Nida Art Colony (LT), (August 28 - 31, 2016)

When arriving at a new place, a certain courage and openness is required in order to start engaging with the situation. We are all awkward with the newness that makes us at first feel perplexed - not only the surroundings, but also other people's presence, bodies, language, their experiences and communication styles, even the way they dress, eat and sit. And if you are going to spend the next three days together, you are going to bond - yet, not in a forced way but more naturally and through activities that are staged as non-direct bonding strategies.
      The Nida Art Colony as a place is well known for its surroundings, especially its location nearby the Baltic Sea and the White Dunes. All those elements of the particular places add certain magic to it. The mesmerizing effect of the sea as well as the direct presence of nature, such as an elk eating leafs from a tree in the garden just next to the Nida Art Colony building, generates a feeling of being outside your own habitat. This served as a unifying aspect. Almost being a strategic point where the meeting and/or merging of different contexts and backgrounds happens.
     Alongside the usual “touristic” activities like walking by the seaside, going to swim, sunbathing or having ice cream, we engaged in doing morning pilates (that taught us to link the imagination with our bodies), reading Ursula K. Le Guin's text The Seasons of the Ansarac (initiated by the Young Girl Reading Group, that reminded us of the smoothness of a rhythm, monotony and sharing) and watching films (as a form of rest and relaxation).
      The meeting in Nida provided a certain setting for the generation of future plans/ideas and joint collaborations. It was triggering the memories of being together without a directly visible goal or aim, like group activities that we all did back at school, during camp seasons, etc., requiring to indulge in a relaxed and processual activity of mind and body connection.

The results are brewed afterwards. They ought to emerge.

BCC: Curators Go to The Bar 90+ (2015)

Reference here is to the 89+ platform by Hans Ulrich-Obrist & Simon Castets, for which so called ‘post-internet’ artists and cultural producers were invited to reflect on the new sensiblities of art production in the digital age. Is there a new paradigm in technologies that affects and constitutes the different way of thinking, seeing, consuming and working? How does ”post- internet” art reflect on distribution and frame it?

BCC is happy to present an online reader accompanying the series of events Curators Go to The Bar 90+. The reader introduces with both new and recycled material by artists and writers such as: Eoghan Ryan, Hannah Heilmann, Justė Kostikovaitė, Pakui Harware, Rory Rowan, Rózsa Zita Farkas. Edited by Maija Rudovska.
Available here

BCC: Curators Go to The Bar 90+:
lecture, workshop and screening The series of BCC: Curators Go to The Bar 90+ will be taking place at National Art Gallery and elsewhere in Vilnius on March 27-28th. They will be featuring a workshop by curator/gallerist Rózsa Zita Farkas (Arcadia Missa,UK) and a presentation by artist/curator Hannah Heilmann (Toves,DK), among others.
Detailed programme available here

BCC are happy to announce Eltons Kūns (LV) and Eoghan Ryan (IE) as residents for a one-moth residency at Rupert in March 2015.The open call at Rupert was intended for BCC: Curators Go to The Bar 90+ events, scheduled to take place in Vilnius late March, 2015.

In conjunction with the exhibition What Thinks Me, curated in Taiga Art Space, St.Petersburg in June 2014 BCC organised the first meeting of Curators Go to The Bar 90+. Participants: Nikita Kadan, Monika Lipsic, Dmitrij Simanovskij, Rebecca LaMarre, Elina Petrova, Juste Kostikovaite, Maija Rudovska.

Partners:
The Lithuanian Culture Institute; Rupert; Contemporary Art Centre; National Gallery of Art; Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Lose&Find (2013)

BCC invited the UK based artist Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad to produce a workshop Lose&Find within the 5th International Contemporary Art Festival Survival Kit organized by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. The workshop proposed to embark on an expedition to one of Riga’s neighborhoods – Sarkandaugava. A game format was used to discover the locality and invent models of alternative action, collaboration and communication.
     Can play act as a permissive research tool that leads to new knowledge? By overlaying new rules and flexing the existing ones that govern public space Lose&Find proposed a parallel engagement with the city and defined it as a site of experimentation. The act began with a series of collaboratively devised instructions that specifically considered the Sarkandaugava — its geography, spatial politics, impressions, and implicit and tacit knowledge.

Interview with bahbak hashemi-nezhad

BCC: Curators Go to The Bar (2012)

Curators Go to The Bar was a three day (23th-25th October, 2012) public event taking place at kim? Contemporary Art Centre and Riga Central Market. Participants: Joachim Hamou (DK), John W. Fail (EE/USA), Maria Arusoo (EE), Lars Cuzner (NO), Institut for Colour (NO), Maija Rudovska (LV) and Juste Kostikovaite (LT).