Call for applications: Performing Artist Residency in Beijing

Artist in Residence Programme

A residency opportunity of two months in Beijing for a performing arts professional is being offered by the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

Beijing is a city developing at a radical pace, and its emerging contemporary art scene consequently shares that characteristic. More and more international artists want to witness this dynamic, and are keen to work and live in such an active but at the same time confusing context.

This residency is available for a period during March - May 2010 and will be hosted by Theatre In Motion Beijing (TIM)/LAB, a cross-disciplinary work space for artists, theorists and researchers with a base in Antwerp, Belgium and Beijing. Find more information about TIM/LAB below.

The residency will provide an artist or researcher linked to the performing arts with the opportunity to temporarily plug into TIM’s research community in Beijing, which consists in the first place of artists, but expands into different disciplines. The focus of the residency will be on process oriented research rather than strictly product-producing research. However, if proven worthwhile and time allows so, the residency might culminate in a small-scale curatorial project, open studio or presentaton set up in collaboration with local partners.

The successful candidate will be provided with a large room in a fully equipped studio apartment to live and work, with all necessary appliances available. The apartment is located downtown Beijing. They will also be granted access to a private working area in the TIM workspace.

The candidate will be required to provide progress reports of their residency to the Asia New Zealand Foundation and to conduct a series of presentations or artists talks in New Zealand upon their return.

Asia:NZ will provide:

• a return economy airfare between New Zealand and Beijing

• a stipend of NZ$40 per day

• the cost of a single entry tourist visa

• a contribution of NZ$300 towards travel insurance.

Applicants must be New Zealand citizens or permanent residents and able to exercise a degree of autonomy and self reliance. Professional practising artists with a record of achievement in the theatre arts are invited to submit a written application to Asia New Zealand Foundation by no later than 5pm on Friday, 25 September 2009.

A panel appointed by Asia New Zealand Foundation will select a shortlist of candidates, from which TIM will make a choice. Selection criteria will include:

• record of achievement;

• a specific artistic rationale for wishing to be resident in China;

• ability to develop networks and work collaboratively;

• an understanding of the aims of the Asia New Zealand Foundation;

• the quality and significance of the proposed residency project.

Timing:

• Friday 25 September: Application deadline

• Friday 30 October: successful candidate advised

• March – May 2010: residency takes place (dates to be confirmed between TIM and artist)

Please fill out the application form downloadable here in Pdf and send three copies of the supporting material requested. Please also include letters of support.

Please DO NOT send material which is spiral bound or in clear-files. Support material will not be returned. PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE ORIGINAL MATERIAL IN AN APPLICATION.

Post to:

Monica Turner
Projects Officer, Culture
Asia New Zealand Foundation
PO Box 10 144
Wellington 6143

For further information please contact:
Monica Turner: Phone 04-4708708. Email: mturner@asianz.org.nz

Read the Asia:NZ media release.

About TIM/LAB

TIM/LAB is a mobile laboratory for the contemporary arts with a base in Beijing and Antwerp (TIM/LAB Website) LAB supports research projects of contemporary artists using cross-disciplinary information and/or research strategies, while initiating own research topics stretching the borders of artistic research. At the core of LAB lays the question what cross-disciplinary interaction can learn us about the specificity and added value of artistic research in broader research debate, and what kind of organizational forms can be established to accommodate this.

The performing arts, performance and performativity are a reference on three fronts. First of all - and quite simply – because LAB has built up its main expertise in the performing arts, and wishes to further accumulate and elaborate this knowledge.

Secondly, because LAB recognizes in performance – here in its broadest sense - the intrinsic quality of a potentially interesting research tool. As an artistic medium, performance accommodates direct and live interaction between artist and audience, in the form of an action in space and time that, when alternated or reconfigured, can be used as a research tool to understand the relationship between the above mentioned elements. It gives rise to a form of artistic information that is specific enough to test its potential contribution to academic, architectural, even corporate debate dealing with similar concerns.

Finally, as we are part of a global artistic village, artistic mobility can also be read as a form of performativity. Space, territory and geography form the primary contextual platform in which the arts operate, interact (are mobile) and thus should be understood; but they also make out the contemporary and critical substance that when performed free us from borders, ideologies and markets – hence their two-folded importance.

LAB runs a research station in Beijing providing artists, theorists and researchers with a point of departure to work on a research project in China. In collaboration with a custom-made cluster of local partnerships - based on the content and needs of the research at stake - LAB provides artists, theorists and researchers in residence with infrastructure, access to information and a network in China. Partners in Europe and across the Asian region further “mobilize” projects by hosting them in their respective workspaces and art labs. In addition to selecting and supporting research projects proposed by artists, LAB also initiates own research topics for which artists and theorists are pro-actively invited to join.

Research projects show relevance in the Chinese context without being limited to it: LAB seeks to inscribe China in international research mobility and explicitly avoids one-dimensional, “China-tailor-made” projects. Rather than producing specific research about China, LAB proposes China as a provocation bringing about new perspectives and insights on global phenomena. LAB taps in on content generated in China but also connects with the new contexts, artistic architectures and mobilities established inside and with China. As a result, LAB keeps closely connected to partners in the Chinese periphery and abroad. As a networked organization, LAB supports mobility of artists and researchers while staying mobile itself.

LAB strives for long-term commitments and continues to invest in artists and projects that have stirred LAB’s artistic agenda, by hosting not one but a few research sessions, if possible concluded within the framework of small-scale curatorial projects.

Prevous artists in residence include Mette Ingvartsen (Denmark), Heine Avdal (Norway), Juan Dominguez (Spain), Boukje Schweigman (The Netherlands), Anna Koch (Sweden), CREW (Belgium), Wayn Traub (Belgium), Edwin Zwakman (The Netherlands), Jean Bernard Koeman (The Netherlands), Mette Edvardsen (Norway), Isabelle Schad (Germany), Edit Kaldor (Hungary/The Netherlands), Bill Aitchison (UK), Speedism (Belgium/Germany) and many more.