Art Omi International Artists Residency

2010 Artists in Residence's Biographies
(Click on the artists names to access their individual websites)

Ahmed el Shaer, Egypt, VIRTUAL RESIDENCY
Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1980; lives and works in Egypt.
Ahmed El Shaer is a photographer, video and installation artist. His videos combine a diversity of time-based elements: film, machinema, stock footage, ambient and synthetic sounds as well as three-D animation.

Alassane Drabo, Burkina Faso.
Born in 1968 in Koudougou Alassane Drabo received and developed his art at Art Workshop Versatile plastic (APAP) Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1994. His training was strengthened during the various editions of Ouag'art from 1993 to 1995, and through various international courses in visual arts and design. He participated in the creation of many monumental works, symbolizing the values of the nation of Burkina Faso and exhited in various countries: the Cote Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Mali, Algeria, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and the United States. Drabo was awarded numerous diplomas and awards, both nationally and internationally. These include: 1988 winner in sculpture Regional Award Grand Prize National Arts and Letters Burkina Faso Winner of major national awards in sculpture Burkina Faso 2001 Diploma for participation in design 21 (Felissimo design house in New York and UNESCO House Paris) 2006 Special Price UEMOA design (under the design show at From the International Biennial of Contemporary African Art Dakar (SENEGAL) 2006 Price of journalists and critics of African Art (through the International Biennial of Contemporary African Art Dakar (SENEGAL) Currently the artist lives and works in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Takako Azami, Japan.
Born in Japan. Graduated from Tama Art University(BFA). Creates her works with traditional Japanese painting materials and acrylic mediums. The motif is trees. There are spots of ink and white, empty spaces, semitransparent lines and form crisscrossing. Spreading like splash marks, they are scattered over the surface in complex layers. Brushstrokes placed on the back of the hemp paper, both black and white, cross between the light and its opposite, reversing themselves. Light and afterimages of light create endless vibrations at "Inframince" moving back and forth between front and back.
The artist worked in New York from September 2007 for a year by the artist exchange program coordinated by Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan.

Patrick Bancel, France/USA.
Born in Provence, south of France, lives and works in New York. Patrick learned "trompe l'oeil" (trick the eyes) at Van Der Kelen Superior Painting Institute in Brussels where he was awarded the Medal and Jury's distinction, and worked as Assistant Director of the Institute. He also studied at the Ateliers des Beaux Arts de Paris in France. Looking at art as an intuition for the future, he keeps practicing meditation, painting, photography and video to use today all his body of work on skies in public art to open eyes on the new world coming to us. His new “Billboards” collection focus on revealing the shocking contradictory times we live in as it relates to climate change. Bancel has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and US, in galleries and museums, including The New York National Arts Club, Chelsea Art Museum, National Museum of Marine (Trocadero Paris, France), Salon des Artistes Francais (Grand Palais, Paris, France). His work has been highly praised by the New York Times or other leading publications for the past ten years and included in many private and public collections in more than 24 countries.

Gudrun Barenbrock, Germany, was born in Germany and lives in Cologne as a painter and video artist. She studied painting and video at the Art Academies in Duesseldorf and Muenster and attended the masterclass of German colourfield painter Ulrich Erben, where she graduated 1991.
From 2005 to 2006, she hold a chair as assistant visiting professor at the art academy Muenster.
She received several art awards, including a DAAD-fellowship to London and an artist in residency by the Research Institute for Inter-Culture in Seoul/South Korea. She continously exhibits her work in single and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad.

Nisrine Boukhari, Syria.
Nisrine Boukhari is a mixed media and installation artist based in Damascus, Syria. In her work, which inherited the legacy of Situationism, she uses concepts of psychogeography (the study of the laws and specifics effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals) to explore our relationship to inner and domestic spaces. Principles of 'colour and light therapy' often underline the interactive nature of her installations.
With a characteristic economy of means (her work often builds on the recurrence of mundane objects, such as ropes, post-it notes or sheets of copier paper), Nisrine creates sensorial and participatory installations which engage the body as well as the mind.
Nisrine Boukhari (b. 1980) studied Sculpture at the University in Damascus. She had artist residency in Delfina Foundation/London, virtual residency in Almahatta Gallery/Ramallah, exhibited her work internationally and locally (AllArtNow festival for Contemporary arts, Traces, Magnetism, Here I Stand). In 2008, she participated in the Shatana workshop, Jordan (Triangle) and in 2009, she participated in Amsterdam Biennial.

caraballo-farman, Argentina/Canada/USA.
A two-person team, collaborating in video and photography, live and work in NY. Leonor Caraballo (born: Buenos Aires, Argentina) studied photography at RISD. Abou Farman (born: Tehran, Iran) is an award-winning writer and artist. Their work has been shown around the world in galleries and museums (eg. The Tate Modern (London), PS1/MOMA), Biennials (Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), Havana Biennial (Cuba)) and other arts institutions (eg. Whitney ISP, Artists Space, Museo del Barrio). They have received several grants including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, Canada Council grant in Media Arts and The NY Community Trust. Working in a wide range of settings, from Argentine stadiums to American laser tag arenas, they explore the rituals of modernity as spaces of power and euphoria, as well as of the absurd and the tragic. They abstract from the context to blur the line between the documentary and the aesthetic, and emphasize formal or rhetorical structures.

Anibal Catalan, Mexico (born Iguala Guerrero, 1973) received his BFA at The National School of Painting Sculpture and Printmaking "La Esmeralda" and also completed coursework in architecture at University of Anahuac. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include:1st Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the 2nd MexiCali Biennial, Mongolia 360 Land Art Biennial and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. Trained as an architect and visual artist, Anibal Catalan is interested in the space between total chaos and order; Catalan creates site-specific installations that include improvised wall drawings, paintings and illuminated sculptures constructed to recreate the fluidity of urban architecture.

Cesar Cornejo, Peru/USA, has been awarded grants and residencies from Creative Capital Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Sculpture Space, The Center for Book Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the British Council, Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Arts Council of England, the Henry Moore Institute, the Ministry of Education of Japan. He has participated in group exhibitions like V Biennial de Barro de América in Venezuela, The S-Files at El Museo del Barrio in New York, and Busan Biennial 2008 in South Korea. He is represented by Gallery Lucia de la Puente in Lima Peru and Art Front Gallery in Tokyo.

Meera Devidayal, India, Prana Studios Award recipient.
Born in 1947, went to Loreto House, school and college, Kolkata, and graduated with an Honours degree in English Literature in 1966. Went to JJ School of Art, Mumbai, 1971-74. She has been exhibiting, solo, and in group shows since 1975, mostly in Mumbai (with Chemould Prescott Road), but also in Delhi, Kolkata and Vadodara. She participated in Triangle Artists’ Workshop, New York, 2002 and has worked on art projects with underprivileged children, creating works jointly with them, for auctioning. She also worked on two public projects: (1) With Open Circle to paint a train bogey during World Social Forum, Mumbai, 2004 (2) Designed a 54’ mural for Tardeo Police Station, Mumbai, 2007

Luciano Di Rosa, Italy.
Born 1976, Naples, Italy. Lives and works in Naples as sculptor and scenographer. He particularly prefers making installations in nature.

Dread Scott, USA.
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President G.H.W. Bush declared his artwork “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced it as they passed legislation to “protect the flag.” His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1/MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and at the DeBeyerd Center for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands. He has been awarded a Creative Capital Foundation grant, a Mid-Atlantic\NEA Regional Fellowship in Photography and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture as well as in Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Art. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arkon Art Museum. He works in a range of media including installation, photography, screen printing, video and performance. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Ernest DÜKÜ, Ivory Coast/France. Born Ivory Coast 1958.
Diplômé de l’Ecole des Beaux Arts d’Abidjan, de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, et d’un D.E.A d’Esthétique et Sciences de l’Art à l’université de Paris 1. Son travail de création explore le champ des frontières esthétiques entre peinture, sculpture, installation.
Il a participé à plusieurs expositions au Cameroun, Côte d’ivoire, Belgique, Chine, Etat-unis, France, etc …
Sélectionné en 2009 dans le cadre du 2eme Festival Panafricain d’Alger pour l’exposition « La modernité dans l’art Africain d’aujourd’hui. »
Son travail s’articule autour des sujets qui interrogent la question des syncrétismes religieux, ses œuvres questionnent également les non-dits de l’histoire qui ont une résonnance sur l’actualité d’aujourd’hui. Il vit et travaille entre Abidjan et Paris.

Eckhard Etzold, Germany, lives and works in Berlin and New York. Currently, he is investigating possibilities of computer-generated media in painting. He studied at the Academy of Fine Art, Berlin; The Slade School of Fine Art, London; and The Art Institute of Chicago. He received numerous grants and awards, including Philip Morris grant for painting in 1995; the Studio Program fellowship at P.S. 1 in New York in 1996; Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, MA in 1997; the GKB Bank Award for Painting in 1999; and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2008. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including a solo exhibition at the Museum Goch, Germany, in 2003 and a group show at apexart, New York, entitled "Avant-Guide to NYC: Discovering Absence" in 2009.

Patricia Eustaquio, Philippines, Art Omi Ateneo Art Gallery NY Projects recipient, (b. August 1977) works in a variety of media, including painting and sculpture as well as fashion and design. Her works combine paintings with soft sculpture and neon as well as pieces in wax, ceramics and found objects.
She presents her sculptural installations as broken narratives, exploring the idea of memory.
Patricia was awarded the Thirteen Artists’ Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Ateneo Art Award in 2009. She has exhibited in art fairs in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York. She was recently part of id11, an artist residency in The Netherlands.

Matteo Fato, Italy, Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art Award recipient.
(born in Pescara, Italy 1979). Graduated in Painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti, Urbino, Italy. His research is a focused analysis of the relationship between “image” and “mark”, the moment just before the mark becomes a recognizable language. A representative “equilibrium” in which the pure “mark” is domesticated and disciplined so as to find its place on the limit of reality.
Since 2003, his work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in such institutions, galleries and festivals as the Centro per l’ Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Galleria Riccardo Crespi, Milano; MLAC, Roma; Galleria Cesare Manzo, Pescara/Roma; MNAC, Bucharest; ACAX, Budapest; Kasa Gallery, Istanbul; GC.AC, Monfalcone; Palazzo Reale, Milano; Janko Dada Museum, Israele. In 2006, he participated in FuoriUso, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and in 2008, he was selected to take part in an invitational workshop at the Fondazione Spinola Banna in Torino with visiting professor, artist Adrian Paci. He currently teaches Printmaking in the Accademia di Belle Arti, Urbino, Italy.

Nancy Friedemann, USA, The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Grant recipient.
Nancy Friedemann's large scale works allude to the Pattern and Decoration movement, and Spanish colonial painting but explore the experience of identity and memory. Selected exhibitions include: The Cuenca Biennial, Collette Blanchard Gallery, Frost Art Museum, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Jersey City Museum; Queens Museum of Art; Jersey City Museum, John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo del Barrio, Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango.
Among Awards and Residencies are The Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, NALAC, Pollock Krasner Grant; Fountainhead, The Tamarind Institute, Yaddo, Gasworks; Bronx Museum for the Arts.
Friedemann is also affiliated with the Artist Pension Trust, Mexico City, and her work can be viewed at the Feminist Base, Sackler Center, Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Irfan Hasan, Pakistan.
Born in Karachi 1982. Graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore in 2006 Specialized in Mughal Miniature painting with Distinction Award. Awarded twice as Best Young Painter in 2007and 2008 from Punjab Arts Council Pakistan. Participated in various exhibitions local and abroad including two solo shows in Pakistan. Attended TaazaTareen 3rd Residency 2007 at Vasl and Studio RM international Artist Residency 2008 in Lahore. Currently working as visiting faculty at Indus Valley School of Arts and Architecture Karachi and University of Karachi. Currently living and working in Karachi.

Bo-Yun Jang, South Korea, Paradise Culture Foundation Award recipient.
Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She has completed Graduate Fine Art Certificate Program in Seoul National University in last year, BFA in Fine art and Graphic Design (vice Specializing) in Seoul Women University. She incorporates photography, installation, and drawing to explore unclear and unconscious memories. Her works relates to between ontological status of the photographs and reading an image, calling into question some ideas. She has received critical reviews in PHOTONET, MONTHLY PHOTOGRAHPY, BITE(on-line) magazine. In 2009, she had two different series of Solo Show <Un-Vanished Memory>at Woo-Seok hall, <Preface Of Memory: K’s Slides>at Brainfactory in Seoul. She has also participated diverse group exhibitions. Especially, she recently announced her new digital video art work at <Digifesta-Rookie>in Gwang-Ju Biennale Hall. Her work was announced Jury recommended work at the JAPAN MEDIA ART FESIVAL.

Maude Leonard-Contant, Canada, Antrev Award recipient.
Born in 1979, lives and works in Montreal, Canada. Her sculptural and installative work questions the wicked relationship most people have with the representation of nature. Her recent works, inspired by postcards depicting landscapes, have been shown in several galleries and art centers, including Circa, Clark gallery, Plein Sud, the Joliette Museum of art. She received grants from the conseil des arts et lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is part of several private collections. She is currently completing a Master in Fine Arts at Concordia University.

Anna Lundh, Sweden, was born in Sweden. She graduated in 2008 with a MFA from Konstfack University of Art in Stockholm, and has previously studied at the Cooper Union. Last year, she participated in the LMCC Workspace residency program in New York and is currently completing a Post Graduate Research project at Konstfack, Stockholm. Her work investigates and interprets cultural and social phenomena, technology and language and takes the form of installations, video, text and various experiments. Lundh has been exhibited at for example Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, X-initiaive (for Rhizome) as well as Apexart and Marian Spore in New York.

Shahar Marcus, Israel, Artis-Contemporary Israeli Art Fund/ Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in NY Fellowship recipient.
b. 1971, Israel. Lives and works in Tel Aviv. Shahar Marcus is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in video, performance and sculpture.
Marcus works often with organic, perishable materials, such as dough, bread, orange juice and ice, in relation to his own body. His relationship to his materials examine the position and role of his body as both human and creator, and his choice of perishables likewise highlights the nature of art and life.

Eduardo Navarro, Argentina, lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was born in 1979. Between 2003 and 2005 he was selected to attend the "Program for the visual arts UBA” in charge of Guillermo Kuitca. In 2006 he had the chance to show his drawings at the opening of the Blantom museum/Art Palace, in Austin Texas and received a UBS Art Grant for emerging artists. During the summer of 2006 attended Skowhegan School of painting. He participated in shows in Americas Society, Frankfurten Kustverein, Museo del Canal Interoceánico Panamá, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Daniel Abate Galeria, Mercosur Bienial. This year he will be participating in the 29th São Paulo Biennial.

Sungyeon Park, South Korea, Paradise Culture Foundation Award recipient.
Park Sungyeon is a visual artist living and working in Seoul. She has graduated from Chelsea College Art & Design, London with MA in Fine Art (2007). Her subject comes from female voices within ordinary lives. The works are concerned with her social self-awareness, and with social issues, which are related to her visual language to individual experience. She has frequently exhibited in Korea in both solo and selected exhibitions and has also successfully completed several artist workshops. She has also won several juried competitions and awards by the GyeongGi Cultural Foundation and Korea Arts Council. She performs as an artist in residence ISCP New York, 2010.

Renata Poljak, Croatia/France.
Renata Poljak is a visual artist coming from Split, Croatia, currently living in Paris. Her body of work is composed of different medias: photos, neon, installation, videos and film. In 2002 she was on ArtsLink award as visiting artist in San Francisco Art Institute, in Museum Quartier, Vienna in 2004 and in 2008 she has been selected for Art In General residency program in New York and in Art Omi for 2010. Renata's work has been exhibited wildly, on solo or group shows, biennales and film festivals. She received several awards among which the Golden Black Box Award for Best Short Film at the Black Box Festival in Berlin 2006, and in the spring of 2010 a selection of her videos and film work were exhibited in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Ishmael Randall Weeks, Peru/USA, divides his time between New York City and Peru, where he was born. Randall Weeks studied at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he received his BA and later at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine. Starting in 2000, he has had solo exhibitions in New York, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru and he has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions including representing Peru in the 10th Havana Bienal as well as the 9th Cuenca Bienal. He has received fellowships, residencies, and awards from a range of institutions, including the Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York; The Art Matters Foundation, New York; The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, New York; The Vermont Studio Art Center, Johnson, Vermont; Sculpture Space, New York; Kiosko Art Residency, Santa Cruz, Bolivia; and La Curtiduria art center in Oaxaca, Mexico, among others.

Deb Sokolow, USA.
Sokolow’s text-driven drawings chart the obsessive, inner-dialogue of a nameless, paranoid narrator who speculates on various topics relating to popular culture, politics, conspiracy theory and human nature. Recent projects include large-scale, site-specific drawings for the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Smart Museum at University of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Sokolow’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Spertus Museum. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 where she continues to live and work.

May Tveit, USA, Charlotte Street Foundation recipient, is an artist whose site-specific art & public art has received national critical reviews in Art in America, Art Papers, National Public Radio, The Kansas City Star, and Review Magazine. She has received numerous honors and awards including a 2002 Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, American Institute of Architects Allied Arts & Craftsmanship Award, ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, University of Kansas Research Grants, Hall Center for the Humanities Creative Work Fellowship, and was most recently selected to participate in the 2010 Art OMI International Artist Residency. Her work is represented in numerous corporate & private collections. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied in Rome with the RISD European Honors Program, and received her Masters Degree from the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. She currently teaches at the University of Kansas and lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri.

Shona Wilson, Australia, Art Omi Australia Committee Award recipient, b.1964, graduated in sculpture from Sydney College of the Arts in 1990. Originating from self-funded installations, Shona has a 15yr history of regular, successful commercial shows. Her core practice involves the re-assembly of found natural detritus via the transformative processes of repetition and series making. A current theme, distilled from a long–term dialogue with natural materials is nature’s evolution/devolution resulting from human cross- pollination. Recently Shona was selected for ‘Immanence- Nature, Beauty and Organic Abstraction’, Samstag Museum of Art, (UniSA) 2010. Short-listed for the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize (2004) and Blake Prize for Religious Art (2003), she is included in the Stanthorpe, Manly and Shepparton Regional galleries and the Macquarie Bank Collection. Shona is represented by King St Gallery on William -Sydney and Mossgreen Gallery -Melbourne. She has participated in numerous group shows and is regularly reviewed in Australian publications.

Tuguldur Yondonjamts, Mongolia, (born Ulaanbaatar/Mongolia, 1977), completed a Bachelor of Mongolian Painting (Thanka Painting) with Honours in the class of Professor Narmandakh Tsultem at Mongolian University of Arts and Culture, Ulaanbaatar in 1997. He also graduated in Fine Art study in the class of Professor Lothar Baumgarten at University of the Arts Berlin in 2004. His drawings express concrete situations including politics, globalization, conflicts and war, discoveries and innovation of human history, mostly based on current events heard through English, German, Russian and Mongolian international radio. Also the sound of languages such as Bhutan, Vietnamese, Indian and other countries gives him inspiration as well. His works have been exhibited throughout in Europe and abroad including the Modern Art Gallery Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, Haus der Kunst in Munich/ Germany, Mongolian Embassy in Berlin, Museum of Modern Art/Hofstallungen in Vienna, Cologne Art Fair 21in Germany, Arsenale in Venice. He has been the recipient of award and honours including Karin-Abt-Straubinger Foundation Fellowship (Germany), the Art Omi International Artists Residency Fellowship (USA). He was visiting as Artist in residence programm the Cité International des Arts in Paris and he is going to attend an MA Fine Art study at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design London in 2010/2011.

Come see these artists' works at Open Studios Day! Sunday July 18, 1 to 6 pm, Omi International Arts Center, 59 Letter S Road, Ghent NY 12075.
call 518 392 47 40 or send us an email for more information and directions.