Roberta Burchardt welcomes you to this Autumn´s Open Studios, sharing the questions behind its making, why we foreground listening, and what it means to meet the grant holders exactly where they are – choosing to interact with the plenitude of the practices in residence.

Roberta Burchardt is a IASPIS Project Manager. Together with the grant holders and their collaborators; and Johnny Chang; Stefan Wrenfelt; Rikard Heberling; IASPIS team; and International Dance Programme, we have generated this Autumn´s IASPIS Open Studios.

Mark Frygell and Joa Ljungberg talk about Mark´s working process, involving semi-automatic drawing and doodling, later manifesting in complex and colorful paintings; how the characters of his work populate a realm beyond our physical reality; and why the fantastical and magical is crucial to keep us sane. J.L.

Mark Frygell is a studio grant holder in Stockholm, Studio 2. 1 April 2021 – 30 September 2021. Joa Ljungberg is Curator of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden.

Lap-See Lam presents ’soundtrack for a process’, with excerpts of sounds and music composed for previous and ongoing work. These include Phantom Banquet (2019-2020), The Singing Chef (2021-) and Dreamer’s Quay (2021-). Music and sound composition by Marlena Salonen and Linus Hillborg. Ping-Kwan Lam’s voice as The Singing Chef.

Lap-See Lam is a studio grant holder in Stockholm, Studio 4. 1 April 2021 – 30 September 2021. Ping-Kwan Lam is the artist´s father and collaborator in previous and ongoing works. Marlena Salonen is a sound artist and musician. Linus Hillborg is a composer and musician. All are based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Sebastian Moske reads a text-collage in collaboration with the musician Yasmine El-Baramawy. Using the format of ’Open Studios’ to get text and music in dialogue for the first time, they use a call and response -method as test for the upcoming video-work ’I myth you’ which will be shown during Gallery Night, at Malmö Konsthall. With lines from ’Doktor Glas’ (1905) by Hjalmar Söderberg, ’Kallocain’ (1940) by Karin Boye and ’Faceless Killers’ (1991) by Henning Mankell.

Sebastian Moske is a Malmö grant holder. 20 June 2021 – 27 September 2021. Yasmine El Baramawy is a Composer, Oud Player & Sound Artist based in Malmö.

Krolikowski Art – Alexander Krolikowski and Alexandra Krolikowska share an immersive piece that allows us to dive into the artists’ personal experiences and childish stories which affect their art practice today. Special sounds and audio background provide a sense of spy-like aesthetics or secret service messages, along feelings of being present. While Alexander reflects on his childhood during the Soviet Union, with the Iron Curtain and spy-fever; Alexandra remembers her experience of growing up with Protestant Christian grandparents. So, if Alexander´s free communication was limited by paranoid and totalitarian Soviet politics, Alexandra felt locked within a fanatic religious system. In attempt to find a language without such limitations and borders, the artist duo investigates in mediums such as radio waves and satellite images, researching communication and its psychological, social, and ecological aspects. A.K. and A.K.

Alexander Krolikowski and Alexandra Krolikowska are studio grant holders in Stockholm, Studio 3. 1 September 2021 – 15 November 2021.

’To unearth the huaca’ is a sketch by Chiara Bugatti, Mariana Jochamowitz and Nicolás Rivera. ’A crumbling cube of compressed diatomaceous earth. We tell the story in a virtual space and we confess a fictional plan. However, ’to unearth the huaca’ ends up being anchored by a real occurrence, when we saw your performance ’Rehearsing Brutality, until it is totally destroyed’ and realised you knew about huacas without having seen one or knowing their name. And because we knew the huacas, ruins of pre-hispanic monuments in the coastal desert of Peru, we understood the cube as one.’ — M.J. and N.R.

Chiara Bugatti is a studio grant holder in Stockholm, Studio 1. 1 July 2021 – 30 September 2021. Estudio Jochamowitz Rivera is based in Lima, Peru, where the architects combine their design work with teaching.

Lisa Trogen Devgun and Johanna Gustafsson Fürst talk about insights from the process in the studio, what happens to the work on site at IASPIS, and of a seemingly frictionless system made for oblivion, but that the artwork reels out and challenges.

Lisa Trogen Devgun is a studio grant holder in Stockholm, Studio 6. 1 April 2021 – 30 September 2021. Johanna Gustafsson Fürst is an artist and Professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

Raha Rastifard shares a paced reading that will, perhaps quite abstractly, give insight into her process between making and being. From real presence and spirituality to nature, art, human potential and geometry.

Raha Rastifard is a studio grant holder in Stockholm, Studio 9. 1 April 2021 – 30 September 2021. Reference texts from A.H.Almaas and Loai M. Dabbour.

Bianca Traum, Ingrid Mugalu and Anna Näsström share a raw, casual conversation over art, identity and ’all that good stuff’, with Gloria Anzaldúa´s ’Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality’ as grounds for opening and questioning issues of personal and social narratives, and possibilities drawn from our embodied experiences.

Bianca Traum is an International Dance Programme grant holder in Stockholm, Dance Studio. 15 August 2021 – 15 November 2021. Ingrid Mugalu has a background as a hip hop dancer with further education as an Ethnologist. She is a program advisor at Dansens Hus, Stockholm and part of the reference group for Dance and Circus at the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. Anna Näsström is a dancer and choreographer with a background in social, non-institutionalised dance forms and cultures.

Merve Gül Özokcu shares a sound collage that opens up her ’on the road/ on-site’ research with recordings over the past 10 years. While travelling through the geographies with women in villages of Turkey, daily routines reveal spaces of care labour and encounter the collective aspects inherent to food. Oral history becomes a tool, where eco-feminist perspectives unveil the social reproduction of architecture.

Merve Gül Özokcu is an online grant holder Istanbul/Stockholm. 1 October 2021 – 1 November 2021 and studio grant holder in Stockholm spring 2022. The voice pieces heard in the records include Merve’s individual researches along with the collective works of Architecture for All Association.

Geoff Robinson shares ’Durational Situation / Ume River / Birrarung’, an audiowalk during the Re-Think Festival Norrlandsoperan, focused on the deep time and anthropocentric relations of the Ume River. Speaking from Melbourne, the narrator relates the river system of Birrarung and its flow into Nairm, to the Ume River and its flow into the Gulf of Bothnia.

Geoff Robinson was supposed to stay in Umeå for a three-month residency this autumn, but international travel restrictions put an end to these plans. With local help and research, Geoff still managed to finalise the soundwalk. The Re-Think Festival Norrlandsoperan took place 3 – 5 September 2021.

Yingmei Duan shares the track ’朋友 Friend’, from the album ’Forty-Eight Years Ago, the Road an Ocean’, developed with Chinese contemporary composer Xiaohan Han. The lyrics mostly come from Yingmei Duan’s performance artworks. Xiaohan’s inspiration for the music comes primarily from the descriptions of Yingmei’s works. On this basis he combined her improvisational singing, documentation materials from Yingmei’s live performances, and her personal experiences as a performance artist. These diverse points provided the structure from which Xiaohan composed the album. Y.D.

Yingmei Duan is an Umeå grant holder. 31 August – 29 November 2021. The track consists of Lyrics: Yingmei Duan & Xiaohan Han  /  Composer Remix: Xiaohan Han  / Acoustic guitar, harmonica, backing vocalist: Han  /  Double bass: Bobby Zhang  /  Vocals: Yingmei Duan.

Yingmei Duan has been making performance art for many years, her artwork involves and incorporates people from different cultures and parts of society. Improvisational singing, sound, language and collaboration with different musicians are often part of her live performances and performance installations.

Yingmei Duan’s participation at the Re-Think Festival consisted of an installation at Verkligheten Art Gallery in Umeå. The work is an interactive performance installation, where the artist herself also takes part in an attempt to connect with the audience through Chinese calligraphy. In the installation she draws on her own life experiences and twenty-year-long art career to investigate what everyday objects can tell us about a human being.