Slavutych and realised that I want to dive more into this motive of darkness that is also always attached to solitude and isolation.

The residency at BKN during the darker time of the year provides the perfect context to experience the darkness in an intense way and research further into this field to continue my photographic project as well as develop new work.

Bio

*1961 in Kaufbeuren/GER, lives and works in Bonn/GER as a freelance artist since 2010, previously in Basel/SUI.
Studied biology at the Biozentrum Basel/SUI, diploma thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles/USA (UCLA); Art studies at the F + F School for Art and New Media, Zurich/SUI (www.ffzh.ch); Executive Master in Design | Art + Innovation, University of Design and Art, Basel/SUI (www. fhnw. ch/hgk).

Solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad; Acquisitions of works by institutions and private
collectors; Studio grants including Cité des Arts, Paris/F and Rotterdam/NL (international studio
exchange of the Christoph Merian Foundation, www.iaab.ch), Urban Residency Slavutych/UKR,
www.86.org.ua/en, travel grant from the Frauenkulturbüro NRW (Armenia and Georgia). Nominated for CityARTists 2020, www.cityartists.de. Research residency Goethe on Mallorca by Goethe Institute Barcelona and Casa Planas, Palma/ES

Since 2011:
Founding, management and curation of the artist-run, nonprofit art space DAS ESSZIMMER – space for art+ (www.dasesszimmer.com) in Bonn/GER.

Artist webpage: https://atworld.ch

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.

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 19 2022 - Jan 21 2023