Visitors 2016

During her OCA residency, Saodat Ismailova is planning to work on archives of silent Uzbek films from early 1930s and film journals from the region to create a work dedicated to the female body in relation to its public representation. Furthermore, as part of the OCA ISP programme Ismailova will travel to Tromsø to develop her first solo exhibition in Northern Europe at the Tromsø Kunstforening (TKF), which is scheduled to open in January 2017.

Saodat Ismailova has studied filmmaking at the Tashkent State Institute of Art in Uzbekistan. Subsequently she joined the cinema department of Fabrica, Benetton's research centre, Treviso, Italy, where she directed the short film Zulfiya and co-directed Aral, Fishing In An Invisible Sea (with Carlos Casas), awarded Best Documentary film of the 2004 Torino Film Festival. Her first award-winning feature film 40 Days of Silence premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 and has since been presented in more than 30 countries around the world. She is presently working on directing her next feature-length film Barzagh, which has received support from the Hubert Bals Fund, The Netherlands, and the Asian Cinema Fund, South Korea.

Saodat's video- and sound-installations have been presented in numerous international exhibition and festivals including most recently the 2013 Venice Biennale (Central Asian Pavilion) and 'Lost to the Future', the 2014 Singapore Biennale. Titled 'Celestial Circles', her first solo exhibition was presented at the Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg, Germany in 2015.

Currently Ismailova is a guest artist at Le Fresnoy, National Center of Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing, France, where she is working on the three-screen film installation Stains of Oxus – featuring the Amu Dariya, a major river in Central Asia and collecting the dreams of its inhabitants alongside the river's shores – and the 'choreographic film' Two Horizons, which reflects on dance heritage in Central Asia and the disappearance of these dances.

Rometti Costales’s artists-in-residency is the first residential programme forming part of the OCA project 'Thinking at the Edge of the World. Perspectives from the North’ and it has been structured together with the artists through a light and a dark period of visitation and research in the North. The light period residency will take place in May and June 2016 in Nordland and the Svalbard Archipelago and it is made possible through the kind support and collaboration of Nordland County Council, Bodø; The Hamsun Centre, Hamarøy; Árran Lule Sámi Center, Tysfjord; and The North Norwegian Art Center, Vågan. The dark period residency will take place in February 2017 and it is made possible through the kind collaboration and support of Pikene på Broen, Kirkenes.

Rometti Costales have been working together since 2007. The duo consists of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales. Their work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions including: Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; La Casa del Lago in Mexico City, Mexico (2014); L’Appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco; La Central in Bogota, Colombia; Jousse Entreprise gallery in Paris; Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, United States (2013); Project Room Arte Actual in Quito, Ecuador (2011). They have also presented their work at Proyecto Siqueiros - La Tallera, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2015); in the context of the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador (2014); at the Frac Nord Pas-de-Calais, at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, at the SALTS art centre in Basel, at the CRAC Alsace in Altkirch, at Fondation Gulbenkian in Paris (2013), at the Kunsthalle Zürich, at the Qalandiya International Biennial, Jerusalem and Ramallah (2012), at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London, at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2011); at the 29th Sao Paulo Biennial and at CAPACETE (2010)… They are currently preparing a public commission for the Bordeaux Urban Community at the invitation of Catherine David. Their work will be presented soon at Tenderpixel in London, at the 12th Bienal Monterrey FEMSA in Mexico. Josegarcia ,mx gallery in Mexico will be dedicating a solo exhibition to them in 2016.