Ac/kademie 3: Place/s of Return

Wed NOV 17, 2021 Online event, 16:00 CET

With Elisa Caldana, Felix Kalmenson, Hanni Kamaly, and Fazal Rizvi

Please join via Zoom (password: 777), YouTube or Vimeo. 

Place/s of Return explores what it means to be distant and to process and respond across places of displacement, absence and/or loss. It looks into what happens when a connection to a place has been lost over generations or centuries, or when a place has become distant and can no longer be revisited. Whether embodying a physical environment, a memory or a moment, a person, or a single or multiple fictions, each of the places discussed may serve as a place of return, confrontation, response, or communication.

Elisa Caldana is an artist working primarily with sculpture, performance, film, and writing. Her works are united conceptually by the use of abstraction and imagination to draw attention to political and social issues, analysing the paradoxes and liminal spaces that generate from the coexistence of plural standpoints. Caldana studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt where she was a student of Simon Starling (Fine Art class) and received her BA and MFA in Visual Arts from the IUAV University of Venice. Her work has been exhibited in exhibitions and presentations internationally.

Felix Kalmenson is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive. By bearing witness to everyday life, and hardening the more fragile vestiges of private and collective histories through their work, Kalmenson gives themselves away to the cadence of a poem, always in flux.

Hanni Kamaly works with sculpture, film and performance. Through a research-based process, the artist has developed a practice in reading material culture in terms of racial and colonial history. In these varied mediums and manifestations, Kamaly engages with questions of memory, embodied narratives, attention and agency.

Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist. While he has spent a few years thinking about the materiality and immateriaity of the sea and its borders, he also keeps returning to the personal and familial as a place of trigger. Rizvi is currently beginning his long term engagement and research in reference to the glacial and mountainous terrain in the north of Pakistan, where he hopes to settle next year.

The Jan van Eyck Academie and the Rijksakademie alternate monthly in hosting a public dialogue with their artists-in-residence. The Ac/kademie project is a collaboration between the Jan van Eyck, Rijksakademie, the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in Finland.