Last updated: May 2012
ComPeung Grant 2012 - Call for applications
Due to our continuous support by our generous private donor, we are able to continue the ComPeung Grant program and are very pleased to advertise the ComPeung Grant 2012!
We are calling for applications for 2 ComPeung Grants 2012 for a 1 month AiR @ ComPeung.
Eligibility & Conditions:
Individual artists as well as artist duos are eligible to apply. Artist groups (max. 3 people)
can also apply but we won't be able to fully fund the travel expenses for the whole group.
At the end of the grant residency we expect the grant beneficiaries to present their
outcomes in form of a public presentation/lecture.
The period for the 2 residencies is fixed and scheduled for October 2012, which is not
negotiable.
Each of the 2 grants covers:
Air ticket to/from artist's home country
Transportation to/from Chiang Mai International Airport
Small artist fee
Accommodation/studio
3 home-cooked meals per day
Interested artists are to apply online only by providing:
ComPeung Grant Application Form (.pdf / .doc)
Proposition of work or project to be undertaken during the grant residency, which can be
part of a current work-in-progress or a new body of work.
Artist statement clearly stating the objectives for applying for this particular residency.
Curriculum Vitae (2 pages A4)
Max 10 images of the work
Links to sound, video/animation work and/or artist websites
*All documents are to be merged into a single pdf/doc file (not exceeding 5 MB).
Disciplines & Media (open list)
· Visual Arts, Media, Architecture, Performing Arts, Literature, Music
Grant application deadline: 31 May 2012. Late applications will not be considered.
Applications are be sent to: compeung@yahoo.com
Grant notifications will be emailed by end of June 2012.
previous grantees (2010 - 2011)
ComPeung Revisited 2007 - 2012
catalogue
Photo Credit: Mona Oren
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM 2012
The ComPeung Artist-in-Residence Program is designed for local and international artists to live and work together with our team and the local community. Interested artists are encouraged to apply by providing ComPeung with a preliminary proposal of her/his/their art work or project. As a work-in-progress we understand that the proposed project might change in the process.
We are now accepting applications for our regular residencies in 2012. (more details)
Artists @ ComPeung
Rasmus Vasli (Norway)
Active Ageing – An ongoing investigation
As a photographer working mainly with portraiture I wish to express a genuine interest
in human emotions and relations through the subtle elicitations exposed during a simple
portrait. My intention is not only to capture a fascinating face through the medium of
photography, but also to encapsulate a moment of a person's life in its fullness and
honesty. Inspired by the announcement of 2012 being the year of active ageing, I hope,
during my residency in Doi Saket to set focus on the elderly people who live there, and
their daily activities.
Suzi Garner (USA/Vietnam)
My current project is a novel entitled "The View from Cloud Mountain". The story is about an ethnic minority man in the mountains of Southeast Asia who plays a flute at funerals and has a strong connection to the spirit world. I have worked for several years with ethnic minority communities and became very inspired by the spiritual practices and beliefs of ethnic minority people in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. While at Compeung I intend to work further towards revising my manuscript for publication while drawing on the local environment and communities for further inspiration.
"A Death in Hanoi" by Suzi Garner. Monotone Press, 2011.
With an American Bachelor's degree in fine art photography and an Australian Master's degree in culture and development, I have been living and working in Vietnam since 1997. Speaking fluent Vietnamese, I have participated in many cultural revival and socio-economic development projects involving different ethnic minority groups, including the Hmong, ethnic Thai, Tay, Nung, Dao, and San Chi groups in Vietnam. I find the lives and spiritual beliefs of ethnic minority tribes in Southeast Asia to be incredibly inspiring. Aside from conducting academic research, I have done 2 photodocumentary projects with ethnic groups, as well as written studies for organizations such as Oxfam Great Britain, IUCN The World Conservation Union, and Enfants et Developpement. During this time I also continued to write and do my own artwork.
Trygve Luktvasslimo (Norway)
"My motive is the potential for individual transcendence and
biographical liberty, and I investigate how the premise for such
concepts is seduced by social normalisation, formed by religious and
traditional currents, and influenced by popular culture."
Trygve Luktvasslimo holds an MFA in Visual Art from Malmö Konsthögskola. He is a sculptor and a performance artist, and lives in Northern Norway and Berlin. Previous performances include "33 ⅓ The Final Insult", "A Shot in the Dark" (Berghain Kantine 2007), "Black Diamonds aren't forever" (HAU1, Berlin 2009), and "Catching Fire" (ps122, NYC 2007). He has participated in group exhibitions at Basso in Berlin, Henie Onstad Art Centre, and Tromsø Kunstforening. His last solo presentation was for Persbo Studio in Sweden. Luktvasslimo is currently curating an international group exhibition entitled "Odor, Water, Limo".
http://www.trygveluktvasslimo.com
Amanda Krantz (Australia)
My practice is underpinned by a playful exploration of materials, where I harness mistakes to create beauty. I deliver the paint in pours, squirts and flicks, employing gravity and using the natural fluidity of paints to mimic the randomness of the natural world. Although the delivery of paint to canvas is somewhat playful and random, the preparation of paint, chemicals and mediums is calculated and almost alchemical in approach.
Each piece is multi-layered, creating depth with levels of sharpness and contrasts in opacity and transparency. I like to play with the focus in a painting by shifting layers, pulling them forward or rubbing them back, playing the layers like faders in a recording studio. Often there are old paintings underneath the new and I like to leave windows on the surface layers, peering to the old underneath. I think of this technique as reverse collage and this thinking also inspires me to experiment with resin and collage, the results of which are strongly evident in my current work.
Franzisca Siegrist (Spain/Norway)
In previous years my works were mostly inspired by the concept of movement and also more recently by nature. The idea of integrating nature in my work is still visible, in form of an object or as a working space.
In performance art I have found an extended way of developing ideas, having the possibility to related also to other art disciplines, such as sculpture, video or installation, but using always performance art as a base.
Creating with this interdisciplinary way gives me the opportunity to seek the possibilities of my body and observe the relations with time and space.
Usually they are simple objects from everyday life I use to create pieces, transforming their use, taking them out of their regular context and giving them a new meaning. Working with the symbiosis among artistic and daily actions is in my ongoing projects a starting point, combining these concepts and researching the borders. Observing and analyzing all the actions we realize and repeat every day inspire me.
The result of my performances ranges between absurd and poetical images, and are often site specific works.
At ComPeung I will be researching the local culture, their everyday life and their objects. Create a cultural exchange and through that, new everyday actions.
Catherine Thompson (Canada)
Nomadic
My work and my life circles around what you could call 'nomadic' living. It is a word that I commonly use and though it is not an entirely adequate term, it will do. I find myself landing on what you also might call 'home' in many places. Many places in Canada, where I mostly live and in a couple of places in other parts of the world. Compeung is one of those homes and it felt so right away when I arrived for my first res here in 2011. It has been so good to be back home again. This year at Compeung (2012), I been working with textiles for the most part; making pieces of clothing primarily with Pwo Karen fabrics from the Sop Moei district in Mae Hong Song province. I also used 20-30 year old fabrics from unknown hill tribe (chao khao) sources. The sounds, the shape of the land, the air, the living inform what I do. I could feel as I stitched up my pieces by hand that I was living through the lines of the land. The land of southern Alberta in particular, which this winter I am missing so much. The stitches are also of this place in the north of Thailand and I find the two places, so different, merging. Again.
The pieces that I made at Compeung will be well worn during a long solo horse ride that, all willing, will take place in May of 2012. It will be year two of my long ride over rough beautiful open country in the western plains of of Saskatchewan and Alberta. The essential takes precedence; clothing is essential; simplicity is essential; conservation of energy, awareness of moment, gut feelings, the skies, my companion horses. As time goes on, I can feel the non essential peeling away and being left by the wayside. Important absolutely on a long ride, but also, it is becoming clear, in a long life.
Trevor Leech (UK)
YES / Bamboo Wall
YES
Living letters "YES" uses Compeung's site for a permanent installation where headges are shaped into letters by the intervention of a wire structure.
The contrast between Compeung's site and the letter structures placed in it questions human intervention in shaping the natural environment.
The word Yes is and affirmation to compeung as a place for artistic exploration,sustainability and inspiration.
"Bamboo wall" its part of an ongoing exploration by Trevor of different ways of creating living walls.
Bamboo has been employed to create a canvas which uses different plants,flowers and grasses as the source of colours,textures and shadows to create a simple and sustainable living wall.
Trevor Leech has studied art, design and graphics at university and worked as a freelance artist, photographer and graphic designer. He has traveled around the world as a DJ and sound engineer for more than 15 years and for the past 3 years he has been working for biotecture living walls systems, building, planting, growing, installing the walls and doing the maintenance. www.biotecture.uk.com. He manages his own business called Re-pot, which grows plants and works with the maintenance of living walls across the UK. Re-pot is an eco company with principles of recycling and working organically.
Manuela Benini (Brazil/Italy/UK)
The Red Dress Project
Manuela Benini is a movement and performance artist who works with different movement traditions including kathak, maracatu and butoh dance as well as video and photography.
She has a life long project entitled "Red dress" where she performs in locations around the world wearing a red dress.
Her work offers a comentary on environmental and human rights issues in the different locations she performs.
In Compeung, Manuela explored possibilities using living installations (plants and living walls) as sites for performances and performed at a disused quarry in Doi Saket are as part of her life long project "Red Dress".
Maia Sørensen (Denmark)
ComPeung Grants 2011 Artist
The ComPeung Grants 2011 are funded entirely by a private donor.
A SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
My experience at ComPeung-ComPeung Grant 2011
by Maia Sorensen
Jan. 2012
ComPeung gave me an opportunity I would never have had in any other way: to work and live for one month in a completely strange environment with other artists and animals. The ComPeung team has created a space that is raw, beautiful and inspirational and the experience will stay with me forever.
My motivation for applying for the ComPeung grant was primarily for two reasons:
1. I wanted to experience a different culture, nature and live under basic sustainable conditions, to confront my own comfortable life style and habits.
2. To have one month only to explore ideas and new ways of working in company of artists from other disciplines.
My goal was to create a three screen dance video with no narrative and no performer, and have a camera attached to my body while filming my movements around what I experienced.
At the same time I wanted to work differently than I usually do, less planning and more improvisation and play:
My first approach was to attach the camera and dance to give the spectator the physical feeling of my movement, but I realised that the feeling does not translate directly.
So I started to work with simpler movement directions as well as being extremely aware of where the camera was facing. This time around the video felt too self aware and the physicality felt flat.
Then I met a snake and that was the turning point for my project.
In collaboration with Ong, I started to attach the camera to moving objects: a hot air balloon which we build ourselves, a kite and a plastic ball that worked under water. With this footage the camera started to have its' own life and the movement became much more interesting.
The project is still in the editing process, and I still don't know if I have a final product, but I learned a lot about the relationship between how the camera moves and what's in front of the lens. I am continuing my research of the accidental camera movement, freeing the camera movements from the person, and forced camera movements.
Most importantly was my experience with the raw beautiful nature and how people live with it. The release of control and acceptance of the forces of nature and life, is both inspiring and intimidating to my Scandinavian controlling mentality.
Over all, the residency met my expectations, shook hands, and then took off to a different level that made the time so rich of emotions and experiences, that are still too close to describe.
A Subjective Experience is becoming a doodle of movements that overlap the edited video clips. I have worked with three different approaches: object moving in front of still camera, deliberate camera movements and in collaboration with Ong attaching the camera to moving objects such as a ballon, kite and inside a plastic ball. The video will be connected through direction of movements, that lead the spectator through a scrapbook of my first experience in Thailand.
A SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE is a three-screen-video-dance-collage- installation, where everything is seen from the perspective of a dancing body. A camera is attached to different body parts while moving through the landscape of ComPeung. The camera movements create an independent dance that invites the spectator to feel the movement:
...feeling the temperature, feeling the soil, feeling the grass, feeling the leaves on the trees, a stone in my sandal, the freedom of spinning around myself while seeing the unfamiliar land, the color of the sky, a spider moving, the new smell, a strange flower, the sensation of a lake or waterfall, falling to the ground, feeling the dry sand in sweat, covering my body as I roll down hill...
The 'I' is removed, the body, the surface, and left is a nonlinear story of physicality and sensations.
The three screens will each be a collage of cut out moving images. Some images are static wide shots of the landscapes, that the other images (my point of view) is moving through. The three screens continuously change, as the POV images are traveling and discovering new things. The collage images will demonstrate how an experience brings along memories and associations, which help to shape and color the present.
http://maiasorensen.weebly.com/
ELIN&KEINO (Finland)
ComPeung Grants 2011 Artist Duo
The ComPeung Grants 2011are funded entirely by a private donor.
…Repetition, Repetition, Repetition…
Expectations, Experiences and Evaluation- ComPeung Grant 2011
by Heini Nieminen
Jan. 2012
In the residency we wanted to explore continuous movement and repetition in art with a meditative attitude. These elements came from our interest in meditation and Buddhism. For a while we didn’t have a clear plan how we would implement this “investigation”. We wanted to focus on the process and ephemerality of the work instead of on the final product.
After a while and several talks we ended up working with two separate works; a site-specific installation / environmental artwork where the focus was on the continuous movement of a sculptural form, and with a more performative piece where we used repetition in writing. Both of these working methods are quite new for us as well as working intensively together from the beginning of the process in same the place.
It’s always easier to see the things that were difficult than the things that were easy. I will here mostly concentrate on things that I learned from but these issues aren’t negative, at least for me.
We have worked together in Elin&Keino for a while but very separately and as individual artists we have very different ways in processing art work. In my point of view this was our main challenge, how to meet each other in the middle.
For years I have tried to leave behind some ”bad habits” that I have learned from school - over analyzing things while working. I’m quite often aware of what I do and why, but I feel like I need to give space and possibilities for changes, transformation, experimenting along the process in the form as in content. This may seem a pointless wandering but I think sometimes you can find something more when you look for.
By questioning my own opinions and habits and trying to work in an other way was sometimes much easier and got me closer to our goal - the meditative way of working. When I knew how or what exactly I should do, there was no space for experimenting- for sideways, no reason to think which for few moments cleared my mind. But in an other way it also lead me to think about the final shape- a product. I understand that we can’t shift years of our western patterns and cultural behaviour into a eastern inner calmness by working for some hours in the field of art with a meditative starting point. But what I find important is that I realised that this way of working can reveal something that I can’t grasp in an other way - and I have no words for what this something is. I guess it has quite a lot to do with tacit knowledge that can’t be explained by words…?
But it’s obvious to me now that if you want to work with this meditative method you need to be very committed or the repetition is just a repetition or not even that and a continuous movement is not continuous and meditative way of working is turning into pursuing a visual goal. Does this lack of meditative feature make the concrete art work unsuccessful? I have no answer to that. But at least as an experiment it was successful.
It’s easier to see things more accurate, your routines and behavior patterns when you are away from home. Of course we tried to change this point of view deliberately but at least I found much more that I expected. The most important ”lessons” from the residency didn’t come from the actual work process but from the whole experience - the people, the way of living and thinking, the surroundings and last but not least from dogs. RedX is my idol, I learned a lot from him as funny as it sounds. It’s difficult to separate between ”the artist and the person thing” that I have learned and realised. But as I wrote already in the little ComPeung book the most irritating and most important thing I found out is that I have to take more risks and be more brave.
ComPeung was a great residency, much more than I expected. The friendly atmosphere, great food, beautiful surroundings, interesting talks ect. provided finally a possibility to stop for a while, to concentrate and to be influenced. It’s has given us time and space to think, talk and try without feeling pressure from the outside (I can create that myself very well). Being back in Finland feels very hectic and I’m sure we would have never been able to explore these themes here. We have planned to continue this investigation and/or to reshape it and to fit it into a new context. We also got some new ideas there that aren’t really connected to the theme we were working on but which were initiated by our experiences at ComPeung. I’m excited to work with these ones as well. So thanks again for making these chances and experiences possible!
Just to make it more clear after this messy artistic self evaluation here’s something more understandable. In these rules of John Cage defines quite clearly what I came to appreciate during the residency.
Rule 7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
Rule 8. Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.
Rule 10. We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules, and how we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X qualities.
During the residency we wanted to investigate continuous movement - its sense and senselessness.
This theme can be seen in the chosen elements and the act of creating the art works, as well as in a more conceptual/spiritual way; as an exploration of an unknown culture - the Buddhist way of viewing life as a continuous circle and the principles of meditation. As Repetition has an important role in meditation, we decided to take this feature as a starting point for our project.
We explored this theme by working on two separate works; a site-specific installation / environmental artwork where the focus was on the continuous movement of a sculptural form, and with a performative piece situated in the local surroundings and in which the mental process was emphasized. In both cases, we chose to work in a meditative way, keeping in mind the Buddhist way of thinking and focus on the process and ephemerality of the work instead of on the final product.
Practices
#1 Growth (Kasvu) – Practice to acknowledge the potential of growth in all situations
#2 In a/the Moment (Hetkessä) – Practice to live in the moment
#3 Life (Elämä) – Practice to understand the notion of life as a continuous circle
#4 Materia (Materia) – Practice to understand the unimportance of material wealth
#5 Body (Keho) – Practice to acknowledge the temporary nature of the body
