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#VirtualSPAR UK-focused Season 3: Making Space

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We’re glad to start the year 2021 with a new season at #VirtualSPAR. 

Season 3 entitled Making Space will have a focus on the UK and highlight five artists with different backgrounds: 

* Vicky Clarke
* M. Jacinta Silva Armstrong
* Bo Choy 
* Shir Cohen
* Peter Shenai

Please scroll down for more information about the artists. 

The thematic focus of the residency is space as a place of presence and absence, a social construct, a frame for creative practice. The artists are encouraged to approach the concept of “Making Space” from different perspectives. What role does space play in their professional practice and personal life? How can we make space around us and inside of us? How does the ‘ new normal’ change one’s perception of space? Is space something that appears on its own or is it produced by our actions? How can space be measured and mediated by means of art? How is space made and taken? These are some of the questions that are proposed for discussion.

We would like to thank the Cultural and Educational Section of the British Embassy Moscow for their kind support and ACME Artist Studios for collaborating on this project. 

__________________________PUBLIC_______EVENTS_____________________________

14.01.21_________14:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Virtual tour of the Museum of nonconformist art 

19.01.21__________20:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Networking event: artist-run initiatives in St. Petersburg and Russia

20.01.21__________20:30 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Live interview with artist Shir Cohen
Watch the recording on Facebook or Instagram

26.01.21__________14:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Live interview with artist Bo Choy
Watch the recording on Facebook or Instagram

01.02.21__________16:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Live interview with artist Peter Shenai
Watch the recording on Facebook or Instagram

01.02.21__________20:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Networking event: political agenda in the work of St. Petersburg-based artists 

04.02.21__________16:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Public talk by Paul Bayley,
Head of Residencies & Award at ACME Artist Studios London
Watch the recording on Facebook or Instagram

09.02.21__________16:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Live interview with artist Vicky Clarke
Watch the recording on Facebook

13.02.21__________16:30 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Virtual tour of The Beatles Museum at Pushkinskaya-10 
Watch on our Instagram account

13.02.21__________20:00 Moscow time (GMT+3)
Virtual bar with artist of Season 3
Streamed live on our Instagram account

Shir Cohen is a graduate of the BFA Fine Arts Department at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She has participated in the Aesthetics and Bias Project in collaboration with the Jan Matejko Academy in Krakow, and received a long-term studio residency with the Jerusalem Art Cube Artist Studios. Under the Clore-Bezalel Scholarship, she has graduated the MA Painting course at the Royal College of Art in London (2020). Recent shows include Final Not Over: Open Fields at Unit 1 Gallery (2020), Lion Hunt at Bezalel Fine Arts Department Gallery (2019), and 50/50 at FOLD Gallery (2020). Her work explores contemporary political anxieties through humor and theatricality, using tropes from mythology and ancient history.
Bo Choy is a Hong Kong-born, London and Hong Kong-based artist working across film, performance and sound. She uses fiction, music, writing and costuming as artistic devices to navigate through the socio-political, the historical or simply what it means to be living in a technologically driven, capitalist urban society. Often borrowing aesthetic tropes from Far Eastern folklore traditions and rituals, her use of costumes and fiction results in works that merges the everyday with the fantastical, the mythological and sometimes the absurd.
Selected screenings, performances and exhibitions include VII Moscow International Biennale For Young Art, Moscow, 2020; Kasseler Dokfest 2020, Kassel; Tomorrow: London, White Cube Online Exhibition, 2020; Platform1, Bloomsbury Theatre, 2020; Intimacy Spills, Barbican Arts Trust, 2020; Gathering 1 @ Sanmei Gallery, 2020; Manége, Trekorner Fort, 2019; A/WA session at Auto-Italia, London, 2018; and the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki, 2017/18.
She is a graduate of MA Fine Art Media from Slade School of Art in 2020, a recipient of Clare Winsten Memorial Award 2020, Felix Slade Award 2018 and ACME Studio Award 2016.
Bo Choy was nominated for a residency at #VirtualSPAR by our project partners ACME Studios London.
Peter Shenai is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, UK. While working across installation, sound, and sculpture, he puts the focus on the things that are usually obvious and ubiquitous to give them a new meaning. In recent works Peter Shenai developed new ways of communicating data through physical artworks, enabling audiences to engage with scientific and cultural stories through tangible, interactive and multi-sensory encounters. His work has been exhibited internationally across London, Tokyo, Venice and elsewhere. Among recent creative collaborations are projects involving composer Laurence Osborn and musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as scientists at Imperial College and King’s College.
„Maybe my “artistic medium” is the taken-for-granted. My practice is an attempt to bring these things back into focus, and an invitation to be astonished. The covid pandemic has only strengthened my resolve to try to see, and appreciate, the things that hide in plain sight.“
Vicky Clarke is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester, UK. Working with sound culpture, DIY electronics and human-machine systems, she explores our relationship to technology through sonic materiality, live AV and browser-based artwork. Vicky won the Oram Award 2020 for innovation in sound and music technology. She is director of Noise Orchestra and a 2020 AMPLIFY DAI artist with British Council, MUTEK and Somerset House Studios.
M. Jacinta Silva Armstrong is a Chilean artist who lives and works in London. She completed a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (London, 2020), and a BA in Art at the P. Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, 2012). Recent shows in London include Unit 1 Gallery/Workshop, Fold Gallery and RCA Hockney Gallery. Recent shows in Santiago include Sala de Arte CCU, Premio Arte Joven MAVI and Galería Bicentenario CCEM. 
„My practice starts from the paradox of growing up in a seismic country, built on the latent possibility of destruction. I approach painting as a position from which to learn and analyse the geography surrounding me, now revisited from the experience of being away. I exercise this as an active slowness: an effort to actively unlearn a known territory and look for new ways of organising it, according to my own measures.
I make visual essays that result in paintings, drawings and hand-bound books. I am interested in fragments, folds, translucency and blurriness as mediums to create fragile narratives and atmospheres. These become a collection of exercises around an observation or wondering, to which an answer appears elusive and untranslatable into language.“

#VirtualSPAR3 #virtualartresidency #ukrussiacreativebridge #ukcontemporaryart

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