Artist in Residence Program

The Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University offers a Visual Artist in Residence fellowship in collaboration with the Visual Studies Platform of CEU. These residential fellowships (up 5 months each with a minimum stay of 3 months) are offered on a competitive basis to visual artists who relate in innovative and convincing ways to the annual theme in various visual media, including film and digital applications.

Artist-in-residence in 2024/25

Anna Kryvenko is artist-in residence from October 2024 to February 2025.  She is working  on a hybrid documentary film using the deconstruction of images and the "reconstruction" of the city through the advertisements that people post on social media. That will help us see how the city of Mariupol has changed during the Russian occupation, how people left, or how and why they decided to stay. But all of this will be revealed indirectly, for example, through the sale of children's clothes, because there are no more children around to wear them. Also, a very acute topic directly related to the events of Mariupol is burials. This will be the second part of the film, i.e. what is going on in one of the most lucrative businesses right now, the funeral business. It is important for me to tackle this film not through the emotional side and the testimonies of specific people, but analytically and through the deconstruction of media images and facts.

Artist-in-residence in 2023/24

Nidhi Khurana is artist-in residence from October 2023 to February 2024. She explores through her work the experience of a place; the layers of history, memory and association that places create in each of us. During her fellowship in Budapest between October 2023 and February 2024 she began her research around water. The daily journeys that she took across the Danube compelled her to document and think about water in its various forms leading her to question the origin of water on the planet. Water is a magic liquid, an essential component for life to grow and flourish on the planet. Water makes up more than half the human body (by weight), making us a part of the wider flow while connecting us viscerally to it - a substance with the most unique properties which we often take for granted. We know a lot about water except its origin. Over millennia, earth has had more than one source of water but it is not possible to ascertain the different sources. How can a liquid essential to life on this planet be mapped? How can we map water? Rather how can we map the origin of water and what is the signature of water? Her exhibition is planned to be held in March 2025.  

Artist-in-residence in 2022/23

Andrii Dostliev is artist-in residence from October 2022 to March 2023. In this post-photographic project “OST: gesture, landscape, message“ he explores the archival photographs and postcards sent by (and to) the forced workers (Ostarbeiter) from Eastern Europe in Germany during World War II. It focuses on the ways these people were appropriating images of hostile landscape on photos and postcards and also on the ways these photographic prints were becoming small gestures of support between the workers and their families back home and also between workers themselves.

Artist-in-residence in 2019/20

Robert Lisek is artist-in-residence from January to May 2020. In the framework of the project he proposed research uses advanced AI methods (meta-learning) and cutting-edge technologies including immersive environments and virtual reality (VR) to offer an innovative, productive contribution to the domain of creative storytelling. Specifically, the project aims to propose a solution for problems linked to the creation of dynamic interactive narratives, specifically the problem of continuous adaptation of artificial agents in complex dynamic environments. This refers to the difficulty of designing artificial narrative agents that can respond dynamically and intelligently to evolving complex narrative situations. The main objective of this fellowship will be to research and develop new forms of  storytelling as a new dimension of artificial intelligence. This project will respond to the challenges posed by such dynamic changes by creating a meta-learning framework. In this system, the actor (neural network) learns a high-level procedure (meta-learning) that can be used to generate a good strategy (policy) in response to repeated environment changes.

Artist-in-residence in 2018/19

Katharina Roters is artist-in-residence from January to May 2019. Her project is a research-performance entitled SOFT TOTALITARISM RELOADED in conjunction with Jozsef Szolnoki, through the merging of fine art and anthropological strategies. It is a re-acting of Enzensberger´s essay, written in 1985, “Hungarian Confusions”. The locations, themes situations, meetings and moods of the original text are reconstructed, paraphrased and documented. The miniatures, as a social “metascan”, we set out to localise and visualise the neuralgic points and stereotypes, both within the scope of the propaganda and beyond it, it uncovers the direct 2 interrelationships between the power and morality of the declining communism and eso-nationalist  turbo-capitalism. A prominent role will be given to the presentation and interpretation of cultural memory as an ideological battlefield. Their project, which operates through various media, reveals, documents and reinterprets intellectual attitudes in the form of text, photos, videos, performances, street art and graphics. The final presentation will take the form of a visual art exhibition.

Former artists-in-residence: