UNIARTE TALK:
Artists in Residencies – Dec. 19, 2019
Avantia Damberg (visual artist / UniArte member) in conversation with Sasha Dees and Willum Geerts, both AIR residents in Curacao at the moment. Dees at UniArte and Geerts at IBB. Damberg will question them about their work experiences in Curacao as well as their broader experience with international residencies and how residencies could benefit the art field and its professionals in Curacao.
Sasha Dees
Dees is an independent producer, curator and writer in visual art, performing arts, literature and film. She owns a production & managment company (1998) working with artists and art-organizations internationally; producing and programming projects, exchanges and collaborations, scouting talent for venues, festivals and foundations. She also co-founded, with Philip Powel, the not-for-profit John106 (2003). In 2010 she initiated and curated an international residency for multiple disciplines in Amsterdam, Ailsa Anastatia participated in, transferred to art collective Vinger in 2014. She has been a resident in the region, and participates in visitor programs of international residencies as Art Omi, Residency Unlimited and NARS in New York. Dees’ currently works on a publication, a toolkit at sorts, mapping the art infrastructure in the Caribbean (insular) region based on 14 (of the16) countries she visited doing research on this topic from November 2017 until May 2019 on 14 islands. Development of this publication is in part made possible by Mondriaan Fonds (NL), Marguerite de Rooy, UniArte (Curacao), Nina Jurna (Rio), and Ateliers’89 (Aruba).
Willum Geerts
As multidisciplinary artist, Willum Geerts plays through prosaic elements from the everyday with the major themes of our absurd existence. In a poetic, associative and satirical way, his projects question the status quo of our contemporary off- and online world, in which the inevitable and intricate reality is in intimate entanglement with the world of entertainment. Within our current world Geerts looks for the moment between holding on and letting go. That one moment, when exhaustion strikes, and changes to the situation. Whether the situation is tiresome or not, it contains an inevitable insecurity: the constant possibility of change. Geerts is currently living and working in Amsterdam and presents his multidisciplinary work all around the world, in- and outside the regular art context. He lectures at the Fine Arts Department at the HKU University of Arts in Utrecht. Geerts is on the island as the Mondriaanfonds resident at Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) and has done multiple artists in residencies from Vietnam to New York and beyond. www.willumgeerts.nl