artist residency
Throughout 2024 The Institute will hosts three Scandinavian artists.
Uffe Isolotto is a Danish multi-disciplinary artist specializing in physical and digital sculpture. His work is known for pushing the boundary around questions of how the human body intersects with the machine – in a time when social media and artificial intelligence are increasing their presence in our day-to-day life, what does it mean to be human, how do our bodies interact with the world (physical and digital), and how do we conceive of our bodies as they wonder, stress, move, reflect, escape, revel and survive through the twenty-first century world?
Uffe isolotto
Bjarne Bare
Bjarne Bare is a Norwegian artist living between Oslo and Los Angeles. His approach to photography is conceptual, offering a complex, dynamic visual that stands in contrast to the ‘decisive moment’ that is often portrayed in traditional photography.
Motivated by a desire to investigate the environmental impact of digital media, Bare is envisioning a project that will scrutinize the significant energy and freshwater consumption within server infrastructure, drawing parallels with the liquid dependence of analog media from the past.
The RESEARCH
Bjarne Bare received his B.F.A. from the Academy of Fine Art Oslo (2013) and M.F.A. from UCLA, Los Angeles (2017). Bare co-founded the Norwegian gallery MELK in 2009, which has since helped shape a generation of Scandinavian artists.
Through his work as an artist, gallery director, and publisher, Bjarne Bare maintains a profound interest in the development and current state of the photographic image, as well as a theoretical curiosity concerning modes of perception in the reading of the photograph. He has been the editor of notable books on photography, including the publications Why Photography? (Skira, Milan) and New Scandinavian Photography (Black Dog Publishing, London). Alongside his practice as a visual artist, Bare has worked as a curator at a number of exhibitions focusing on contemporary photography, as an advisor, editor, and juror.
In 1989 Jeff Wall made famous the concept of analog photography’s dependence on water. This serves as a foundation for Bare’s argument and current interest. He contends that in the digital age, the significance of water becomes evermore pronounced, during our times marked by climate change, global warming, water scarcity. A prime example of this digital water consumption is evident in generative A.I. and platforms like Instagram, which exert an enormous strain on server infrastructure.
Recently, Professor Shaolei Ren and his students at UC Riverside conducted research confirming this issue. Their report sheds light on the critical environmental impact of digital media, particularly concerning freshwater. For his proposed residency project at the Institute, Bare will highlight the urgency of the intricate relationship between the digital world, scarce water resources, and climate change.
SESSA ENGLUND
Sessa Englund is a Swedish artist based in Berlin. Englund explores impermanence through a visual language of domesticity and the body. Sites of somatic intimacy - furniture, food, jewelry - are abstracted into hybrid forms suggesting a liminal realm in which the body has merged with its surroundings. The sensitive materiality of these objects further conveys a state of intermediacy: rusted metal, burnt marzipan, latex, and dried flora inhabiting an entropic ontology of continuous flux.
Englund incorporates a generic adolescent iconography: trolls, hearts, flames, and butterflies mass produced in endless variation and sold to signify identity. The artist often deploys these motifs through techniques of body modification, adorning objects with piercings and stick-and-poke tattoos. As an ethos, the practice of body modification acknowledges the transient nature of the body while asserting agency over its material and form. Recorded in altered flesh, memory is made visible. This is evident in a series of floor-bound sculptures resembling rugs of skin. Augmented with custom body jewelry and tattoos, their biomorphic surfaces are raised in furcated patterns suggesting roots, veins, or mountainous topography. Cast in latex, they have the texture and appearance of weathered dermis, and like the biological material they evoke, are in fact encountered in a state of slow, continual aging and disintegration.
Sessa Englund holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY, Purchase NY (2013). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include All made of tender flesh, all put together, Haul Gallery, Brooklyn NY (2019); Wild Objects with Alicia Adamerovich, Project Pangée, Montreal Canada (2019); A suspended state in last, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute Gallery, Baltimore MD (2018); Sympathy for trolls (artist in residency presentation),, East of Elsewhere Gallery, Berlin Germany (2018). Recent group exhibitions include From Dallas to Baum Bridge curated by Anna Frost, LA River, Los Angeles (2020); Beast On Its Back curated by Anna Frost, Canyon Canyon, Los Angeles (2020); Games of Ceres, King’s Leap, Brooklyn NY (2018).
APPLY
Institute of the Sun offer residencies to artists based in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland.
If you would like to learn more about how to apply for a residency in 2024 or 2025 send us an email.