Residency: Bukhara Photo Gallery, Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Dates: May 25 — June 24, 2018

Alisher Primkulov is a photographer and director based in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. He is a member of the Union of Cinematographers of the CIS and Baltic countries. Currently he is a producer/creative director for the communications agency “ArtAREA.” 

During his residency, Alisher will create a series of video and photo works about Bukhara’s residents and sacred places and conduct masterclasses and a presentation. In particular, the artist plans to work with the Bukharan Gypsy (Jughi) community and/or the Bukharan Jewish community. 

Residency: Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus

Dates: May 26—June 26, 2018

Eltaj Zeynalov started out in photography as an amateur, and eventually made it his professional practice. Eltaj Zeylanov’s photographs have received several awards both in Azerbaijan and abroad and his works are in private as well as public and corporate collections. He is actively engaged in social issues and works with people with special physical and mental needs.

In his work, Zeynalov attempts to draw attention to the difficulties of how people perceive each another. The residency will culminate in a photo project that addresses problems of physical and mental disability.

Residency: The State Silk Museum in collaboration with GeoAIR, Tbilisi, Georgia

Dates: June 1—30, 2018

Tatiana Fiodorova is an artist, curator, and teacher. She works in installation, performance, public art, video, photography, drawing, and artists’ books.

During her residency, Fiodorova will become acquainted with the trends, specifics, and social aspects of silk production in Georgia. In addition, as part of a summer school organized by the museum, she will lead a workshop for artists and researchers on creating artists’ books.

Residency: CSM / Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art and Open Place Artist-Run Space, Kyiv, Ukraine

Dates: June 8—July 6, 2018

Zoya Falkova has participated in many contemporary art exhibitions and festivals in the former Soviet Union and Europe, including the unofficial pavilion of Kazakhstan at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2017, she was nominated for the Singapore Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Art Prize. Her area of interest is the study and deconstruction of colonial and post-colonial practices (gendered, political, ecological, etc.). She works in installation, sculpture, media art, photography, painting, and drawing, and also creates poetic texts.

During the residency, she will continue working on her project PLAYINGTHEWOMAN, which is an attempt to study and critically portray gender stereotypes through artistic methods. PLAYINGTHEWOMAN currently includes painting, photo wallpaper, and installations. Falkova plans to involve the local feminist community in creating new art objects.

Residency: Atelier PİLLƏ, Baku, Azerbaijan

Dates: 11 June—9 July, 2018

Dana Kosmina is an artist, co-founder of Pilorama, an open group for urban interventions, and a member of the self-organized art initiative DE NE DE. In 2017, she joined the Hudrada (Creative Committee) curatorial group. She has participated in many international exhibitions, including the Parallel Program of Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Kyiv Biennale, and Burning Man, among others.

During her residency, she plans to study grassroots forms of nonprofit public spaces in Baku. Over the course of her research, Kosmina will also conduct meetings with local residents in the form of an open laboratory that seeks to engage them in activating the urban “UN-SEEN.”

Host Organization: Oberliht, Chișinău, Moldova

Dates: June 15–July 18, 2018

Almaz Isakov is a curator. He has worked as a specialist for promoting civil society initiatives with the Youth Human Rights Group (2011–13) and the coordinator of the School of Theory and Activism, Bishkek (STAB) (2013–14). Currently he is a curator at Laboratoria Ci, a series of initiatives directed toward artistic production and research into contemporary sociocultural processes.

During the residency, he plans to carry out the project Tourist KIOSK. This project will attempt to re-imagine Flat Space, an outdoor replica of a standard Soviet-era apartment, as an informational kiosk for tourists that represents the city through practices of critical art research (psychogeographical maps produced by guidebooks that include objects and spaces in the city other than the usual commoditized tourist sites, etc.).

Host Organization: Oberliht, Chișinău, Moldova

Dates: June 16–July 16, 2018

Semyon Motolyanets works in both Belarus and Russia and joined the group PARAZIT (PARASITE) in 2007.  Together with Dmitry Petukhov founded the group MYLO (SOAP) in 2008. He works in performance, installation, and sculpture and is the recipient of the Innovation Prize (2009) in the category “New Generation” (as part of the group MYLO). His works are in the collections of the State Russian Museum, the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Nonconformist Art in St. Petersburg, as well as in private collections in Russia and Germany.

Motolyanets plans to study “common areas” in Chișinău’s urban spaces, installing a series of objects in them.

Residency: CSM / Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art and Open Place Artist-Run Space, Kyiv, Ukraine

Dates: June 26—July 24, 2018 May 28

Aydan Mirzayeva works in installation, painting, drawing, performance, video, and readymades. She has participated in many exhibitions and festivals.

During the residency, Mirzayeva plans to engage with public space. She is interested in getting to know Kiev’s social context and its local communities.

Host Organization: Oberliht, Chișinău, Moldova

Dates: June 27—July 26, 2018.

Pavel Khailo graduated from the School of Visual Communication (Kyiv, 2015) and the Chto Delat School of Engaged Art (St. Petersburg, 2017). From 2015 to 2017, he worked with the Kyiv art group Concrete Dates Collective. His areas of interest include contemporary art in the context of political and economic processes, communications, and games as educational and ideological instruments of the creative economy.

During the residency, he plans to research transitional processes in public space that are initiated by various players and hierarchies. Khailo will focus on playgrounds and the discourses that surround them, as well as on these discourses’ presence in PR technologies and communications. The project comprises two parts: field research and work with local communities.

Residency: Suburb Cultural Center, Yerevan, Armenia

Dates: June 28—July 25, 2018

Sasha Kurmaz is an interdisciplinary artist who works with photography, video, and performance. His artistic practice addresses questions of embodiment and sexuality, as well as the relationship between the individual, society, and the state. He has participated in international exhibits and festivals.

The concept and form of his final project are currently in development and will be chosen based on research into the local social and political context.

Residency: Atelier PİLLƏ, Baku, Azerbaijan

Dates: June 28—July 26, 2018

Daryna Nikolenko is a photographer and researcher and works with photography, video, and text. Her artistic practice deals with transformations in public city space (visual culture, memory, and everyday practices). Her writing has been published in the online journal KORYDOR.

During the residency, she will study urban mythology. Focusing on downtown Baku, Nikolenko plans to ascertain which patterns and developments are typical of and desirable for demonstrations in “hotspots” and how these demonstrations are connected to the social and symbolic structures of the (un)changing city.

Residency: The State Silk Museum in collaboration with GeoAIR, Tbilisi, Georgia

Dates: July 1—31, 2018

Dilyara Kaipova is an artist. From 1998 to 2012, she worked as a production designer at the Muqimiy Uzbek State Musical Theater. From 2012 to 2014, she was an actor and the artistic director of the student theater at the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts and Culture. For the past few years, she has been working on a series of projects inspired by traditional Uzbek textiles. She has participated in local and international contemporary art exhibitions.

In Tbilisi, she will devote herself to studying the local textile tradition using the collection of the State Silk Museum as a reference. Kaipova will also conduct a series of lectures, artist talks, and workshops on Uzbek textiles and ways of creatively interpreting museum collections.

Residence: Eurasian Cultural Alliance, Almaty, Kazakhstan

Dates: August 1—28, 2018

Tigran Amiryan is an Armenian independent curator and contemporary culture researcher with a PhD in Literary Studies. For many years, Amiryan’s main interest has been the problem of narrating individual and collective memory in contemporary culture. Amiryan has dedicated the past few years to studying narrative theory as it relates to visually narrated texts. Currently, Amiryan’s research and curatorial projects combine an examination of the narration of personal/individual experience, artistic (fictional) representation of and stories about the self, and biography; and a focus on urban space and the environment, which preserve memories about people’s lives even as they are subject to constant neglect and decay.

During the art residency, Amiryan will study the dynamics of the development/disappearance of urban objects related to individual or collective memory. In particular, he proposes to identify how the memory of a multiethnic city is formed and functions, and which fragments of urban architecture reflect the identities of various religious and ethnic groups.

Residency: Eurasian Cultural Alliance, Almaty, Kazakhstan

Dates: August 1—28, 2018

Sergei Kravchenko is an architect, columnist, and musician. Since 2014, he has been involved in projects that combine local semantics with contemporary approaches to design. He writes the column “How to Love It” (“Kak eto lyubit”), a series of guides to Belarusian cultural heritage sites, for CityDog.by, and has authored a series of articles on Belarusian company towns. He is a cofounder, co-organizer, and architect for the Sprava Festival (Belarus). Since 2005, he has been a part of the avant-garde trio of artists Port Mone, and since 2016, part of the group Hutkasmachnaā, which has created several public art objects and carried out artistic interventions in Minsk.

Andrei Busel is an artist and architect from Minsk, Belarus. Since 2006 he has combined his architectural work with artistic interventions into urban space. He has participated in various group exhibitions and street art festivals in Belarus, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Ukraine, and Lithuania.

During the residency in Almaty, Hutkasmachnaā will create a serious of objects in urban spaces. (The group works with all sorts of provisional textures—mirrors, photographs, natural materials, found objects and furniture, stencils, text, etc.) Over the course of the project, the artists will also work with local media.

​Residency: Sanati Muosir Public Foundation / Dushanbe ArtGround, Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Dates: August 5—25, 2018

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Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek director and artist, who lives and works in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Paris, France.  Her film, “Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea,” won the price for best documentary film at the Turin Film Festival in 2004.  In 2013,  Saodat showed her first video-installation piece “Zukhra” at the Venice Biennale.  Her first full-length film “40 Days of Silence” about the life of four generations of Tajik women was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014.  The film received wide international recognition and was nominated for many prestigious film awards.

In Dushanbe Saodat aims to reconstruct the history of the Central Asian colonizer Alexander the Great, working with contemporary toponymy and landscapes. The project includes a series of interviews, photographs and documentation using scientific and poetic texts.

Residency: Suburb Cultural Center, Yerevan, Armenia

Dates: August 10—September 10, 2018

Maria Vilkovisky is an artist, curator, and poet.  She began curating exhibits and educational projects in the field of contemporary art in 2011 and has collaborated with Ruth Jenrbekova on the “Creolex Centr,” an imaginary cultural institution, since 2013.  She participated in the first poetry slam in Almaty, the Polyphony International Poetry Festival, and the Sozyv Poetry Festival and work has been published in Vozdukh, Novy Mir, TextOnly, Apollinary, Znaki, Yshsho Odyn, and Megalit. Her book of poems From This Very Place (“Imenno c etogo mesta”) was published in 2014.

Ruth Jenrbekova is an artist, trans feminist, writer, and performer.. She and Maria Vilkovisky make up the staff of the “Creolex Centr”. 

During the residency, the artists will continue working on the second issue of the journal Shalazine, which will be dedicated to practices of resisting normativity, including feminist and queer art and activism. During their stay in Yerevan, the collective also plans to conduct a series of meetings and public events.

Residency: Sanati Muosir Public Foundation / Dushanbe ArtGround, Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Dates: September 3—24, 2018

Meka Muratova is an artist working in video and new media. Her works explore themes  of social change, nationalism and identity, post-Soviet and Central Asian culture, and cultural and natural heritage.

Her stay in the art residency will culminate in a video project and public discussion of questions of contemporary Tajik national identity.

Residency: Sanati Muosir Public Foundation / Dushanbe ArtGround, Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Dates: September 10—30, 2018

Yuliya Sorokina is a writer, a lecturer at the T. K. Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts, the director of the Asia Art+ Public Foundation, and an independent contemporary art curator. She holds a PhD in Film Studies.

In Dushanbe, Sorokina plans to study the state of contemporary art in the region, write an essay about local artists, prepare materials to be included in the digital archive of Central Asia, and also lead workshops on contemporary art careers and archiving contemporary art.

Host Organization: Ilkhom Contemporary Art Center, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Dates: September 14—October 15, 2018.

Dima Fatum and Maria Uvarova are an artist collective—Fatum is a muralist and street art advocate, and Uvarova is a curator and urbanist. They have participated in international street art festivals, murals and public art projects, and residences. They take a site-specific approach to their work, incorporating the historical and/or philosophical context of the city.

Dima Fatum and Maria Uvarova’s art residency will culminate in a mural based on the history and mythopoetics of the city. The project will be preceded by an extensive preparation stage as they collect and analyze information about Tashkent and its cultural codes.

Residency: ArtEast, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Dates: October 1–30, 2018

Nino Khuroshvili is an artist who works mainly in books. She is the founder of Traveling Art Books and Tarazo (Leveller), a platform for social critique. She is currently working on independent social and research projects.

During the residency, Khuroshvili will teach a series of workshops for the students of the ArtEast School of Contemporary Art on techniques for creating experimental exhibition catalogues. The workshop will focus on alternative methods of working with paper, book dummies, and binding techniques, as well as ways of presenting the finished publication to the public.

Residency: Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus

Dates: October 10—November 10, 2018

Asia Senina is a cultural critic and curator of art projects at the Bureau 90 Research Society. Her curatorial and research interests include the interaction between art practices and their social context, means of communication between art and viewers, and problems of cultural memory.

At the end of her stay in Minsk, she will create an interactive map of sites and events in Belarus’ cultural, social, and political life based on interviews with contemporary artists and curators.

Residency: ArtEast, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Dates: November 1–30, 2018

Lizaveta German is a researcher with a PhD in art history has been a part of an independent curatorial collective with Maria Lanko since 2013.  She has been a guest curator at the Liverpool Biennial (2016, UK), co-editor of the books The Art of the Ukrainian Sixties and Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics, a contributor to the educational websites Cultural Project and Sense, and a lecturer in Contemporary Art at Kyiv Academy of Media Arts.

Over the course of the residency, German will give lectures on the history and theory of curation, lead a series of workshops on curating and preparing art projects (the basics of curatorial research, guidelines for putting together a display and writing wall texts, conventions of interacting with artists), and serve as a consultant for ArtEast students’ final exhibition.  German also plans to make studio visits, visit local art institutions, and get to know museum collections in Bishkek and nearby cities as part of research for a book that she is currently working on about the history of curation in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries.