Category: Bio-residency

The Creative Association of Curators TOK is a curatorial duo founded in St. Petersburg by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits in 2010 as a platform for research projects at the intersection of contemporary art, social sciences and socially oriented design.

As a nomadic collective working between Russia and Europe, the Middle East and the United States, TOK curators place their practice between historical analysis and political imagination. Their multilayered, durational and cross-disciplinary projects generate new knowledge about the causes and consequences of changing political realities.

Often working outside of traditional art spaces, TOK infiltrates into social structures, bringing their strains and corrupt functions into the public discourse in order to revisit the roles and powers of social institutions and redraft their potential future. TOK investigates mechanisms of post-Soviet public space and modern cities, collective memory and amnesia, the transformation of social institutions, including education and local governance, media and strategies for managing public opinion. TOK’s activities include exhibitions, performances, educational events (conferences, seminars, summer schools, round tables and discussions), and publications.

TOK curators will join the (Re)configuring Territories residency in the spring 2021.

Laura Kuusk lives and works in Tallinn. Her works (in video, photography and installation) are connected to recycling anthropological visual (found) materials. Her latest works address the identity construction and its’ links to visual intertextual materials. Her latest solo show “Dear algorithm, ” at Tallinn Art Hall gallery was dealing with the identity creation at the age of copy-paste culture, technology and climate change.

She has studied at Annecy Higher Art School (DSRA, 2014), Estonian Academy of Arts (MA in photography, 2008) and Tartu University (BA in semiotics and cultural theory, 2005). She has done exchange studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III University (2003). Kuusk works as an assistant professor in Estonian Academy of Arts since 2015. During the last two years she has been studying environmental technology at Tallinn University of Applied Sciences. In 2020-2021 she was a researcher at MOBERC30 “EUROREPAIR: Europeanisation through repair” research project at Ida-Virumaa by Francisco Martínez at Tallinn University.

At NART program and Reconfiguring Territories program I hope to be an agent of activation for the issue of natural and cultural territory changing through the consequences of war and climate change. The connecting element in my project will be water.

https://laurakuusk.com/

As a duo varialambo (Varia Sjöström, visual artist, musician and performer Hatz Lambo, visual artist, poet and performer) we formed in Berlin in 2018. 2019 we moved to Helsinki and were invited to the Festival Today Is Our Tomorrow. 2020 we have been invited to curate and facilitate an 8 months long Performance LAB program at Museum of Impossible Forms Helsinki and the Festival NOTHING TO LOSE. Last August we unveiled The Chainsaw Man, an immersive performance made for an online livestream format and supported by the KONE home residency grant. In September 2020 we launched our art and poetry book The Itching Triangle at PUBLICS, Helsinki. 2021 we will exhibit our new work Narrating WAR / HABITAT 1 in collaboration with Ali Akbar Mehta, and open Partners in Crime I-X our solo exhibition at Myymälä2 Helsinki.

„We like the idea of social fantasy. We like the state of over exhaustion and lasting plays. The repetition of given narratives is one of the last dinosaurs on earth. It’s time to bury it with dignity but fast.“

varialambo’s CV here.