Tirana Art Lab: Residency
Starting from September 2020 artists Donika Çina, Hanna Hildebrand and Alex Walmsley will each spend two months in residency at Tirana Art Lab – Center for Contemporary Art. The selected artists, chosen from over 200 applicants, will develop new works reflecting on Virtual Reality contributing artistically to the discourse generated by the project BEYOND MATTER. The residency program is part of the large-scale cooperation project BEYOND MATTER. Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality, co-founded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, dedicated to novel, digital approaches to exhibition revival, documentation, and dissemination, and the artistic, curatorial, and museological elaboration of the chances given by virtual representation.
Hanna Hildebrand, is a multimedia artist with Italian & Swiss citizenship. She lives and works in Berlin. She completed her studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2009. Film and photography are her main means of expression. The genesis of her work often has a documentary foundation, with emotionally driven narratives drawn from her observations of contemporary life. At the moment she is concluding the ongoing project “Omega Transit”. This multidisciplinary work has a science-fiction plot touching on topics related to contemporary society while reflecting its utopias and dystopias. It is an expressionist oniric story which follows a group of oppressed beings which flee their own planet, to start a better life on a new one. One central element of the work is the use of existing architecture of Chiasso, Switzerland, the border town with Italy. The trilogy of videos are produced in collaboration with la rada, Locarno, with a cast of young non-professional actors.
For her stay in Tirana during the residency, she will explore the possibility of imagination, memory, and forms of storytelling in specific relation to this place. The work will be be assisted by archival material, sharing of personal objects and contextualizing these memories and experiences in places of historical importance. Her project will then take these findings and bring it to the medium of VR, and create an immersive work.
Donika Çina was born in 1988 in Korça, Albania, studied at Academy of Arts in Tirana Albania, University of Arts and Design Cluj-Napoca Romania and at University of Art Braunschweig, Germany. She lives in Tirana, Albania. Çina works with video art, video installation, and short movies. The subject of most of her works is she herself, her biography and the story of her family or those surrounding her. Her works often concentrate in capturing those specific moments where the inner perception of the individual and the exterior collective consciousness clash. By dealing with real stories and characters as well as historical events her works often operate in the field of historical documentation. Her works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions including; MSUB/MoCAB Belgrade; TIA MUCH KLIMA, Halle 50, Munich; Albania is not Cuba, Havana; Dejeuner avec Marubi, Belvedere 21, Vienna; In-Between, Zeta Gallery, Tirana; Double Feature #7, Tirana Art Lab; Ardhja Award, Zeta Gallery, Tirana; Tirana Open 1 Book and Art Festival, Tirana; Archivitionism (archivism-activism-exhibitionism), Galeria Plan B Cluj-Napoca; Autopia Cycle, Eliava Market,Tbilisi; The Office Tirana, National Gallery, Tirana, and Museo Orientale, Torino
During the residency at Tirana Art Lab she will use the space of a technological lab for data recovery technology as the set up for the content of a video work as well as VR technology to digitally map a former art intervention in the public space in Tirana.
Alex Walmsley is a British virtual reality artist and developer based in Berlin. He is particularly interested in the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds, and how they are socially and technologically mediated. His work takes the form of interactive computer-generated environments, be they historic, speculative, or abstract, that make extensive use of digitised elements of the physical world. He comes from a background in archaeology and anthropology (University of Cambridge, University of Geneva). Alongside his artistic work, he is also currently a research associate for VR and 3D visualisation at the HafenCity University, Hamburg.
During the residency at Tirana Art Lab, he is interested in developing a series of virtual environments composed of reconstituted digitised material from the physical world (e.g. 3D-scanned objects, field recordings, videos, textures). These are to act as virtual “time capsules” for different areas and locations within the city of Tirana, as a means of exploring questions around digital archiving practises and the reconstruction of virtual spaces.
