Kauser Husain

NN Contemporary Art, UK

Emer Grant is the current Artistic Director and CEO of NN Contemporary Art, a National Portfolio Organisation in Northampton. She is a Curator, Producer, and Researcher who completed her studies at CCS Bard College (USA) the University of York (UK), and the University of Brighton. Emer was a Fellow for The Recalibrated Institution (Miami) and Curator at Art Center South Florida (now Oolite Arts). Prior she has curated shows and programming for various institutions including the Hessel Museum (NY), P! Gallery (NY), ISCP (NY), Stroom den Haag (NL) Void Gallery (NI), Pollinaria (IT), Yeah Maybe (MN), PHL (DE) and The Grand Parade Gallery (UK). She was Visiting Tutor at the RCA, Visiting Curator at Bard College MFA, Visiting Curator at the University of Minnesota Studio Arts BFA and Visiting Critic for Florida International University’s Architecture BFA programme. and has written for various publications including, Nero, Electronic Beats, The Editorial, The Miami Rail and Rhizome.

She was a fellow selected for the ICI (Independent Curators International) 2013 and has consulted for various organizations on Digital Arts and interdisciplinary strategies for public space, she was also an Associate Curator for Left Gallery (Berlin). Emer initiated and developed the 4.7 mil capital project at  24 Guildhall Road, Northampton, due to be completed in 2024. The renovations of the old Town Hall built in 1927 ( across 5 floors & 2000 sqm) will become NNCA’s new permanent home. Facilities will include a new gallery space, project space, education studio and civic reading room.  NNCA plays a unique role in the ecology of the visual arts in the town and region, focusing on how artist-led institutions can be developed and defined for the 21st century.

Secondment Destination:
Athens: June 2023

Royal College of Art, UK

K. Yoland is a transdisciplinary artist and practice-based PhD student.
Current research explores site-specific art interventions as modes of
resistance to territoriality and future forms of colonisation.

Recent work has focused on the Southwest deserts of the United States,
visiting sites of military training, interplanetary observation, surveillance and
data farms in these regions. Navigating state and corporate geographies,
Yoland’s installations and performative actions reveal and test the existing
spatial controls and search for opportunities for free movement inside these
systems. Working on private and public land, Yoland’s working methods
instigate encounters between systems of control and instances of spatial
complexity in which empathy might emerge. Research is influenced by
fictioning, absurdity, spatial theory, radical ecology, critical race studies, and
contemporary readings of hospitality across public space.

Incorporating installation with live-performance, video, photography, objectmaking
and text, Yoland has worked with both trained professionals and
volunteers (including soldiers, border patrol and oil riggers). Yoland has also
lectured in socio-politically engaged art practice and expanded cinema (US/
UK/French universities). Supporting free education and open dialogue,
Yoland produced/hosted Constructive Forces (Resonance FM London) and
Talk at Ten (NPR affiliated Marfa Public Radio, West Texas), interviewing
artists, politicians, activists, and scientists.

Secondment Destination
Berlin – September 2023

Royal College of Art, UK

Melanie Jackson is an artist, and a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. She works with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image, focused on Ur-forms of resisting biotechnocapital and their resonance in the contemporary moment.

She is founder of @thepoorhousereadingrooms. Recent solo exhibitions include Spekyng Rybawdy at Block336, London and Deeper in the Pyramid, Banner Repeater, London Grand Union, Birmingham and Primary, Nottingham, with books of the same name as part of an ongoing writing collaboration with writer Esther Leslie. Other solo shows include Matts Gallery, Flat Time House, John Hansard Gallery, the Drawing Room, Chapter Arts Centre as well as group shows nationally and internationally including eva 2020/1, Ireland’s biennale.

As part of my practice, I am founder of @thepoorhousereadingrooms, an artist led archive and rural residency space for urban based artists, and a repository and occasional publisher of artists books and editions for regional publics. The reading rooms also fold in a pedagogical role working with students and learners who want to work with archives and/or making books.

For Spacex Melanie is particularly interested in these three strands:

• Art as a Means for Investigating the Archive
• Art as a means of constructing the Archive
• Pedagogic Strategies and the Transformation and Construction of Subjectivity 

And will use the secondment to research models of self organisation within spacex membership, and in archives across Europe.

Secondment destination:
tbc

AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism

Maria Loizidou (www.marialoizidou.com ) is a visual artist, who renews her work’s perspective and enriches it with social and political concerns, by emphasizing “the power of fragility”. She is one of the co-founders of AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism. AA & U focuses on the constructive entanglements between architecture, urban planning and the visual arts to support the urban commons (www.aaplusu.com ). Maria’s collaboration with AA & U allows her to address practices of fragility in a collective and interdisciplinary level.

Secondment destination:
University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, 2023
The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2024

University of Cyprus

Socrates Stratis (www.socratestratis.com ) is an urbanist, architect, and activist for the urban commons. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. He is the co-founder of the critical urban practice agency AA & U, Cyprus, (www.aaplusu.com ). His research focuses on the political agencies of architecture and urban design. Socrates investigates how the strategic and tactful values of urban design, as well as the social dimensions of architecture, inform critical urban practices. He oscillates between diffractive practice and practice-led research, thanks to creative entanglements between teaching, practicing, curating, and writing. His publications include the “Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries in Contested Spaces” (Jovis 2016) and numerous articles available here. His curatorial and activist work includes the Cyprus participation in the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, (www.contestedfronts.org ), as well as the “Hands-on Famagusta” project (www.handsonfamagusta.org).

Secondment destinations:
Wonder Cabinet 2023
Transparadiso 2023
Coventry Biennale 2024
Van Abbemuseum 2024

TRANS (transparadiso), Austria

Architect and urbanist, founded transparadiso with the artist Barbara Holub in 1999 as transdisciplinary practice. teaching at the technical university of Vienna; 2018 Österreichischer Kunstpreis, 2007 Otto-Wagner-Award for Urban Design for Salzburg Stadtwerk Lehen; 1994 Tische federal grant at Jean Nouvel’s, Paris; 2001 thesis “contextual acting in architecture and urbanism”, 1997-2003, teaches in differant positions since1997 at University of Technology of Vienna, 2004 Schindler grant, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles,  2004-2006 co-secretary of European Austria, since 2002 member of the editorial board of “dérive – Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung”; 2012 funding by departure for “Direct Urbanism”; 2013 publication “Direct Urbanism”  in Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2018.

Secondment destination:
TBC

Royal College of Art, UK

Marisa Ferreira is an artist and practice based PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London with the project: “Waste Matter. Public Art and the (Im) Materiality of Post-Colonial Memory”. Her research is concerned with ruins created by industrial development in places under extractive colonialism and popular resistance, economic dispute and ecological crisis. Her practice focuses on interdisciplinary artistic expressions in particular sculpture and site-specific projects and draws from material culture, “critical spatial practice” and the idea of waste as an agent for “radical change” in order to explore alternative ways to rethink and reimagine a more inclusive politics of memory, sustainable and emphatic urban policy.

Secondment destination:
TBC

www.marisa-ferreira.com
@marisaferreirastudio

Simon King is a walking artist with a socially engaged practice who teaches at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London. Co-founder with Jaspar Joseph-Lester of the cross-disciplinary project ‘Walkative’ at the RCA in 2013, he has worked collaboratively since 2017 with the artist Corinne Noble to create group walks that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive methodology: the use of literal and metaphorical correspondence through ephemera i.e. antique postcards, found maps, archive photographs, fragments of text, as well as personal recollection and speculation, to prompt engagement and interaction with participant walkers.

Simon is a practice PGR PhD candidate at Birkbeck College (supervised by Professor Esther Leslie), whose research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement.

Secondment destination:
Florence, Italy – November 2022

thewalkativeproject.org

AHDR/Home for Cooperation, Cyprus

Andri is the Manager of the Home for Cooperation (AHDR/H4C). She holds an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology from K.U. Leuven, Belgium, where her thesis focused on reinterpreting the transformation of borders and border-spaces in Nicosia, in their symbolic and literal sense. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focused on the relationship between the postcolonial state of a country and the notion of hostility in national identities. Her evolving academic interest is to undertake her first steps for an interdisciplinary PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Architecture, looking to unpack peacebuilding as a conceptual term, a process and method, in the post conflict context of Cyprus. She is interested to look at the relation of peacebuilding with spatial practices and discursive exchange, and how the multiplicity of stories can affect and enable alternative subjectivities and transformation.

Secondment Destination:
Coventry, UK – 2023