The beneficiary of the inaugural 2013 EIB Institute Artists’ Development Programme has been selected: Jokūbas Čižikas, a 25-year old artist from Lithuania.
The call for applications attracted a lot of interest, with 89 applications from the five eligible countries (Baltic States, Malta and Cyprus).
The applicants were practitioners in a wide range of artistic media in the field of visual arts and presented inspiring and original projects for the residency. After careful consideration of all 89 entries, the jury selected a shortlist of eight before making its final selection. The jury consisted of members of the EIBI Arts Committee, advisers from the museum sector and the Mentor for the Programme, internationally acclaimed Polish artist Mirosław Bałka.
Jokūbas Čižikas will be mentored by Mirosław Bałka, whose works are included in the collections of the MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) etc.
The artist’s residency will provide Mr Čižikas with an outstanding opportunity to develop his practice at the highest level, through mentoring by a leading peer. He will spend a few days in Warsaw in late August to visit Mirosław Bałka and experience the latter’s two creative studios. He will then come to Luxembourg for five weeks, taking up his residency at the Abbaye de Neumünster, where Mirosław Bałka will join him in early October.
The programme aims to pay tribute to the extraordinary pool of young creative talent in Europe, and to acknowledge the value of experience and knowledge-sharing by way of a mentoring programme.
There is a strong economic feature of the programme: fostering emerging talent, in a highly challenging economic environment characterised by reduced funding for Europe’s cultural sector, enables the EIBI to add value and compensate for gaps in the market mechanism. This programme also serves the mandate of the EIB Group to contribute to social cohesion, which benefits from promoting such cross-border cultural synergies.
