The Academy has a residency program for contemporary artists, theorists and curators with a focus on non-European countries. These fellows of the Academy, proposed and selected by the academy members themselves, receive the invitation to live and work in Cologne for between 1 and 6 months. The residency program is offered without the obligation to realise a specific project. Networking with the artists and institutions located in Cologne as well as with the independent scene is desired.
Kim Soyoung (Jeong) is a filmmaker and author from South Korea. She majored in Cinema Studies at NYU and is one of the first graduating member of the Korean Academy of Film Arts. As a critique she wrote for Cahiers du cinéma, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Cine-21 as well as for various newspapers on film and popular culture.
Her filmography includes Women’s History Trilogy (2000-2004) (Koryu: Southern women/South Korea / I’ll Be Seeing Her / New Woman: Her First Song) which was screened at numerous international film festivals such as Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Japan, and Digi Beta Festival, Berlin. Kim Soyoung’s feature length fiction film Viewfinder (2010) was screened at Busan International Film Festival, South Korea, Tokyo International Film Festival, Japan, as well as at Seoul Indie Film Festival, Seoul, and released in theaters.
Her books on modernity, gender, cinema, and media both were published in Korean and English, among these are Specters of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Cinema *(in Korean) and *Electronic Elsewhere: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), co-edited by Chris Berry, Soyoung Kim and Lynn Spigel.
She was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and Duke University and a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Kim Soyoung (Jeong) is the director of the Trans Asia Screen Culture Institute, Seoul Korea and editorial board member of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She is a founding programmer of Jeonju International Film festival (2000) and Seoul Women’s film Festival (1997) where she is still co-director.
She is currently working on her Open Cities Project (since 2014) and the Exile Trilogy *(since 2014) as well as *Diva – Sound of Nomad, a work in progress on female singers during the Kolhoz period of the Soviet Union and Good Bye My Love NK, a work in progress on North Korean refugee directors in Central Asia during the Soviet Union.
Kim Soyoung is a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World and a fellow of the Academy in September 2015.
Nora Amin lives and works in Cairo. She studied French and comparative literature and has worked Nora Amin lives and works in Cairo. She is a writer, performer, choreographer and theatre director and has worked as a teacher at the Academy of the Arts in Cairo for nine years. She started her professional stage career as a professional dancer and a founding member at the Modern Dance Company of the Cairo Opera House (1993/94). After that Amin moved to work as an actress in lead roles at the Hanager Arts Center till 2002. In 2000 she founded the independent theater group Lamusica and was the artistic director of the first international independent arts festival Jadayel in 2002.
She published three novels, four collections of short stories, an audio book, and translated 15 books on theatre and dance. Amin is the author of the first Arabic book on theatre and human rights Egyptian Theatre and Human Rights: the art of claiming our right under the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, 2003, and instructed the first storytelling workshop for women victims of the civil war in Sudan in cooperation with SIHA network. She is the author of Theatre for change: from the internal to the external, 2007.
One of her recent projects is The National Project for Theatre of the Oppressed where she trains units of Forum theatre activists all over Egypt. The team has now reached 500 activists in 30 cities and developed an Arab network of groups in Morocco and Lebanon. In 2014 she celebrated the 15th anniversary of her company Lamusica Independent Theatre Group ,where she directed 35 theatre, dance and music productions, by presenting a year long program of workshops and of ten restaged repertory productions with a grant from The Prince Claus Fund.
Amin was awarded with, among others, the UNESCO-Aschberg Laureat for the Center of the "Theater Of The Oppressed" in Rio De Janeiro (2003), the Samuel Fischer Guest Professorship for Literature, Germany (2004/05) and the Ibsen Scholarship, Norway (2009), and was announced by the British Council as the international young cultural leader of Egypt in the performing arts 2009/10.
In 2013 The National Festival Of Egyptian Theatre awarded her the prize of the best dramaturgy for her production An Enemy Of The People which was largely considered as the most popular theatre production in Egypt during political transformation.
Nora Amin is a fellow of the Academy from June to August 2015.
Raed Yassin is an artist and musician who lives and works in Beirut. He graduated from the theater department at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003. His work often originates in an examination of his personal narratives and their workings within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. He has exhibited and performed his work in numerous museums, festivals and venues across Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Japan such as Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010), Sharjah Biennial 10, UAE (2011), Art Cologne, New Directions, Kalfayan Galleries booth, Köln (2012), The New Museum, Museum as a hub, New York (2012), Thessaloniki Biennial 4, Thessaloniki (2013), and Beirut Art Center, The Impossible works of Raed Yassin, Beirut (2013).
Among his many recent exhibitions and festivals are October Salon, Belgrade City Museum, Belgrade, This is The Time, This Is The Record Of Time, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Blue Times, Vienna Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria, Yassin Dynasty in The Chinese Room, Castello Di Rivoli, Torino, Italy, and Songs Of Loss and Songs Of Love, Gwangju Art Museum, South Korea (all 2014). Yassin was awarded the Fidus Prize (2009), the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2012), the AFAC grant for production (2010), the YATF grant for production (2008 & 2012), and the Sharjah Production Programme grant (2014). He is one of the organizers of IRTIJAL Festival, has released several music albums and founded the production company Annihaya in 2009. He is also a founding member of Atfal Ahdath, a Beirut based art collective. Yassin is represented by Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki.
Raed Yassin is Academy fellow from May to June 2015. His new exhibition Karaoke opened in May 2015 as part of the Academy's PLURIVERSALE II in Cologne.
TkH (Walking Theory)/Teorija koja Hoda is an independent – institutionally non-aligned, extra-academic – platform for performing theoretical-artistic activism and was founded in 2000 in Belgrade. Since 2002 the TkH platform operates as an independent organization: the TkH-center for performing arts theory and practice which realized several programs: TkH Journal for performing arts theory, educational programs (PATS, s-o-s project, dramaturgical trainings, Knowledge Smuggling!, Deschooling Classroom), a regional online platform tkh-generator.net, programs dedicated to a critical reflection of the local scene like Forum for the Performing Arts Criticism and Walking Critique, artistic (Pro Tools) and theoretical events (conferences, labs), inter-disciplinary performances and other artworks, as well as hosting presentations and lectures by artists and theoreticians outside of Serbia. TkH collaborates with self-organized initiatives, organizations, and platforms from Belgrade (the Other Scene), the region of Western Balkans (The FaMa, Clubture), as well as several European platforms (i.a. PAF). Editorial collective: Ana Vujanović, Marta Popivoda, Bojana Cvejić, Bojan Djordjev, Siniša Ilić, Katarina Popović, Dragana Jovović, and Jelena Knežević
Ana Vujanović, Marta Popivoda and Bojana Cvejić came to Cologne as fellows of the Academy in March 2015, followed by Bojan Djordjev, Siniša Ilić and Katarina Popović in April and May 2015.
Tobaron Waxman is a visual artist and a vocalist. Tobaron was traditionally trained in Jewish philosophy, law, and liturgy for many years, and has created live art, photography, videos and films by repurposing that religious literacy and training in new ways both critical and reverent. Tobaron's work is a Queer interrogation of how borders and notions of citizenship make moral and ethical claims on our bodies. Their strategies have included: food, photography, tissue engineering, porn, biofeedback processing, curation, sound, choreography and voice.
Tobaron's work has been curated at international venues including Palais de Tokio, Videotage Hong Kong, Kunsthalle Vienna, Lentos Museum, Vdance International Video Dance Festival Tel Aviv/Ramallah, New Museum NYC, Momenta, Le Petit Versailles, Jewish Museum NYC, and Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music.
Tobaron has taught their voice and collaborative techniques at the Art Institute of Chicago and Hollins MFA Dance; lectured at Parsons, SOAS London, SMFA Boston, Videotage Hong Kong, OCAD and others. Tobaron was honoured with fellowships including Kulturlabor ICI Berlin for “Mechitza 7.1” — acclaimed one of the five best art experiences of 2010. For the endurance performance “Opshernish”, Tobaron is the recipient of the first ever Audience Award of the Jewish Museum of New York. In 2013, Tobaron created “The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency”, a summer institute of critical engagement with LGBTQ art, politics and histories, on the Toronto Island. Current projects include site-specific endurance performances for the a cappella transsexual voice, a hand painted 16mm film, and curatorial projects including their most recent written work: “Trans Women Artists: interviews with artists on the MTF spectrum” with forward by Susan Stryker (forthcoming 2015).
Tobaron Waxman was Academy fellow from January until December 2014.
Documentary filmmaker Negar Tahsili was born and raised in Tehran, where she continues to live and work. She is particularly interested in film, painting, and industrial design. Her work is centered on stereotypical perspectives of Iran, questions of gender between tradition and modernity, and the position of the individual in society.
As a fellow at the Academy, Tahsili has been working on a new screenplay that explores themes of identity, creativity, and art in exile. Last year, she visited Cologne on the occasion of the Heinrich Böll Foundation film festival, where she presented the preliminary work on her latest project, under the working title “Rose and Nightingale.” Completed in early 2014, the project bears the name “Private P.art,” and addresses the body and gender in Iranian contemporary art.
Her video “Of one essence...” (2005), which tackles the demonization of Islamic states after the September 11 attacks, was screened at various exhibitions across the globe. Since 2005, Tahsili has collaborated with Swedish and Swiss production companies on a series of documentary films. The docufiction “Shahrzad never tells the story” (2006) follows three transsexuals living in Iran; the documentary film “Wee-man or Women” (2008), which was screened at the Arab-Iranian film festival in Berlin, examines how the risks women face on the streets of Iran are handled.
Alongside her filmmaking practice, Tahsili curates exhibitions on Iranian video art. Her collection “Tehran 2008” was shown in Turkey, Macedonia, and the United States. She has also shot short films about contemporary artists in Iran for foreign broadcasters.
Negar Tahsili was fellow of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World) from February till end of June 2014.
The Australian Dr Timothy O’Dwyer is a saxophonist, composer and researcher, as well as current Head of the School of Contemporary Music at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. With a background in punk-jazz and free improvisation, Timothy O’Dwyer’s music constantly pushes the boundaries of style, technique and especially context stretching across borders of culture, performance practice and art forms.
He has toured widely internationally, released 8 CDs of original compositions to critical acclaim and is a member of the Australian contemporary music group ELISION Ensemble. Timothy was Academy fellow from August 2013 to August 2014.
http://www.timodwyer.com https://www.facebook.com/timodwyerfellowship?fref=ts https://www.facebook.com/TimODwyerTheFold
Etcétera… are a multidisciplinary collective of visual artists, poets, actors and performers that formed in Buenos Aires in 1997. They all share the intention of bringing art to the sites of imminent social conflict, i.e. to the streets; and vice versa, social conflicts are brought into the arenas of cultural production, including art institutions and the media.
Etcétera… worked closely with the human rights group H.I.J.O.S. (Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence) in developing and popularising a form of direct action protest called “escraches” i.e. acts of public denunciation and humiliation of human rights infringers in order to reinstall social justice and influence the state’s legal and judicial institutions to follow a certain course of action.
Etcétera… form part of the urban scene as a statement of protest, denunciation and public signaling; and as a result the interventions pertain to a specific time and place. Using street-art, public interventions, and performances that are by nature contextual, ephemeral and circumstantial, they combine humour, irony, poetic means of discovery and the deconstructive potential needed to forge a new kind of socially committed art free of hackneyed rhetoric, often sarcastic and at times “incorrect”. In 2005 they co-founded the International Errorist movement based on the idea that error is a fundamental principle of reality and life.
The group develops interventions and activities in collaboration with other collectives and individuals, inside and outside the art institutions, and in the field of education. Loreto Garín Guzmán (Chile) and Federico Zukerfeld (Argentina) are the co-founders of the collective and they coordinate the archive, activities and other initiatives. In 2013 Etcétera... received the International Award of Participatory Art.
Loreto Garín Guzmán and Federico Zukerfeld were Academy fellows from February 2014 to April 2014.
Ye Fu (Zheng Shiping) was born in Enshi, in the Hubei province of China. He belongs to the ethnic minority group of the Tujias. As intellectuals, he and his family were relocated to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. From 1978 to 1981 he studied Chinese literature and culture at the Hubei Institute for Nationalities. During that time he began to write and quickly gained fame in the literary underground scene in China. From 1986 to 1988 he continued his studies of Chinese literature at Wuhan University, where he also organised the “Hubei Post-modern Poetry Salon”. In 1986 he published a collection of poems with the title “The Night Howl of Wolfs”.
After graduation he was assigned a job at a public security unit in Hainan. He quit the job in 1989 to support the students at Tiananmen Square. After the bloody military suppression of the protests, he was sentenced to six years in prison. Following his release he was running a publishing house in Beijing for ten years.
Today he is a freelance writer, who is well known throughout China. Apart from publishing poetry and fiction, he also writes essays and reportage, as well as screenplays and scripts for television (for example the TV series “My Father’s War”, which was successfully broadcasted in China in 2009).
Since his work has not yet been translated into other languages, he is less well known in western countries.
Ye Fu has received many awards, among them the “Contribution Award of Contemporary Chinese” in 2009, a prize set up by the Beijing Institute of Contemporary Chinese Language; the non-fiction award from the Taipei International Book Exhibition in 2010; and the “Freedom of Writing Prize“ from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre in 2011.
His works include:
• Under the River, (Jiangshang de muqin), essay collection, Taipei 2009
• Paijian dong lai huan jiuchou, Selected essays of Ye Fu, Hong Kong 2009
• My father's war, novel (later rewritten as TV series script), Beijing 2009, reprinted in Hong Kong 2010
• Earth Lament, essay collection, Beijing 2010
• Xiangguan hechu, selected essays, Beijing 2012
From January to December 2013 he was a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne.
Alessandro Petti (born in Italy) is an architect, researcher in urbanism, and director of Campus in Camps. He is founding member and director of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), an art and architecture collective and residency programme which combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, collective learning, public meetings and legal challenges. Their projects have been shown in various museums and biennales around the world.
Sandi Hilal (born in Palestine) is an architect based in Bethlehem. She is consultant with the UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) on the camp improvement programme and visiting professor at Al-Quds/Bard College Palestine. She is founding member of DAAR as well as Campus in Camps.
She is co-author of several research projects, such as “Stateless Nation” with Alessandro Petti and “Border Devices” with Multiplicity, which are published and exhibited internationally.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b.1983) live and work together in Ramallah and incorporate a range of sound, image, installation and performance into their artistic practice. Their work explores issues connected to the politics of desire and disaster, spatial politics, subjectivity and the absurdities of contemporary practices of power, often finding themselves investigating spatio-temporal resonances in the relation between the actual, the imagined and the remembered.
Their practice increasingly examines the immersive, experiential possibilities of sound, image and environment, taking on the form of interdisciplinary installations and live audio-visual performances.
Their work mostly consists of large-scale installations, much of which they reinterpret into a performance and publish online.
They have exhibited and performed internationally and most recently founded the sound and image performance collective Tashweesh in Ramallah with local artist boikutt. Recent exhibitions and performances include 4th Guangzhou Triennial (2012), TBA 21 (Vienna, 2012), 5th Jerusalem Show (Jerusalem, 2011) New Art Exchange (Nottingham, 2011), Homeworks V (Beirut, 2010), The 6th Liverpool Biennale (2010) and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have been fellows of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne from December 2012 to August 2013.
The fellows network cologne is an intercultural and interdisciplinary platform that is engaged in the artistic dialogue among the various residency programs all over Cologne. It aims to connect the independent art scene with established art institutions and is a general contact for fellows for any matters and concerns. To develop a floating dialogue the network will establish regular meetings for fellows, taking place in different spaces in Cologne.
A big step for the fellows network cologne was the launch of its new blog in April 2015. The blog works as an information pool, bringing events, information on fellows and helpful material for fellows to one digital place. The network has been initiated by the Academy of the Arts of the World and the City of Cologne in 2013 and is glad to be funded by the RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur. It works closely together with its two main partners Opekta Ateliers and the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne as well as with its associated partners Literaturhaus Köln and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
The fellows network cologne is coordinated by the cultural educator Anna Kallage.