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Rockefeller Foundation Names Inaugural Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellows
October 15, 2008
The launch of the annual Creative Arts Fellowship Program at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center dramatically increases the Foundation's stake in the visual arts. Global in scope, the Fellowship Program is rigorously ambitious, highly selective and an unparalleled opportunity for the chosen artists, who are selected by a panel through a nomination process.
The Bellagio Center's conference and residency programs attract influential and relevant leaders, policymakers, artists, practitioners and scientists from around the world to share their ideas and projects, to debate and to collaborate. They address issues that are fundamental to the Foundation's mission.. In this rich, provocative environment, ideas and solutions evolve through the cross-pollination of the differences and diversity of those in residence at any given time.
The 2008 Creative Arts Fellows are:
Each Bellagio Creative Arts Fellow is awarded a three-month residency in a private apartment, complete with studio space, on the peaceful grounds of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, adjacent to Northern Italy’s Lake Como. In addition to room and board, each Fellow will receive 12,000 Euros, a materials stipend, round-trip travel expenses to Bellagio, and a printed catalog of artwork, to be produced after the residency.
An advisory panel of leading international curators and artists identified 2008 nominees from all over the world. The Foundation has chosen three of the most outstanding candidates and announced this year's Fellows on October 15th, during the London Frieze Art Fair.
Advisory Panel member and former resident Catherine de Zegher said, "To be offered a period of calm and distance away from other obligations allowed me to focus on the development of my writing.” She described her role as one of the advisory panelists as "a wonderful opportunity to share my enthusiasm for this rare space of quietude, reflection, and unexpected lucidity of artistic expression.”
2008 Bellagio Creative Arts Fellows
MONA HATOUM
Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum has lived and worked in London since 1975. She originally went to England just to visit, but remained after the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon prevented her from returning.
After studying at the Byam Shaw and the Slade School of Art in London, Hatoum became widely known in the mid-1980s for a series of performance and video works that focused on the human body. Since the early 1990s, her work has moved increasingly toward large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. She often transforms familiar objects—such as chairs, beds, cots, kitchen utensils, and even the human body itself—into strange, threatening, and sometimes dangerous things. In “Corps étranger” (1994), for instance, a video installation displays an endoscopic journey through the foreign interior terrain of her own body.
Hatoum has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta XI (2002), Biennale of Sydney (2006), and Auckland Triennial (2007). Her solo exhibitions have been featured at Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997), the New Museum of Contemporary Art and MoMA, New York (1998), the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (1998), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), Tate Britain, London (2000), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Magasin 3, Stockholm (2004), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005). The XIII Biennale Donna, in the Palazzo Massari in Ferrara (2008), was entirely devoted to a Mona Hatoum solo exhibition entitled “Undercurrents.”
The 2004 winner of the prestigious Sonning Prize, given biennially by the University of Copenhagen, Hatoum is also the 2004 winner of the Roswitha Haftmann prize from Zurich. From 2003 to 2004, she served as Artist-in-Residence on the DAAD program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm, Deutscher Akademischer Austrauschdienst). More recently, she was named the 2008 Rolf Schock Prize laureate in art. She currently divides her time between Berlin and London.
KOFI SETORDJI
Though his graphic art, sculpture, and installations have been exhibited all over the world since as early as 1982, Kofi Setordji lives, works, and organizes artistic resources in his hometown of Accra, Ghana. He began working as a graphic artist after high school. Since then, he has produced works in the graphic and fine arts, from sculpture and photography to print making and theater set design.
In 1984 he studied with the great Ghanaian sculptor Saka Acquaye, who taught him to cast and mold bronze and clay.
Today, Setordji prefers to work with wood, clay, stone, metal, and found objects. Major exhibitions of Setordji’s work have been held in Accra, Ghana; Abidjan, the Ivory Coast; Dakar, Senegal; Lille, France; Berlin and Munich in Germany; and Geneva, Switzerland. Perhaps his best-known work is “Genocide,” a multi- dimensional installation that took four years to assemble. It dramatically expresses protest against the civil wars that have torn Africa apart from Liberia to Rwanda.
The Ghanaian government has awarded Setordji various commissions for the creation of wall reliefs, including for the museum belonging to the mausoleum of Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Together with the French artist Di Rosa, he created the only public modern artwork in the capital city of Accra.
Setordji is active in West African regional organizations that support and mentor young artists and artisans. In 1994 he founded the ArtHAUS, which offers residences where artists share ideas and work without pressure or disturbance. He sits on the board of several institutes devoted to developing the creative arts. These include the Alliance Francaise and the NUBUKE Foundation.
SHAHZIA SIKANDER
The work of Shahzia Sikander spans a variety of mediums, including drawing, large-scale wall installations, animation, and video. Examining the provenance and canon of Indo-Persian miniature painting, Sikander pioneered an experimental approach to this genre in the mid-1980s in Lahore, Pakistan, and brought it into the realm of contemporary art. Her work launched a major following in Lahore, where the Miniature Painting department at the National College of Arts has undergone a historic transformation, becoming a sought-after choice for young artists pursuing majors in the Fine Arts program.
Sikander’s work deconstructs the conventional methods of addressing traditional miniature paintings and reassembles them to expand their associations, inserting new dialogues, often subversive in nature. Using wit, irony, and paradox, Sikander’s inventiveness draws upon literary, pop, media, and historical contexts.
Based in New York, Sikander researches and develops her works in various locations. Recent projects were an outcome of her many visits to Laos, Berlin, and Pakistan from 2006 to 2008. Sikander’s work is in collections in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Collections in California include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and San Diego Museum of Art. Her work is also included in the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Houston Museum of Fine Arts; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, among others.
Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007-08); and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England (2008). Her awards include the National Pride of Honor from the Pakistani government. In 2004, Newsweek listed her as one of the most important South Asians transforming the American cultural landscape. Her work has been regularly reviewed in publications including Art Forum, Art News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time. In 2006 Sikander was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos and she is a MacArthur Fellow (2007 to 2011). Her current show, Shahzia Sikander Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection, will be on exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum through Sept. 9, 2009.
The 2008 Bellagio Creative Arts Advisory Panel
- Amada Cruz, Program Director for United States Artists, lives and works in Los Angeles.
- Anna Danieri is the Curator of the Advanced Course in Visual Arts for the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy.
- Elena del Rivero, a visual artist, migrated from Spain to New York in 1991.
- Catherine de Zegher, currently Director of Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, is the former Director of the Drawing Center, New York, and co-founder and Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Belgium.
- Mario Garcia Durham, Director of Presenting at the National Endowment for the Arts http://www.nea.gov/, was the founder and Executive Director of the Yerba Buena Arts and Events in San Francisco.
- N’Gone Fall, an independent curator and art critic, is based in Senegal and France.
- Mario Fortunato, Director of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy, is a literary critic for the magazine L’Espresso and the daily newspaper La Stampa.
- Kim Hong-Hee is Director of the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Korea.
- Abaseh Mirvali lives in Mexico City where she is the Executive Director of the Fundacion/Collecion Jumex.
- Aneta Syzlak, curator and art theorist, is the co-founder and Director of Wyspa Institute of Art (in Polish) in Gdansk, Poland (Description in English).
- Nicholas Tsoutas is the Artistic Director of Casula Powerhouse International Centre of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.
- Isao Tsujimoto, the Director-General of the Japan Foundation in New York, is acting Director of the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
For further information about the Bellagio Center and its programs, go to the Creative Arts Fellowship Program press release or the Bellagio Center homepage