Artist in Residence Program | Visual Studies Platform

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 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.