POLYTOPIA – re . birth –
Opening: Thursday 16th May, 6-8pm
Exhibition dates: 17th May -14th June 2024
Gallery Hours: 12-5pm, Thursday and Friday
*Visits outside of gallery hours can be made by appointment between May 17th – May 24th. Please contact : contact@co-iki.org
Location: Res Artis— 44 Glasshouse Rd, Collingwood (Wurundjeri Country) 3066, Victoria, Australia
*Access is via Gertrude Glasshouse and is not wheelchair accessible.
Curated by Yoko Negami / co・iki
Participating Artists :
Soe Yu Nwe / Myanmar
Subhash Maskara / India
Muhamad Gerly / Indonesia
Nana Biakova / Ukraine & Japan
Olia Fedorova / Ukraine
Ryoichi Wago / Japan
Cooperator: миразом & co・iki friends
Grant by : Toshiaki Ogasawara Memorial Foundation
Poster & Graphic Design : Muhamad Gerly; Font Design : Hlib Shkurupii
Please consider donating to support the costs of this exhibition through this link.
“POLYTOPIA” started in 2021, the second year of the pandemic to follow Co-iki’s first remote residency “Creativity from Home” in 2020.
The participating creators from different parts of the world came together to cocreate our POLYTOPIA delving into the concept of locality in this changing era.
February 24th, 2022.
That was the very day of our final presentation and wrap-up of POLYTOPIA , when the full-scale war started in Ukraine, in our fellow artists’ country.
5am in Ukraine, 12 at noon in Japan. Urgent messages have been exchanged.
We decided to postpone our event but just to pray for our friends. Everybody got together online, remotely praying and caring for each other. Breathing in synchrony.
2 years of breathing.
Where do we stand now?
Here, we stand and live again.
From Ukraine, Myanmar, India, Indonesia and Japan, we are coming together to resume, regenerate and reshape our POLYTOPIA in this physical space of Melbourne city.
We wish this exhibition will be a connecting point of polytopic times, spaces, localities and identities, as well as to invent a way of co-existing in various remote conditions.
POLYTOPIA is a remote residency program that started with the pandemic in 2020 and was run from 2021 to 2022, with artists from Ukraine, Japan, Myanmar, Taiwan, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, and other countries in various social and cultural situations. The program has been developed as a remote residency program in which participating artists and cultural workers collaborate to conduct their own research and creation remotely.
The program has also provided an online forum for artists from each participating country to engage in dialogue with Japanese artists, curators, residency administrators, and other cultural professionals to share their different situations, ideas, and activities.
This will be an opportunity to further consider what kind of safety nets and programs we can develop as an international residency network, and to share them with people from various sectors of society and culture in Melbourne and other cities around the world.
https://co-iki.org/en_US/events/polytopia/
Soe Yu Nwe (born.1989) is an artist from Myanmar. After earning a MFA degree in Ceramics at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2015, Soe has been participating in numerous residencies in the United States and across Asia. Her cross-cultural living experience has inspired her to reflect upon her cultural identity through making. She creates hybridized beings that are fluid, fragile and fragmented. Through transfiguration of the emotional landscape by poetically depicting nature and body in parts, she explores the idea of displacement and alienation. Artmaking is her attempt to understand her cultural identity by learning through myths and history of the environment she has lived in.
Recently she has begun learning more about her family’s migration history from Yunnan province in China to the Northern Shan region of Burma after the Chinese Civil War. Soe Yu was named in Forbes 30 Under 30, Art & Style List of 2019. Her work has been acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia and the British Museum in the United Kingdom.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/soeyunwe/
Subhash Maskara (India) is a filmmaker / cinematographer from India whose artistic vision transcends traditional boundaries. His work serves as a powerful medium for sparking social awareness, fostering open discussions, and catalyzing change. Maskara is dedicated to creating thought-provoking films that not only entertain but also deeply resonate with viewers, eliciting a range of emotions and prompting introspection.With a keen interest in the ever-evolving dynamics of society, politics, and human behavior, Maskara’s research explores the intersection of modernity and tradition. His cinematic endeavors are imbued with a profound understanding of mythology and spirituality, viewed through the lens of scientific inquiry.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/subhashmaskara/
Muhamad Gerly (Indonesia) is an intermedia artist who lives and works in Karawang, after studying intermedia visual arts at Telkom University in 2017 gerly actively doing an art exhibition and experimentations since 2018. forming an art collective namely ROOMPOK space and active member of prfrmnce.rar collective. As an artist, Gerly is interested in history, folklore, spatial landscapes and local knowledge values as a creative impetus for his work. In the process of creating all of Gerly’s works, he always uses literary and poetic creation methods to interpret the meaning and lyrics of all the events he encounters to open up new visual and interpretive possibilities in inviting the public to view a work.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/muhamadgerly/
Nana Biakova (Ukraine) embodies the essence of movement-based performance and visual art. She was residing between the realms of Kyiv and Tokyo for the last years, and recently came back to Ukraine and her native city. Born in 1990 in Mykolaiv (Ukraine). Her canvas is her own corporeal form, a neutral material she employs to delve into the memory patterns, identity, and the intricate interplay between human and other-than-human entities. Studied ship interior design at the National Shipbuilding University in Mykolaiv.
Since 2016, Nana has been devoted to the practice and exploration of Ankoku Butoh, a Japanese avant-garde dance that emerged post-WW2 and is often referred to as “the dance of the dead.” Delving into this profound art form, she has sought mastery from Butoh maestro and researches the historical tapestry of Butoh, while living in Tokyo.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/nanabiako/
Olia Fedorova (Ukraine) – multidisciplinary artist working in the field of conceptual art by means of performance, photography, video and text. In 2016 graduated from Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (BA of Interior Design). As an artist, she works with meanings and connotations by studying the mechanics and the issues of their (trans)formation through performative intervention and observation, exploring and interacting with the environment as a semantic space. Apart from this, she engages in writing as a physical, meditative and (self) therapeutic practice.
After Russia launched a full-scale invasion to Ukraine in 2022, she started using her language- and text-based methods as means of (visual) poetry, journalism and art activism, to promote Ukrainian culture internationally and to raise awareness about the war among the foreign audiences. Since late 2022 Olia is temporarily based in Graz, Austria. In the beginning of 2024 she joined the team of «Office Ukraine Graz – Shelter for Ukrainian Artists». Olia Fedorova is a part of the “Secondary Archive” – Platform for women artists from Central and Eastern Europe (since 2021); “Ukraine Ablaze” – the Ukrainian war-time art online archive launched by Mystetskiy Arsenal art centre (since 2022) and “The Wartime Art Archive” by Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (since 2023).
She had solo exhibitions in Ukraine, Poland, Austria and Italy. Participated in art residencies, group exhibitions and projects in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Spain, Norway, Argentina, Japan, Republic of Korea, the USA and many more. Her works are included in the collections of Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (Kyiv, Ukraine) and Jeonbuk Province Art Museum (Republic of Korea), also in the private collections in Ukraine, Germany and Norway.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/olia_off/
Ryoichi Wago (Japan) was born in Fukushima Prefecture in 1968. He received the 4th Nakahara Chuya Award for his poetry collection AFTER, the 47th Bansui Award for his poetry collection Global Brain Psalms, the Minyu Prefectural Grand Prize, and the NHK Tohoku Culture Award. In 2011, he published a series of poems on Twitter from Fukushima immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake. In May of the same year, he was invited to the Concertgebouw in the Netherlands, one of the world’s three largest concert halls, to give a poetry reading of his thoughts on Fukushima. In July 2017, his poetry collection “Pebbles of Poetry” was translated and published in France to win the first Nunc Review Poetry Prize. This was the first time in the history of Japanese literary circles that a poetry collection won a prize in France, and it has attracted a great deal of attention both within and out of Japan.
He is an ambassador for education and reconstruction in Fukushima Prefecture. He is also an ambassador for Fukushima University. In 2019, he won the 27th Sakutaro Hagiwara Award for his poetry collection “QQQ. His reading performances have been highly acclaimed at events in Japan and abroad and he is known for his so-called “Samurai Reading”. His collection of poems will be published in the U.S. next spring. He’s also experienced in writing lyrics for choral music as well as those for operas and dramas.
Website: https://wago2828.com/
TWTR: https://twitter.com/wago2828
Yoko Negami (Japan – co・iki / Producer / curator) Graduated from the International Relations Course of Tsuda University in Tokyo. Studied at Wimbledon School of Art in London. She has initiated co・iki due to her interest in the ties between the individual and society, interdisciplinary processes and coexistence. Putting emphasis on Co-living and Co-creating, co・iki explores an alternative form of a residency program designed to build a bridge between numerous fields of art, culture and the wider sciences, connecting artists, experts and professionals. She also works between a wide range of fields from government led programs to entertainment events as well as community-building of online service development, further linking art with other areas of engagement. She recently founded a collective company Living Together Co. engaging in the field of international art and cultural diplomacy and conducting interdisciplinary science art projects.