Keelung Nights – Nordic Lights | Keelung, Taiwan
Emma Heiðarsdóttir, Evelina Kollberg, Petri Kuljuntausta, Nayab Ikram, Johanne Teigen, Mauriz Tistelö, Hsin-Yen Wei, JenPei Cheng, Kuen-Lin Tsai, Lua Rivera
Keelung Nights – Nordic Lights : International Artist Residency and Exhibition Project
Architect & Designer’s House, Lane 189, Zhongshan 1st Road, Zhongshan District, Keelung City, Taiwan
December 1 – December 10, 2017
The project was initialed at a meeting in a summer day in Paris in 2016. Taiwanese curator Erica Yu-Wen Huang and Finnish artist and curator Nina-Maria Oförsagd were both doing residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. They were coming from two extremely different climate zones, however, the water and ocean linked them together. Both of them also shared similar interest on art takes intervention at non-traditional exhibition site and curatorial practice. They visited each other’s countries on October 2016 and April 2017, and decided to create this project focused on the culture exchange between Nordic countries and Asia. Keelung city in Northern Taiwan would be a base of the first international exchange. Huang and Oförsagd has invited artists from Nordic countries and Asia to Keelung for a month residency to work on site and to explore the surrounding, meet local people and find a language to communicate; with each other, the surrounding and the chosen exhibition space. Also, to talk over possible cultural scape and developing of art scene in Keelung as an international harbour city. The exhibition and residency space, the former Tin-Pin Elementary school, surrounded by local community high up on a hill, looking down at the city center, harbour area and the sea, has its own interesting history with traces left behind for the arts to have the opportunity to join in a dialogue with the room and the surrounding. The exhibition provides audience development, personal artist tours, workshops, concert, live performance art, and site specific sculptures. Together with international artists, Huang and Oförsagd will continue develop the exhibition and residency program once a year with different themes, but will hold on to the idea of ecological awareness, the sea that connects us, and building artwork on site. We will build a platform where Artist and Curators from both Asia and Nordic countries can come together with joint projects, and where they can communicate in both our continents.
About the artists
Emma Heiðarsdóttir (b. 1990) is preoccupied with the spaces and structures that frame our everyday existence. Her works, that are often site-specific, aim toward a new and playful view of our environment. In the past few years she has been active in the Reykjavik art-scene and participated in numerous exhibitions. Emma graduated with a BFA degree from Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2013 and is currently (2016) starting her MFA at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium.