CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
2021
Donna Kukama (South Africa)
Artist In Residence August 2021
Donna Kukama is a transdisciplinary artist and creative researcher whose practice presents institutions, books, monuments, gestures of protest, and economies that are as real as they are fictitious. Her practice takes on an experimental form, shifting between performance, video, text, sound, and multimedia installations, with the aim to subvert how histories and value systems are constructed.
Kukama has exhibited and presented performances at several notable institutions and museums, including the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, Kunsthal KaDe in Amersfoort, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea Milano in Milan, South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, Tate Modern in London, nGbK in Berlin, and the New Museum in New York. She has participated in the 57th Belgrade Biennale; 12th Lyon Biennale; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; 8th Berlin Biennale (as CHR); the 10th Berlin Biennale‘s public programme, as well as the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She is the 2014 recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art and was a nominee for the MTN New Contemporaries Award (2010) and the Visible Award (as NON-NON Collective), 2011.
Kukama acquired a Masters of Arts in the Public Sphere from the Ecole Cantonale d'Arts du Valais in Switzerland in 2008 and is currently a PhD candidate at the Transart Institute for Creative Research, in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University. Her pedagogic engagements include a guest professorship at the HBK Braunschweig (2019-2020) and a current position as a lecturer at the Wits School of Arts (University of Witwatersrand) Department of Visual Arts since 2011. She currently lives and works between Berlin and Johannesburg.
Emilio Rojas (Mexico)
Artist In Residence July 2021
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant and refugee youth.
His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions like The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. Rojas is currently a Visiting Artist in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York, since 2019 and the inaugural resident of the Judy Pfaff Foundation. Where he developed a new commission for Live Arts Bard at the Fisher Center, which which premiered November 2019, focusing on the theme of Borders. Currently working on a new video commission in collaboration with poet, artist and activist Pamela Sneed, for the newly formed Human Rights and Arts Centre at Bard.
Sindy Butz (Germany)
Artist In Residence June 2021
Sindy Butz is a German-born interdisciplinary visual artist, Butoh dancer, and somatic movement educator living and working in New York City. She creates conceptual endurance performances, performance-based video art and photography, multisensory sculptural installations, and olfactoric scent projects. She executes her work with a passion for the research on the human body, the body-mind connection, introspection, altered states of consciousness, heightened sensitivity, slow-time perception, and hyper-controlled micro-movement.
In her project-based works, she explores belief systems and ideologies throughout history, socio-political transformation processes, collective memory, the human unconscious, behavior, human sensing, and the notion of time.
Butz holds a Bachelor's Degree in Visual Arts from the academy AKI Enschede (Netherlands) and a Master's Degree in Art Science from the University of the Arts Berlin, focusing on coaching through art and Corporate Social and Cultural Responsibility program development (CSR/CCR). She continued her postgraduate research with the renowned DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholarship at the New York University in assistive technology at the Interactive Telecommunication Program. Sindy currently pursues an advanced Dynamic Embodiment™ Somatic Science and Movement Training by renowned Dr. Martha Eddy to further develop her sensory and immersive installations projects.
Butz will use her residency at Glasshouse to develop a new sensory installation and performance series "Alchemy, Ceremony, and Coffee" which is based on her previous social sculpture and scent-based performances with coffee.