KLUVEN

24 September–10 October
Exhibition by Dina Abu Hamdan, Brynhild Bye-Tiller, Emma Hirsk, Katarzyna Piórek
Studio44, as a part of Woven Network Nordics

Woven Network Nordics is a pan-European digital residency led by Intercult, Stockholm (SE), in collaboration with partners Transform Festival (NO), Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (DK), Platform TU (UA), and Fablevision studios (UK).
The framework of the 9-month digital residency foregrounds women’s experience as central to the European response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to propose new ways to amalgamate and disseminate artistic, technological, and socially engaged practices, across borders, international networks, and remote audiences. The Woven Network Nordic artists are Brynhild Bye-Tiller (NO), Dina Abu Hamdan (DK/JO), Emma Hirsk (SE/IE), and Katarzyna Piórek (SE/PL), and project manager Alice Máselníková (SE/CZ), visual artist and curator.
Across a broad spectrum of rich and diverse creative praxis, subject expertise, and cultural heritages,
all four of the Woven Network Nordic artists explore and showcase the potentialities of interdisciplinary, inclusive, and socially engaged artistic and digital practices, creating a safe space of support, solidarity, and collaboration for female artists across Europe.

Brynhild Bye-Tiller: The Kintsugi project

The Kintsugi Project (2021) began in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic when a group of women came together to discuss, investigate and share experiences of being ‘Next of Kin’. They asked themselves what does it mean to be next of kin, and what happens if for some reason you are not able to be the next of kin? The project began with a mobile photography workshop, which became the basis for further research and exhibitions. The group was asked to use their voice through photography. To tell a story about being next of kin through the camera lens. In addition, they did, share personal stories from their lives. The first iteration of The Kintsugi Project was exhibited in Trondheim in summer 2021, with a secondary exhibition at Studio 44 in Stockholm.

The Kintsugi Project is based on Brynhild Bye-Tiller’s socially engaged, photographic art practice, which continually explores the tensions between participation and documentary photography. Bye-Tiller’s work examines authorship, authenticity, method, usability and structure, and corresponding concerns about what kind of elements exist and how to use them in art.

Dina Abu Hamdan

The choreography movement choir ‘HUG’, is based on the need to reconstruct and recreate our daily routines, our connections to each other and the spaces we live in.

A large crowd of children, youth, municipality, and local organizations’ employees come together in their own soundscape bubble, yet collectively feel each other’s movement in an open public space. Being split between the individual and the collective need, reflecting on the fear of a crowd in a pandemic and the need of the human collective encounter.

The public is invited to experience the HUG silently or following the music, visually live or online.

The project is produced by the municipality of Ringkøbing Skjern in West Jutland – Denmark with the support of the Danish Kunstfond as part of 100 days of culture and sport.

The HUG is a touring project that aims to visit many cities and bring citizens together.

Choreography: Dina Abu Hamdan

Music: Basil Hogios

Emma Hirsk: Grief Cartographies

The Grief Cartographies project, considers the acute intimacies of both private and collective loss, trauma, and grief, within the context of a global Covid pandemic.
As an artist-researcher from Northern Ireland, based in Sweden, this project is borne from the deeply private loss of my mother earlier this year, and contextualized against the backdrop of pandemic restrictions across travel, borders, contact, care, family, illness, and death.
Incorporating the series ‘One Hundred Sculptures for my Mother’ this residency research maps a path of grief cloven by time, touch, distance, identities, memories, geographies, and Covid-19 restrictions, and presents photographs, films, drawings/writings, maps, and socio-spatial practices as a way through grief, and to somehow keep a connection to, and remembrance of my mother.

Katarzyna Piórek

The Kluven project has been constructed from a series of interviews with emigrant women who were forced or chose to move from their land to another country and arrived in new life situations with unfamiliar social codes, cultural references, and political heritages.

Through this collection of interviews, I correlate personal experiences within a broader spectrum of emotional conflicts, compromises, struggles of balancing between two worlds, crossing borders, and beginning anew in an unknown country, to highlight the global fate of immigrants. Within this documentary project, I also want to focus on the invisible problem and illustrate the burdens of the human condition. I investigate immigrants’ identity through my own perspective, trying to find a merger for the stories together.

How do people deal with challenges and name the daily dilemmas? How do they feel in the corona pandemic context? For many people living abroad in their native countries, the coronavirus crisis showed how important the possibility of traveling is or, at least, having the option of travel to their previous homes. Ultimately, the project is going to be presented as a documentary-animation film.