The IUR will host two artists in residence during the autumn term

Claudia Fonseca Alfaro IUR Artist-in-Residence

After assessing 51 applications, we are happy to announce that Carolina Hicks and Gernot Wieland will be the Institute’s first artists in residence.

Carolina Hicks

Carolina Hicks is a visual artist, designer, writer, and experimental musician from Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Anthropology from San Francisco State University and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her current research interests are considering the affect + mental health implications of climate change, grief & mourning of non-human subjects, interior landscapes (the Psychic terrain), sentience, and the oeuvre of artist Paul Thek (1933-1988).

At the IUR, she plans to create an intermedia exhibition, seminar, and auto-publication.

“Life on Earth has begun to enter multiple layers of shock, denial, fear (xenophobia + hyper-nationalism), and the most exploited populations are suffering worst from the interrelated effects of global warming, political destabilization, displacement, cycles of poverty + crime, and racism. All of these deeply connected causes + effects can be found and studied in the world’s urban centers. ​I am most interested in the aspect of these complexly interrelated issues that is not often discussed: the mental/emotional health effects of urban social crisis and climate change. Aside from sterile statistics, what does it actually ​feel​ like for someone​ forced into the political, physical, and emotional dangers of cross-national migration – what does it feel like to mourn stability? When having to contemplate Collapse, we are, consciously or not, forced to grieve the future in the present. What repressed emotional effects does this have on policy makers, far removed? On the directly affected and displaced? What defines ‘home’ during a planetary transition like this? What ​emotions​ come up when having to contemplate a total reconfiguration of the Urban Future? How do all of these feelings differ from varying class, race, and privilege viewpoints? What does grief feel like when its being experienced for a hyperobject, such as the climate? I will conduct field-research within Malmö to pose these questions.”

Gernot Wieland

Gernot is an artist based in Berlin who has participated in several festivals such as EMAF – European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück, 2019); Belmacz, London (solo, 2019); Vdrome, London (solo, 2019) – to name a few.

He is currently developing new works for “Grand Hotel Abyss”, Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz (2019) and for solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Salzburg (2020), Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2020) and Quartzstudio, Turin (2021).

He was recently awarded with the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics at EMAF, Osnabrück (2019) and the Award of the 20th edition of MOSTYN Open, Llandudno (2017).

At Malmö, Gernot plans to present a lecture performance, together with a series of posters.

“All works are based on research, memory and narration and I work mainly with film and lecture performance. They bring together historical reports with personal recollections and scientific facts, fictional and real elements. The works are always embedded in research and analysis about former or consisting social structures and political incidents, creating a narrative around the human condition and examining the place of the individual in society. […] I consider lecture performance as a tool to poetically explore, describe and analyze many different disciplines including philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, psychology, and sociology.”

Would you also like to visit the IUR? Check out our Artist in Residence section for information.