Visitors 2007

Corey McCorkle is interested in the Utopian ideas of nature and transcendence, which he pursues in many of his installations. McCorkle's work has been included in the surveys Make It Now at Sculpture Center (2005) and Greater New York 2005at PS1, and was featured in a solo exhibition in 2006 at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. McCorkle's work has also been included in The Plain of Heaven by Creative Time in NYC (2005) and in Monopolis at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2005). Most recently, his work was included in Just Kick It Till It Breaks at The Kitchen in NYC (2007). McCorkle will have upcoming exhibitions at Pompidou Center, Paris and SMAK in Gent. He is featured in the November 2007 issue of Frieze.

This residency is made possibly with 03 Funding: specifically designated funds made available by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for exchange with countries of the South in the field of contemporary art, discourse and production.

According to Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Mark Leckey is best known for manipulating pop images and music into dreamy, druggy, disjointed variants on music videos. Sometimes his work has a rough-edged energy, as in his 1999 club-life classic, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. Londonatella (2002) and Parade (2003) are nocturnal fantasies of beautiful people and consumer culture related to the 1980's photo based work of Richard Prince. He is also known for working with his band Jack2Jack in music video combinations as in The March of the Big White Barbarians - a sarcastic tour of public sculpture in London using only still images, and Shade of Destruction, a dark and baroque narrative based on a Graham Greene story about the destruction of a house in post-blitz London.

Mark Leckey is currently Professor of Film Studies at the Staelschule in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He is together with Ed Liq, Bonnie Camplin, and Enrico David, the founder of the band donAtelier. In 2008 he had a solo exhibition,Industrial Light and Magic, at Le Consortium in Dijon, with previous projects at Portikus in Frankfurt, Migros Museum in Zürich, Tate Britain, London and within group exhibitions at P.S.1/MoMA, Dundee Contemporary Arts, BALTIC, Manifesta 5, Salzburger Kunstverein, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art among others. He is represented by Cabinet in London, Buchholz Galerie in Cologne, and Gavin Brown in NYC.

Rosalind Nashashibi uses her 16mm camera as a catalyst, an accelerator of the real. Her films investigate the divide between reality and its extra-dimension - which could be fiction, the world of archetypes or spiritual realms, combining an interest in epic narrative with close observation of details. Throughout her work, she has observed small communities (Hreash House, 2004 and Midwest, 2002); investigated the unconsciously symbolic function of objects (Park Ambassador, 2004, Proximity Machines, 2007) and of a human standing in for an idea (Ambassador, 2004, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer); she has found mythological figures in the urban fabric of New York (Eyeballing, 2006) and attempted to reanimate encased objects in a museum (Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer). Her recent production focuses on the notion of bachelor machines. Bachelor Machines Part 1 combines the observation of a closed community - a cargo ship crew - with the attribution of an anthropomorphic character to the ship as a machine in itself. Conversely, Bachelor Machines Part 2 revolves around Thomas Bayrle's meditation on the invention of the machine, in particular the diesel engine, as man's materialisation of the desires once conveyed abstractly through the repetition of the rosary. Nashashibi conceives her practice more as a tool offered to the viewer to interrogate the world with her, than a report on our current state of affairs. Winner of Beck's Futures in 2003, Nashashibi has had solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and CCA Glasgow (2004). In 2006 she participated in Momentum, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway and in an OCA residency in February 2007 with a later solo show at the Chisenhale. In 2007 she also represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and exhibited in Contour, third Biennial for Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium and at Matrix, Berkeley Art Museum Berkeley California.

Pierre Bismuth tackles the challenges of contemporary art by addressing the representation and the reception of a work of art; by playing on the modalities and power of language and image; and by reappropriating art history and modern cultural references, from fashion to cinema. In doing so, he incorporates all artistic mediums available, from origami and collage to screenwriting and art installations. Bismuth has exhibited his works extensively throughout Europe, and North America. He earned an Academy Award in 2005 for co-authoring the screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Dessislava Dimova is a writer and curator. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She holds an MA in philosophy from CRMEP, Middlesex University, London and in Art History from the Bulgarian Academy of Arts, Sofia. In 2010 she curated 'Thank You for Your Understanding – 2', International Antakya Biennial, Antakya, Turkey. Recent projects include 'In 15 minutes everyone will be in the future. An opera' (18th Week of Contemporary Art, Plovdiv Bulgaria, 2012)and 'Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, Material Culture: Things in our Hands' (Christine Koenig Gallery, Vienna, 2011). Dessislava Dimova is a founding member of Art Affairs and Documents Foundation, Sofia and founding editor of blistermagazine.com. Her first novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in Bulgarian in 2009 (Razvitie, Sofia).

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.

Recent shows include, How to?, Kunsthalle Zürich; Grey Flags, The Sculpture Center, New York; Group Therapy, Museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Bolzano; Incipit, Espace Paul Ricard, Paris and The Look of Law, University of California, Irvine. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York.

Helen Mirra is an artist whose work occurs in varied scrap media, and engages structural and conceptual logics. Mirra engages quite directly in relation to poetry, but her interest is as much in the metrical as in the lyrical. This metricality, even percussiveness, inflects her work which is informed by anxieties related to the conflicting ecologies of the modern world. Within the various forms in which she operates, there is always a source material upon which decisions are made. Recent projects include Instance the Determination, which indexes works by John Dewey and Jane Addams, at the University of Chicago, Cloud, the, 3, published by JRP Ringier/Christoph Keller Editions in 2007, as well as solo shows at Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe; Peter Freeman, New York; Galerie Nelson, Paris; Dallas Art Museum; Berkeley Art Museum and the Whitney Museum, New York. Mirra completed her MFA at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1996, and has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, and Artadia: the Fund for Art and Dialogue. Mirra was a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm in 2005-06, and teaches at Harvard University.

Gabriel Kuri is an artist whose sculptural practice addresses issues of coding experience, temporality and space. His work encompasses an array of media grounded on the grammar of everyday lexicon and exchange. His vocabulary of forms places emphasis on process and the open and unstable nature of meaning. He studied at ENAP UNAM Mexico (88-92) and Goldsmiths College London (93-95). Recent solo shows include 2006 Govett Brewster National Art Gallery New Zealand, 2004 and 2006 Galleria Franco Noero Torino, 2004 MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2003 and 2007 Galeria Kurimanzutto Mexico. Recent Group shows include 2006 Brighton Photo Bienale, 2004 State of Play Serpentine Gallery London, 2003 Interludes L Venice Bienale.

From 2008 until 2013 Pablo Lafuente has been the Associate Curator at OCA, for which he developed a number of projects, among others the anthology Whatever Happened to Sex inScandinavia? In 2011 he was a co-curator with Marta Kuzma and Peter Osborne of Norway’s official representation for the 54th Venice Biennale, which included the lecture series 'The State of Things'. Lafuente has written for numerous magazines and books, and since 2005 he is an editor for the publishing and research organization Afterall. Lafuente is also a lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where he runs the MRes Art: Exhbition Studies.

Chin-tao Wu is an author and academic who specializes in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed to New Left Review and New Statesman. Her latest book, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s, published by Verso in 2002, is being translated into Chinese. The Turkish edition was published in 2005, the Portuguese edition in October 2006, and its Spanish edition was published in February 2007. She is currently Assistant Research Fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London.

Marko Lulic reworks examples of modernism and exhibits them in iconic architectural spaces. In 2005, Lulic constructed a project in the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC, using large-scale monuments built throughout the former Yugoslavia under Tito's regime as a point of departure. He has exhibited at the Frankfurter Kunstverein; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Kunstraum, Innsbruck; MAK/Schindler House, Los Angeles; Grazer Kunstverein; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg. His upcoming solo projects in 2007 will take place at the Kunstverein Heilbronn, Kunstverein Oldenburg, and the Kunstverein Arnsberg. The artist published Modernity and YU with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade and Tesla 21 with the Bawag Foundation, Vienna. In 2007, he will publish new catalogues -Durch weichen Beton (Soft Concrete), with Grazer Kunstverein and Revolver Books, Frankfurt; and with Kunstverein Heilbronn and Snoeck, Cologne.

Thomas Bayrle is an artist who was trained as a weaver and currently works with drawings, collages, film and computer graphics. Bayrle focuses on ideas around the masses in his drawings, photocopy collages and film animation sequences dating from the 1960s, and further into ideas around generating superstructures through geometric patterns of images with a variety of techniques and materials. In doing so, his work reveals contradictions within the forms of organization upon which society rests. Bayrle taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stadelschule in Frankfurt from 1975 to 2002. He has received several awards and prizes including the Prix Arts Electronica, Linz (1995) and the Cologne Art Prize (2000). Bayrle's work has been shown in over thirty solo exhibitions internationally including in Documenta III and VI.

Rosalind Nashashibi uses her 16mm camera as a catalyst, an accelerator of the real. Her films investigate the divide between reality and its extra-dimension - which could be fiction, the world of archetypes or spiritual realms, combining an interest in epic narrative with close observation of details. Throughout her work, she has observed small communities (Hreash House, 2004 and Midwest, 2002); investigated the unconsciously symbolic function of objects (Park Ambassador, 2004, Proximity Machines, 2007) and of a human standing in for an idea (Ambassador, 2004, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer); she has found mythological figures in the urban fabric of New York (Eyeballing, 2006) and attempted to reanimate encased objects in a museum (Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer). Her recent production focuses on the notion of bachelor machines. Bachelor Machines Part 1 combines the observation of a closed community - a cargo ship crew - with the attribution of an anthropomorphic character to the ship as a machine in itself. Conversely, Bachelor Machines Part 2 revolves around Thomas Bayrle's meditation on the invention of the machine, in particular the diesel engine, as man's materialisation of the desires once conveyed abstractly through the repetition of the rosary. Nashashibi conceives her practice more as a tool offered to the viewer to interrogate the world with her, than a report on our current state of affairs. Winner of Beck's Futures in 2003, Nashashibi has had solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and CCA Glasgow (2004). In 2006 she participated in Momentum, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway and in an OCA residency in February 2007 with a later solo show at the Chisenhale. In 2007 she also represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and exhibited in Contour, third Biennial for Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium and at Matrix, Berkeley Art Museum Berkeley California.

Francesco Manacorda is a tutor in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London, and a writer and a freelance curator. In 2004 he curated the exhibition The Mythological Machine at the Mead Gallery, Warwick University, on the impact of mass-media images, and in 2005 A Certain Tendency in Representation - Cineclub at Thomas Dane, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and he organised the symposium Ecology and Artistic Practice for the programme Arts&Ecology at the Royal Society of Arts, London. The same year he also was the curatorial correspondent for the Turin Triennial The Pantagruel Syndrome. In 2006 he curated Subcontingent - The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Satellites at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. He just published a monograph on Maurizio Cattelan (2006, Electa), and regularly contributes to Flash Art, Metropolis M and Domus.