2019: Xiaotan Wan, Media and Screen Culture
Xiaotan’s current project examines the value turn of the female discourse in Chinese realistic TV series. More specifically, she distills two historic nodes for the transmutation of the female discourse and analyzes the value representations and agents during this transfer. Through the in-depth investigation and recognition of the two shifts, she explores the institutional and cultural factors that influence the creation of Chinese TV series with realistic themes and make consultation on it. She is also translating a feminist academic book into Chinese during her visit. In the creative activities, she is conceiving a script on traditional Chinese medicine.
2018: Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley
In collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Advanced Media Studies, the BMA presents an exhibition of works by MacArthur Award-winner Mary Reid Kelley and her collaborator and husband Patrick Kelley. The exhibition, We Are Ghosts (April 4 – Aug. 19), includes two films featuring their signature black-and-white sets and costumes. This is Offal (2016) is inspired by Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem, The Bridge of Sighs, in which the narrator, a forensic pathologist, laments the suicide of a young woman whose body is pulled from the Thames. The Kelleys’ new film, In the Body of the Sturgeon, brings a feminist perspective to an exploration of life on a submarine stationed in the Pacific at the end of World War II, with the USS Torsk docked in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor inspiring the mise-en-scène. The exhibition also includes six light boxes featuring characters from both films and elements from the Kelleys’ sculptural sets.
2017: Tamar Guimarães
Tamar Guimarães was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1967. She received a BFA in fine arts from Goldsmiths College, London (2002); an MFA from Konsthögskolan i Malmö, Sweden (2007); and an MA in art theory from Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi, København, Denmark (2009). She also participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, as a Studio Fellow (2007–08) and acted as a research curator for the Guangzhou Triennial (2008), to which she also contributed her artwork.
2015: Sharon Hayes
Sharon Hayes is an artist and an associate professor at The Cooper Union in New York City. In her work, Hayes engages multiple mediums – video, performance, and installation – in ongoing investigation into specific interactions between history, politics, and speech. Her residency was April 9-19, 2015.
2014: Camille Henrot
Camille Henrot is a French artist who lives and works in New York. Her work includes video installation, sculpture, drawing, and assemblage. Her film, Grosse Fatigue, which was shown at the BMA, won the Silver Lion Award at the 2013 Venice Biennale. The energetic 13-minute video on the origins of life and creation myths incorporates behind-the-scenes footage of the prestigious collections at the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of Natural History.
2013: Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs (pron. rux) follows its self declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures.