Artists for Artists Micro-Grant
A fundamental aspect of AfA is peer-to-peer support - a form of solidarity that is both educational and economic. Moving away from transactive models of art-making, exchange, and education, AfA online masterclasses proceed as peer-to-peer exchange without the need for institutional support or financial payment for training/mentorship. Instead, AfA generates seed funding for the practice of early career Participating Artists through a system of peer-to-peer funding. This is achieved through enrollment donations.
Once an application is successful, the Participating Artists are asked to contribute a recommended donation that is pooled into a traceable online Group Fund. In order to reach the minimum target of the AfA Micro Grant edition (a total of $1000), the recommended donation for each participating artist is $50. All donations are redistributed as Micro Grants to three or four participating Artists (one per workshop) through a peer-to-peer (P2P) voting system.
All artists admitted to the AfA Masterclass are automatically eligible for the AfA Micro Grant.
The AfA Team, the AfA Core and AfA Collective, volunteer time and expertise.
The AfA Micro-Grant is developed by the AfA Core.
POLITICS OF SHARING Micro-Grant Recipients.
For the edition POLITICS OF SHARING, the Artists for Artists Peer-to-Peer funding program facilitated 2 Microgrants to the following artists: Myriam Amri / Tunis and Morisha Moodley / London. Micro Grants are generated through enrolment donations being pooled into a fund and autonomously re-distributed by workshop groups through a voting process by the Participating Artists.
Tunis (b. Tunis)
Myriam is a Tunisian researcher and emerging visual artist. She is an anthropologist-in-training at Harvard University and her research examines money and its materiality. Her creative work explores space, historical memory, capitalist imaginaries and dystopian aftermaths of waste and decay in North Africa through analog photography, sound installations and documentary film-making.
London (b. Durban)
Morisha Moodley is a London based moving image artist. They collaborate with artist Sara David to form the curatorial collective, Otherly. Through Otherly, Morisha and Sara actively and playfully decentre hierarchical ideas of curation, which feel rooted in formality, and instead focus on creating equal exchanges between producers and participants.
INSTITUTIONAL COLLAPSE Micro-Grant Recipients.
For the edition INSTITUTIONAL COLLAPSE the Artists for Artists Peer-to-Peer funding program facilitated 4 Microgrants to the following artists: Kaftaar, Tehran/Toronto, Catherine Lie, Sommerville MA, Divya Saraf, Kolkota, and Danielle Zorbas, Athens. Micro Grants are generated through enrolment donations being pooled into a fund and autonomously re-distributed by workshop groups through a voting process by the Participating Artists.
The Tehran based collective Kaftaar (Hyenas in Farsi) came together in the summer of 2020. Right between the first and second waves of the pandemic and during the protests of Iranian women against male aggression, harassment, rape, bullying and patriarchy, especially in and around Iran’s art scene. It is said that a hyena, who was passing by the deserts around Tehran at the time, noticed that in some fights, cyberbullying men used their name as an insult to silence women. So the hyena decided to find their comrades, enter the city and tell their own story.
During the AfA Masterclass, Kaftaar worked with Advising Artist Jeanne van Heeswijk to develop future actions and methodologies of their collective. Kaftaar, or the Hyenas, operate with what they describe as a feminine force, wanting to critique the artistic atmosphere around them. In particular, they focus on the unequal structures of galleries and art institutions in the unstable political conditions of cities into which contemporary art enters as a transcendent force from outside and change human and cultural relations.
Catherine Lie (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer from Indonesia. Her work critically engages time and temporality to unfold the everyday entanglement of the materials she investigates. She recently received her Master of Architecture from MIT and has practiced in New York, Indonesia, Chile, Puerto Rico, Jordan, and Berlin.
During the AfA Masterclass, Catherine worked with Advising Artist Vivien Sansour on “Sourdough Architecture” project. This work explores how everyday rituals of feeding and baking sourdough can open up discussions on design and ecology to broader public. Exploring the potential of virtual dinner parties based on sourdough feeding prompts, the work culminates in a 3 minute experimental documentary and a collective library.
Kolkata based artist Divya Saraf, is currently pursuing a Masters of Design in Critical Conservation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work focuses on issues around institutionalized knowledge, art, and history, and incorporates postcolonial and feminist critical theory in questioning these issues.
During the AfA Masterclass, she worked with Advising Artists Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain of MTL Collective on her project that examines cultural and material histories that are forgotten, unknown, or oppressed by institutions. Focusing on so-called “Company Painting” style and colonial photography from the Indian subcontinent, Divya’s project aims to unmask the continued obscuration of the British Empire’s exploitation and subjugation of the subcontinent, with a focus on archival and curatorial practices.
Athens based artist Danielle Zorbas works with scripted and improvised filmmaking as diffuse, translucent socio-cultural communication. Her films play with cinema language as collective, poetic interpretation of experience, and they have screened at various international festivals. Zorbas has taught cinema studies at universities, co-curated exhibitions, written articles and presented at conferences internationally.
During the AfA Masterclass, she worked with Advising Artist Noah Fischer on her project that focuses on the potential of cinema (making, reading) as an apparatus of nuanced, collaborative interpretation. Investigating how cinema can act and activate for accessible cooperation, Zorbas’ project considers filmmaking as a play model for solidarity, challenging the complexities of systems through reflective, refractive participation.
RADICAL CARE Micro-Grant Recipients.
For the inaugural edition RADICAL CARE the Artists for Artists Peer-to-Peer funding program facilitated 4 Microgrants to the following artists: Alisa Chunchue, Vishal Kumaraswamy, Alfred Marasigan, and Ebun Sodipo. This was achieved through Participating Artist enrolment fees being pooled into a fund that was redistributed by workshop groups autonomously according to criteria decided upon by Participating Artist peers.
Alisa Chunchue is a visual artist known for her sculpture, mixed-media installation, performance collaboration. Currently living and working in Bangkok, Thailand - her exhibitions include ‘Solo-Sans-Solo’ A.farm, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, ‘Absurdity in Paradise’, Kasseler Kunstverein, Museum Fridericianum , Kassel (2018), ‘Forecast Platform’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018).
Mentored by Terike Haapoja and the peers in her AfA group, Chunchue further developed the project The Resonance - a work inspired by the journal of her hospital experience and by reading ‘When Breath Becomes Air’, (a book written by an American neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi). The project was developed as an analogy for written evidence and then interpretatively expressed through artistic practice. The project consists of two main parts: drawing and sculpture.
Vishal Kumaraswamy is a Bangalore based New Media Artist & Filmmaker. He graduated with an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins, London. Vishal was recently awarded a commission by the Royal College of Art and Furtherfield and will shortly be exhibiting at The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Working with Advising Artist Ahmet Ogut and AfA peers, Vishal further developed the over-site work during the AfA Masterclass. over-site is a collaborative writing performance examining sites of algorithmic production and the encoding of bias into neural networks. Conducted over video call apps, it brings forward the human biases encoded within the language models used by text-based neural networks.
Filipino artist Alfred Marasigan uses live streaming as a primary medium in his transmedial practice to conduct serendipitous research. He graduated from Kunstakademiet i Tromsø with an MA in Contemporary Art; currently, he is a faculty member of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Fine Arts Department. In AfAs masterclass working with Ahmet Ogut and AfA peers, Marasigan further developed the work ‘Omehen: The Garden as Chronicle and Strategy of Resistance’. The work is an ongoing experimental collaboration that focuses on the creation, maintenance, and survival of a precarious vegetable garden inside a university campus by Ateneo de Manila’s and Lumad Bakwit Schools’ artists, students, faculty, administrators, and staff under an oppressive national regime.
Ebun Sodipo is an interdisciplinary artist working and living in London. Engaging with black study and multiple personal and social archives, they craft an oblique, affective language to narrate their self-construction as a black, trans-femme, African migrant living in the wake of trans-Atlantic slavery. Working within the workshop group of Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Ebun worked with peers to further developed a current work that meditates on feminine and queer images, the marks they have left on, and the desires they produce in my body-mind. The work is an attempt to devise new language to make sense of trans-feminine desire by recalling and connecting with the body-mind of trans-ancestors.