Dream images are of themselves another language, the language of our inner landscape. When we recall our dream images and attempt to capture them in spoken language, these images suffer a transformation. They cross the threshold of the unconscious into the conscious mind, where they seem to lack logic and are difficult to understand. This is perhaps because we are meant to understand them instead through intuition, similar to a poem.

Since 2014, I have been leading a group experiment with a variety of international participants in the pursuit of the language of the unconscious. These events have taken place with migrant women and minority youth in Los Angeles, as well as with participants in Mexico City and Paris. These experiments have led to connections that grow beyond every day conversation, and access inner mythologies of being and ancestry.

While traveling to Japan in 2019, I wanted to continue with this psychological art experiment. Given that I wanted to treat this material with respect and sensitivity, I had the idea of proposing an exchange between myself, and the participant, where they would receive something in return for giving me their dream. I did not speak the local language, so instead I decided to speak through images and gestures, allowing the participant to have one of my own dream images in exchange for theirs.

I was born in Mexico City into a family of artists who from an early age introduced me to the deep culture of Mexico and the indigenous peoples. As fate would have it, I arrived very young to study in Paris. While studying dance and plastic arts I met Alejandro Jodorowsky of whom I first became a disciple for many years and later his personal assistant. At the same time I continued to travel to Mexico regularly where I had fundamental encounters with healers such as Pachita, Carlos Said, Luciano Peres (Lakota leader) María Concepción del Castillo of the Nahua tradition and long stays in indigenous communities.

In a personal search I also followed different types of psychological and body therapies until I came across Barbara Schasseur and her innovative technique of emotional and spiritual healing through the body, after training with her my work took the form it has today combining the different techniques I practice: The importance of Rituals.

I currently give private consultations, courses and workshops in different parts of the world.

Lutyens´ artistic practice targets the psychic and emotional well-being of his audiences by skillfully leading participants in hypnotic exercises that affect the deepest levels of their psyche. His works take form in installations, sculptures, drawings, short films, writings and performances. In his explorations of consciousness, Lutyens has collaborated with celebrated neuro-scientists V. Ramachandran and Richard Cytowic, as much as studying under shamans from different cultures. From these investigations and research he has worked with visitors´ unconscious states in museums, galleries and biennales around the world.

Lutyens was invited by the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, NY to be keynote artist with the opening performance at Culture Summit 2019. Lutyens has exhibited in many museums and leading art exhibitions around the world, including the Royal Academy of Arts, Centre Pompidou, National Art Museum of China, Documenta, and the Biennials of Venice, Istanbul, Liverpool, São Paulo. In the time of COVID-19, Lutyens created a series of 12 zoom performances to help the healing process of people in various countries around the world, and is currently working on the national scale COVID-19 artwork Rose River Memorial which has been exhibited at various sites around the US including most recently, the Orange County Museum of Art.

Storytelling and audio-visual exploration are the main tools that Claudia Polanco weaves to bring the narrative of her pieces to actualization. She comes from a complementary journalism & communications background and so understands the common & cultural dynamic which she integrates into her work. Claudia is the founder of Hija del Cuervo Productions, a company born out of love for art and community, that brings stories to life and supports the local art community, Claudia’s stories have crossed paths in collaboration with multiple artists around the world sharing audiovisual offerings.

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ARTIST BIO

Christian Niccoli, (Born 1976 in Südtirol, Italy. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany).

In 2006 Christian Niccoli was an artist in residence at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, and in 2008-09 he participated in the International Studio Program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.

Niccoli’s videos and video installations have been presented internationally in museums and institutions, among others at: Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria (2006); Phönix Art – Harald Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, Germany (2002); Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, Canada (2015); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2012); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2009,2004); 8th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland (2009); 4th Biennial del Fin del Mundo Valparaiso, Chile (2015); Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia (2010); Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2015), Museion – Museum für Moderne und Zeitgenössiche Kunst, Blzano, Italy (2020); Museum Kunst der Westküste, Alkersum, Germany (2020); Alfred Ehrhard Stiftung, Berlin (2021).

Niccoli’s works have been presented at several festivals, including: Transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2009); Hamburg Short Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany (2008); Oblíqua – International Exhibition of Video Art & Experimental Cinema, Lisbon, Portugal (2016); 16th WRO Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland (2015); Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany (2015); Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece (2015); Facade Video Festival Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2014); and Video Art Festival Miden, Kalamata, Greece (2014).

Christian Niccoli’s works are in several public collections, including; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland; Kunstsammlung der Autonomen Provinz Südtirol, Italy; Collezione Farnesina – Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy; and Museion – Museum of Modern and Conemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy.

Varvara Shavrova is a visual artist born in the USSR who lives and works in London and Dublin. Shavrova studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Shavrova’s recent project Inna’s Dream reinterprets the first Soviet amphibious aeroplane designed by her great uncle in 1930s Russia, and includes tufted carpet objects and site‑specific drawings, shown at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London (2019). The Mapping Fates multi‑media installation reflects on Shavrova’s family history of migration, and includes tapestries and sound, shown in Lenin’s apartment in St. Petersburg (2017). Shavrova’s project The Opera portrays the gender fluidity in traditional Peking opera. It received international acclaim and included photography, sound and video projections, and was shown at The Temple Beijing (2016), MOMENTUM Berlin (2016), the Gallery of Photography Ireland (2014), the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014), and at Espacio Cultural El Tanque in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2011). Shavrova’s multi‑media project Borders (2007 – 2015) examines the geo‑political tensions between Russia and China and was shown at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, at the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg in Rumiantsevski Palace, and at the Galway Arts Festival in Ireland.

ARTIST STATEMENT

​My practice is focused on excavating the layers of history through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories. In engaging memory, nostalgia and reflection, I create installations that make connections between historic and current narratives, between the archival and the present. In my current work, I examine the symbols of power and authority whilst investigating their relationship to the individual. The process of empathy is the means of materializing the past into the present. The materiality of my installations is a comment on women’s labour, and include objects made of paper, thread, yarn and fabric, with methodologies of drawing, weaving, embroidery and knitting often combined with digital technologies and the moving image. Thematically, my work often investigates ‘borders’ in physical, geopolitical and gendered terms.

In my new and ongoing Threads of Surveillance. Soft Drones Series (2020-2021), I examine the tools of surveillance, question the notion of privacy and address the meaning of civil liberties in the context of a pandemic. By the end of March 2020, nearly 3 billion people, or every 5th person on this planet, found themselves under total or partial lockdown. Quarantine enforcement, contact tracing, flow modelling and social graph-making are some of the data tools that are being used to tackle the covid-19 pandemic. In the various states of emergency that different countries around the world are experiencing today, mass surveillance is becoming normalised. As citizens, we are asked to sacrifice our right to privacy and to give up civil liberties in order to defeat the pandemic. What happens once the state of emergency is over?

Hovering on the intersection of historic appropriation and contemporary reflection, I develop ideas around tangible and intangible flying objects that conjure up various elements of surveillance mechanisms. The hand-embroidered drawings of drones are sewn directly onto soft fabric used as interlining for drapery and curtains, thus evoking the sense of domesticity and comfort. That comforting sense of security and domesticity is in stark contrast with the objects that I am depicting, thus reflecting on the notion of surveillance that interferes with the very basics of our daily existence.

The process of making a drawing using thread refers to surveillance methodologies set up as domestic traps. The associations that I am developing are those of insects being trapped in webs, like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, or images of aeroplanes following flight charts, or surveillance and spy maps used by pilots. The threaded and embroidered drawings will be further developed into sculptural objects that will eventually inhabit the space around them, creating spiders web-like traps, with objects suspended, pulled and stretched within their physical environments, that will trick and lure the viewer inside them.

– Varvara Shavrova

Leon Leube

1 May-15 July 2020

Leon Leube is a German-Filipino artist born in 1992 in Nürnberg, Germany. From 1995 – 2010 he lived in Baguio City and Boracay Island, Philippines. In 2018 he received a Meisterschüler degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Nürnberg from the sculpture class of Prof. Michael Stevenson. Since 2019 he has been living and working in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include The Days Are Just Packed at THE POOL Istanbul, Public Relations Poetik öffentlicher Kommunikation im Spiegel aktueller Kunst at Stadtgalerie Kiel, and Heavy Metal: Erntedank at Kunstpalais Erlangen.

Samuel Zeller

1 July – 30 September 2020

Website

Geneva and Berlin based Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller (b. 1990, Geneva) approaches his subjects as a well-defined collection of elements he sorts, orders, removes and composes with. Influenced by his previous career in design and by his artist parents, his work is often very disciplined. The rules and principles he created through the years are directing his compositions but that’s his sensitivity that has the last say.

His fine art work is represented by ONE FOUR gallery, Seoul. He’s a member of the Stocksy co-op. He’s also a Swiss ambassador for Fujifilm cameras (X-Photographer).

Rita Adib is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Damascus, Syria and is currently based between Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal and Berlin. She received her degree in architecture from Damascus University, and her degree in fine arts, majoring in sculpture from Concordia University. Her work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions in Beirut and Montreal. She frequently works with public interventions, public sculptures and interactive installations, seeking to collapse the gap between art and viewer, time of creation and time of interaction. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in social activism against political oppression and gender/racial based discrimination.

​I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes installation, sculpture, painting and video performance. I was born and raised in Damascus, Syria, and moved in 2014, shortly after the beginning of the revolution, to Montreal, Canada, where I continued my studies in art. My work shifted from my former architectural education to sculptural practice focusing on the body as a performative instrument in relationship to public space, and time as an essential factor in measuring that encounter.

​My current practice focuses on the performativity of the sculptural piece whether I am the performer, or the participation of the spectator cues the activation of the performance. I explore the possibilities of filming and documenting an action in regards to the question of where would the visual outcome be situated in that liminal space between documentation and video art, and what can be shaped in combining digital art, performance, and sculpture.

​Such questions concerning the search for artforms are inseparable from the subject matter of my artistic practice: Borders, both the impalpable and physical, and how does the body face them?

Invisible restraints imprison the body in them. Systematically imposed thoughts about my identity, gender, and sexuality are fed by cultural and sociopolitical factors. In my process to overcome them, my skin becomes a line separating the inside from the outside: the ideas from their visible manifestation. For example, in questioning femininity, long hair is for many the most visible representation of a “full female”. In a liberating process, I decided to disconnect myself from this dynamic. In my art, I explore more possibilities to challenge the invisible restrictions through body movement, documentation, and playing with time by means of editing.

The body also faces the physical borders which can take the form of dividers between countries, check points, social classes. It is the line created to instil separation on the basis of identities, ideologies, beliefs, religions, etc. These barriers become exemplary of discrimination, which can equally transform the body into the obstacle holding itself back.

British Council Net//Work Residency

The British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire and Digital Arts Studios (DAS), Belfast are pleased to announce Net//Work, a new residency for mid-career visual artists whose practices engage with digital technologies. Our partner organisations brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in digital art residencies, and we’re delighted to be partnering with them on this programme.

Consisting of site visits, independent studio time, group critiques, peer-to-peer mentoring and workshops, the residencies offer artists a space for reflection, research, practice and skills exchange around digital artistic practices and technologies while growing their creative and professional community.

This year, however, the residency is moving online and our participating artists are from Egypt, Syria, and UK. The residency will be followed by an online exhibition.

Residency period: 18th January – 14th February 2021
Online Exhibition: 3rd May – 7th June 2021

The British Council was founded in 1934 and is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. Arts is a cornerstone of the British Council’s mission to create a friendly knowledge and understanding between the people of the UK and the wider world. British Council finds new ways of connecting with and understanding each other through the arts, to develop stronger creative sectors around the world that are better connected with the UK.

The British Council Visual Arts team are committed to promoting the achievements of the UK’s best artists abroad. The team connect the UK’s visual arts sector with professionals internationally, focusing predominantly on staging and supporting contemporary art projects in areas of the developing world.

For more information about British Council Visual Arts:
http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org

Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.

Taking as his inspiration the eponymous sculpture by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder has re-created his own large-scale 3.5m rendition of this iconic work as a kinetic light and sound sculpture for public space. First premiered in Korea, MOMENTUM brought Szauder’s Light Space Modulator to Berlin for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in 2019. Initially installed at the historic Villa Erxleben, Light Space Modulator now moves to the MOMENTUM gallery to serve as a starting point for David Szauder’s visual experiments and re-interpretations of Moholy-Nagy’s work.

Over the course of six months, David Szauder continues to develop his translation of Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas into a multi-mediated interactive installation; creating two videos and a soundscape algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of the sculpture: Light Space Materia and Kinetic Study no. 68. In addition, Szauder experiments with adding a virtual component to enable the Moholy Cloud, designed to translate the ambient data recorded by sensors on the sculpture into visual and auditory forms.

Every day throughout the course of the Studio Residency, Szauder completes a Digital Sketch, which he publishes on social media. A selection of these works has been assembled into a series of video animations acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection.

Within the limits of the COVID-19 restrictions, this work-in-progress is punctuated with Open Studio presentations and Artist Talks throughout the course of David Szauder’s Studio Residency.

One of the greatest Hungarian innovations, and one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture.

Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world.

Light Prop for an Electric Stage, as Moholy-Nagy referred to it, not only pushes the temporal dimension of art but expands its spatial dimensions into the entire environment, including the viewer, who becomes a surface onto which light is reflected.

It embodies Moholy-Nagy’s goal of pushing art beyond static forms and introducing kinetic elements, in which the volume relationships are virtual ones, i.e., resulting mainly from the actual movement of the contours, rings, rods, and other objects.

OPEN CALL 2024

MOMENTUM-LAGOS [Berlin]
LAGOS-MOMENTUM [Mexico City]

RESIDENCY PROGRAM

Since 2023, LAGOS and MOMENTUM have initiated a series of exchanges between our institutions which enable the mobility and visibility of the artistic communities of Mexico City and Berlin through our Artist-in-Residence Programs in both cities. Starting in 2024, we open the applications to international artists and curators, regardless of their nationality or where they are based. The locations of the Residencies are in Berlin at MOMENTUM-LAGOS in the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center, or at LAGOS in Mexico City.