The announcements continue for M:ST's 10th Anniversary Biennial of embodied art practice!
M:ST 10 takes place in September 2020, and from now until the Biennial, M:ST is connecting eight local and global arts organizations to host a series of month long residency exchanges. Last month we announced the first four M:ST 10 artists taking part, and today we are sharing three more along with the Biennial Writer in Residence!
Gathering itself around specific histories, environments, identities, and bodies, the 10th Biennial will witness and consider “the local” in the context of entangled and interdependent global relations. Taking part are new friends and co-presenters, RAVY Bienniale (Yaoundé, Cameroun), Asiatopia (Bangkok, Thailand), Kamias Special Projects (Quezon City, Philippines), and Catalyst Arts (Belfast, N. Ireland), and old friends Stride Gallery, The New Gallery, TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, and Untitled Art Society- all of whom have worked with us to curate an outstanding cohort of M:ST 10 Biennial artists!
All eight artists will be sent on a fully funded Residency and provided with unique exploration and presentation opportunities based on their Residency location. Today we are thrilled to announce the next three artists taking part: Jessica Karuhanga, Brennagh Meehan, and Zeus Bascon! We are also excited to announce Alicia Buates McKenzie, who will join us during M:ST 10 as the Writer in Residence.
Missed the first wave of artist announcements?
Visit this post to catch up on our first M:ST 10 artist announcement, which included KC Wei, Landry Mbassi, Stephanie Comilang, and Halie Finney.
Jessica Karuhanga is an artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her interdisciplinary practice moves through performance, sculpture, drawing, writing and video. She has presented her work in various galleries, museums and institutions internationally. Among these spaces are The Bentway, Toronto (2019), Sheridan College, Toronto (2019), Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver (2019), Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2018), Onsite Gallery at OCAD University, Toronto (2018), Museum London, London (2018), Varley Art Gallery, Markham (2018), the Art Museum at University of Toronto (2017), Bridgeport Art Trail, Connecticut, US (2017) Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2016) Goldsmiths, London, UK (2016) and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016). She has given lectures for The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Ryerson University, York University, Soho House, Toronto International Film Festival, Royal Ontario Museum as well as Harvard University and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU’s Black Portraitures Series. Her writing has been published by BlackFlash Magazine, C Magazine, Susan Hobbs Gallery and Foundarie Darling. She has been featured in i-D, Dazed, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, esse, filthy dreams, Globe and Mail and Canadian Art. She holds degrees from Western University (2010) and University of Victoria (2012) and is currently a Sessional Professor in Visual Studies at University of Toronto.
Jessica will be hosted by the Directors of the RAVY Bienniale in Cameroun where she will be taking part in the festival and traveling throughout the country in July 2020.
Presented in partnership with Untitled Art Society.
@kichokaru | www.jessicakaruhanga.net
Brennagh Meehan (b.1996) is a visual artist and recent graduate from Belfast School of Art in Fine Art, Sculpture. A multidisciplinary artist, she uses performance, sculpture, poetry, photography and sound to investigate the everyday. Elements of her domestic life; objects, relationships, and conversations, are used to express the vulnerabilities of grief. She blurs the line between private and public spaces, bringing her fragility into to each new work. Brennagh has performed for FIX19, Catalyst Arts' 13th Live Art Biennial in Belfast, and with her sister Niamh Meehan in the group exhibition "The Other Troubles" where the ongoing collaboration How do you like your Border? began.
Brennagh will be hosted by M:ST in Calgary and traveling throughout Alberta in April 2020.
Presented in partnership with Catalyst Arts.
@brennaghmeehan_art_ | brennaghmeehan.com
Zeus Bascon (b.1987 | Laguna, Philippines) graduated from the College of Commerce at the University of Santo Tomas in 2008 and since 2006 has built his art career through active participation in exhibitions. Through a practice of questioning his own metaphysical relationship to the present Zeus has become attuned to a variety of apparitions, leading him to create artworks charged with folk mysticism, the supernatural, and the spiritual. His interdisciplinary practice involves the transmutation of form – extracting elements from past works and integrating them with new layers and presentation strategies in order to establish connections between the internal and external; the logistics of location; energies stored in time; and evidences of intuition. Crossing over other disciplines, such as film and fashion, lead him to further explore performative and costume works - focusing on the body, setting, materiality, movement, and labor in art production. He has participated in residency programs such as Fictive Communities Asia: Koganecho Bazaar 2014 in Yokohama, Japan and Craft Taitung Creator Exchange Program in Taitung, Taiwan in June this year. In 2018, Bascon was a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award, granted by the Cultural Centre of the Philippines.
Zeus will be hosted by M:ST and Stride Gallery in Calgary in 2020.
Presented in partnership with Kamias Special Projects.
@zeusbascon | zeusbascon.blogspot.com
Alicia Buates McKenzie is a multi-racial Filipinx-Canadian artist, writer, and organizer from rural Western Manitoba, on Treaty 2 Territory. Alicia recently obtained her BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2018, which includes her studies at Falmouth University (United Kingdom) in 2017. She currently fulfils the role of Visual Arts Curator for Femme Wave Feminist Arts Festival in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta) alongside her independent art and writing practices.
Drawing from her lived experiences from the Canadian prairies, and the shared experiences of diasporic immigrant and mixed-race communities in North America, Alicia concerns herself with questions surrounding cultural (dis)connections, grief and loss, family ties, and loneliness in regards to self-identity and home-making. Through introspective query and repetitive gesture, Alicia negotiates experiences of queerness, mixed immigrant and colonial lineages, and multi-racial perspective--and the innate insecurities and violences that permeate these experiences--with tentative urgency.
Her work has been shown and performed locally and internationally, in spaces such as the ATB ArtVault and Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, The Dragon Academy in Toronto, ON, and The Exchange in Penzance, UK. Her writing has been published in both academic and arts-based contexts, including The Journal of Historical Sociology and These Pills Don’t Come in My Skin Tone.
Alicia will join us during M:ST 10 in September 2020 as the Biennial Writer in Residence. We will announce more details about Alicia's involvement in the new year.
@buates.mckenzie | www.buatesmckenzie.com
