The Soap Factory Announces Artists Participating In International Residency Exchange Program

The Soap Factory is excited to partner with Kutlivera to bring four emerging and mid-career Minnesota-based artists to Tranås, Sweden, to participate in a month-long residency at their organization.

This residency is about time and place, an opportunity to reflect and cultivate ideas through experience and exchange. Artists will be given opportunities to learn about their host city, meet other artists, and space to work independently or collaboratively in their studios.

SARITA ZALEHA

Sarita Zaleha has a multidisciplinary creative practice that includes installation, photography, video, printmaking, fiber arts, and social practice. Zaleha received her MFA in Printmaking at the University of Iowa with a minor in Intermedia. Zaleha has exhibited her work extensively across the US, as well as in Canada, Germany, and Iceland. She is a fiscal year 2017 recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Visual Arts.

Sarita Zaleha's current work explores the interaction between the Arctic as a specific place impacted by rising temperatures and human attempts to observe, control, and preserve their immediate environments. She is interested in the history of polar exploration and its contemporary relevance for climate change research. Sarita is looking to use her time at Kultivera experimenting with weighted helium balloons in temporary landscape installations, researching balloons in relationship to weather and the environment. Her research will include a visit to the Andréexpedtionen Polarcenter at the Grenna Museum in Gränna, Sweden, which chronicles (among other Arctic explorations) Saloman August Andrée's failed attempt in 1897 to cross the Arctic via a hydrogen balloon.

Website:http://www.saritazaleha.com

MOHEB SOLIMAN

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest whose work often deals with nature, modernity, identity, and belonging through writing, performance, and installation projects. In the past few years, he has been exploring his practice extensively through the site of the Great Lakes region in which he has lived and He finds this area fascinating as an environmentally coherent borderland central to the history of North America. In 2015, he circled the region for four months under the banner HOMES [Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior] through a Joyce Foundation fellowship, doing site-specific work and collaborating with diverse partners.

More recently, Moheb has collaborated with the five Great Lakes national parks on an installation of 25 poems disguised as official signs in conjunction with the NPS centennial. He is researching and developing a "poem of sublime proportion" through a Forecast Public Art grant to be embedded around the region as 50+ lines/sculptures. His previous major project, Habib Albi is...Not a Man, about romance, gender, and Arab American identity in the Midwest in light of 9/11, showed in New York, Toronto, and Montreal. In September 2011, it was commissioned as the MAI season-opener in 10-year critical commemoration of 9/11. Moheb has degrees from The New School for Social Research and the University of Toronto, and lives in Minneapolis, MN where he also works as Program Director for the Arab American arts organization Mizna.

Websites:mohebsoliman.info and agreatlakesvista.tumblr.com

LELA PIERCE

Lela Pierce is a multiracial (Black: Negro, Creole, and White: Croatian, Lemko, Rusyn) American visual artist and dancer. She has been a student of the Himalayan Yoga Tradition since childhood, spending a significant amount of time in India over the past decade. Her work is inspired by her ancestors, the spirit world, and the intelligence found in nature.

Lela Pierce is interested in continuing her investigation of invasive plant species in Sweden, looking at the attitudes, language, stories and relationships people have to their presence in more rural areas. She is interested in witnessing the ways that indigenous communities, immigrants, refugees, and other minority groups exist and do or do not integrate themselves into the historic and current social-political climate of Sweden. She will be thinking about how this information may or may not relate back to the presence of Swedish settlers in Minnesota as agents of colonization. Additionally, she will draw upon her personal experiences growing up in a rural Minnesotan town where my family members were amongst a few people of color in a sea of Scandinavian and Western European descendants. Lela hopes to create an immersive installation during the residency, using plant matter from invasive species to express insights around migration, colonization, balance, control, violence, and acceptance/rejection. Additionally, she plans to cultivate and maintain a personal practice of dancing and painting during her time at Kultivera, striving to refine a non-eurocentric and properly appropriated personal aesthetic with clearly expressed ideology. Lela anticipates the time at Kultivera will provide ample space to imagine and dream of societal healing and transformation, while making new connections.

LARSEN HUSBY

Larsen Husby sees himself as an artist working in two distinct but related practices. In his studio practice, Larsen moves frequently between media, including printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation. He is fascinated by maps, and his art explores the connections (and disconnections) between places and our representations of them. Husby's other practice is more public and collaborative. In 2013, he established the Minneapolis Art Lending Library (MALL), a nonprofit which lends original works of art to the public, free of charge. Larsen's work with the MALL stems from my desire to not simply produce art, but to share it broadly and provide new platforms for engagement.

A current project of Larsen's is a conceptual drawing and durational performance, mapping the network of streets that make Minneapolis. Since October 3rd, 2016, Larsen has been attempting to walk every single street in the city of Minneapolis, recording each walk's route, duration, and distance. Originally conceived as a means of delving more deeply into his adopted home, Larsen hopes to conceive of what it means to truly "know" a place. By tracing Minneapolis, Larsen is exploring how physical and conceptual understandings of place inform and conflict with one another, how place is defined and redefined, and how personal presence impacts place. And now, with the walking about half complete, he is looking ahead to figure out the best way to present his experience, documentation, and research to others in a way that is equally illuminating and engaging.

Website: http://www.larsenhusby.com/

About Here & There

This project is supported and presented as part of Here & There. Here & There is The Soap Factory's 2017 out-of-building programming. Here & There includes a Residency Exchange Program with Kultivera, an artist residency in Tranås, Sweden, and Rethinking Public Spaces, public projects taking place directly outside of The Soap Factory and throughout the state of Minnesota, enlivening underutilized spaces in locations including Rochester, Brainerd, and the Twin Cities.
Hashtags: #hereandthereTSF #thesoapfactory #rethinkingpublicspaces About The Soap Factory

The Soap Factory is a laboratory for artistic experimentation and innovation, dedicated to supporting artists and engaging audiences through the production and presentation of contemporary art in a unique and historic environment. Based in the historic National Purity Soap Factory in downtown Minneapolis, The Soap Factory is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

To post a comment, you must register and login.