Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts and three Swedish institutions: The Swedish Exhibition Agency, Baltic Art Center and Art Lab Gnesta, collaborate to produce two symposiums for invited participants. The aim is to develop tools that can assist cultural institutions who work in many overlapping contexts.
The first symposium is happening in Nida Art Colony on 12-14th of October with NAC team members, participants from Swedish partnering institutions (Livia Paldi, Signe Johannessen, Erik Rören, Pernilla Glaser & Mia (Maria) Andersson) and invited guests: artists Artūras Raila (LT), Arnas Anskaitis (LT), Ernest Truely (EE/USA), curator Ūla Tornau (LT), psychologist Rūta Gražulytė (LT), students and local artists-in-residence.
It is a sharing and material thinking event on remoteness, time, communication, solitude, locality and informal education in Nida Art Colony. Multi-context working group has prewritten scripts as well as planned and (un)expected situations.
The main goal of the symposium is to create a detailed, experiential, performative and materialised case study of Nida Art Colony education and artist-in-residence activities, in the context of similar organisations with an intention to capitalize experiences and transfer them into methodologies which might be useful for other art and culture organisations as wells as artists working in remote locations. The participants of the symposium will be employing methodology of “material thinking” while discussing, recording, drawing, making maps, recycling leftovers of previous residents, walking, having sauna and cooking.
Nida Art Colony, Baltic Art Center (Visby, Gotland island), and Art Lab Gnesta (70km away from Stockholm) are small art institutions that are located in a geographical periphery. They all run residency programs and a range of activities which span from exhibitions to seminars and education. Each institution has its specific profile. At the same time it is evident for these smaller institutions that the conditions are in a continuous change. Target groups are changing, funding is under constant negotiation, new networks develop over geographical and interdisciplinary areas.
Context in Flux are two symposiums, to be held in Nida, Lithuania and Visby, Sweden, that mainly consist of workshops where the participants investigate relationships between place and practice, the interaction between the local situation and the flow of practices and people as well as the residency program as a productive arena and sheltered laboratory.
