The 2018 Artists Development Programme (ADP) laureates presented the works produced during their six-week residency in Luxembourg at the EIB premises on 25 June. The exhibition of their artworks will be on show at the EIB until the end of September. Visitors will have the chance to visit the exhibition during the biennial open day event Private Art Kirchberg on 23 September in which the EIB is participating.
The four beneficiaries arrived in Luxembourg on 14 May and spent six weeks at Abbaye de Neumünster researching and developing an art project. They also participated in a mid-residency mentoring session with Darren Almond, having previously visited him in his studio in London.
Bill Balaskas (35, Greece) and Antoni Theodoridis (33, Greece) were the winners of the geographic call for applications, targeting artists from Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta. Bill Balaskas presented three installations, Workbench, Rue Thouin and Point of View, exploring the concept of utopianism and its limits – a central theme in Balaskas’s artistic and academic research. By constantly oscillating between the present and the past, these three works interrogate in different ways the project of the Enlightenment, and the relevance of its key principles of rationality, progress and social transformation to the current historical conjuncture.
Antonis Theodoridis presented The Box of Curios , an accordion-style artist’s book, containing a collection of collaged objects – decontextualized and appropriated by the artist – and creating the artist’s subjective pattern of visual resemblances and correlations. In dialogue with the book, is Theodoridis’s Unknown relics/relics of the Unknown, a series of photographs created in collaboration with the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art in Luxembourg and documenting a selection of objects – currently on display at the museum – of which aspects remain unknown or uncertain up to today.
Francisco Gallardo (35, Spain) – member of FRAUD, a duo of media and spatial artist-researchers (together with Audrey Samson) – created an installation responding to the creative brief ‘Disruption: The Imprint of Man’. The installation Finis-Terra consists of two hammocks, whose fabric’s embroidered details depict satellite imagery of earth’s surface. The work is an art-led inquiry into the use of terrestrial sense date to predict natural calamities, and thus political and social unrest.
Grzegorz Stefanski (34, Poland), the winner of the call for applications on “Cultural Heritage: Dealing with History through Art”, produced an untitled video work, recording images of EIB’s premises and superposing them with a subjective reflection by the artist on the ideas of identity, embodiment and memory. The video work is complemented with a series of untitled works on paper.
About the ADP
The EIB Institute launched the ADP residency in 2013. So far, 19 budding artists from 12 EU countries and Turkey have benefited from the programme. The residency has two angles, geographic and thematic. Each year the geographic programme shifts its focus within the EU but consistently seeks artists from countries that are under-represented in internationally-recognised European art spheres. The second (thematic) angle addresses EIB strategic priorities and current topical issues in Europe.
