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Artica 2024
21 November 2023

Announcing the OCA nominated residents for Artica Svalbard 2024

OCA is very pleased to announce artists Nastassja Simensky, Kamil Kak and Mhairi Killin as the OCA nominated residents for Artica Svalbard in 2024.

OCA is one of the key partners of Artica Svalbard who offer one of the northernmost artist and writer residency programmes in the world. Expressions of interest are open for a minimum of four week residency at Artica Svalbard. Learn more here

ARTICA photo

Nastassja Simensky

Nastassja Simensky, is an artist based in London. She uses fieldwork to explore and understand how complex issues around history and heritage, power and governance, ecology and the geopolitics of extraction are crystallised in specific geographies. Nastassja often works collaboratively with artists and non-artists, including archaeologists, powerplant workers, musicians, and ham radio enthusiasts, to make authored and co-authored artworks. Previously, these have included: place-specific performances on boats, in quarries, and inside a 7th century chapel; amateur radio broadcasts to transmit and publish text and image; sound work for radio and installation; films; and poetic texts.

Ai R bio pic Kamil Kak

Kamil Kak

Kamil Kak is an artist based in Oslo and Berlin, navigating the intersections of queer liberation, immigrants' experiences, and the fragility of recent historical narratives. The multidimensional approach in their process captures diverse statements and preserves untold stories. Their work urges audiences and participators to engage with and reflect on pressing social issues. Kak's artistic practice intersects with activism, uses exaggeration and bittersweet humor as a strategy for social transformation, and probes utopian visions of the world. During the residency, Kak will attempt to step beyond geopolitical narratives and research the complexity of Svalbard, shedding light on issues of identity, cultural preservation, and community rights.

Ai R bio pic Mhairi Killin

Mhairi Killin

Mhairi Killin is a visual artist who lives on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland where she works with the precious relationships between land, sea, humans, and other living beings. A Royal Scottish Academician, her practice seeks to counter the notion of islands as peripheral, romantic and marginal - rather it strives to reveal islands as progressive centres from which we can experience a unique yet relevant perspective on the forces shaping our futures. Working across the mediums of drawing, print, sculpture and film, Killin’s work explores how belief structures - religious, mythopoeic, and socio-political - have shaped the physical and metaphysical spaces we journey through.

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