Launch of AlUla residency program, in partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla
Introduction
We are excited to announce the launch of Sigg Art Foundation’s residency program in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, in partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla.
The Foundation is now extending its existing residency program in Southern France to run a parallel program in Saudi Arabia. The AlUla residency will will run until March 2022, with five international artists being invited to work from renovated mud brick studios in AlUla’s Old Town.
Digging up the Future - Focus on history and heritage through the lense of digital
Besides prediction models based upon recovered data from the past and the present, there is nothing but imagination at hand to envision the future. The specific interest or intent of art and all existing sciences seems to flock together whenever a distinctive humanistic evolution is inevitable, creating an épistème of knowledge.
Archaeology is not simply about the past. It is more about a hope for a past – a dream of a past.
The narrative of archaeology is as much, if not more so, about the fascination of encountering and bridging worlds and cultures today. Echoing AlUla’s context where the exceptional Natural and Cultural Heritage are intertwined, our first program enlightens artistic practices and researches focused on the cross overs between cultural artifacts from he past and their reinterpretation & re contextualization in the digital realm.
‘The present returns the past to the future’ – Jorge Luis Borges
Our work is about creating cultural bridges, both geographically and aesthetically, reinterpreting cultural artifacts from the past through the digital realm. Working in the midst of AlUla’s phenomenal archeological heritage will provide our artists with extraordinary opportunities to develop their ‘techno-vernacular’ research.
AlUla 2022 residents
Please meet the five residents of our inaugural 2022 residency program in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, in partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla:
- Kévin Bray (France)
- Petra Cortright (USA)
- Ittah Yoda (France / Japan)
- Nicolás Lamas (Peru)
- Timur Si-Qin (Germany)
At the core of the Foundation’s artistic direction is an interest in artists whose works challenge art history, through the lens of digital and technological innovation.
Kevin Bray
Playing with the porosity of diverse Media; re-organizing mediums and tools to shape a language that would be welcoming to all of them, the work of Kévin Bray engages with different types of communication strategies. Traversing from digital, cinema, graphic design, illustration, painting, sculpture to music and writing, he tries to understand how the form and language of a particular medium are visualized and manipulated, in order to impose those codes onto another medium.
Petra Cortright
Cortright’s core practice is the creation and distribution of digital and physical images using consumer or corporate softwares. Cortright’s paintings on aluminum, linen, paper, or acrylic are created in Photoshop using painting software and appropriated images, icons, and marks. The digital files are endlessly modifiable, but at a “decisive moment” they are translated into two-dimensional objects.
Ittah Yoda
Coming from diverse backgrounds, Ittah Yoda have developed their artistic identity as a duo through cross-cultural collaborations combining traditional craftsmanship with science and digital technology.
Nicolás Lamas
By carefully manipulating the images, texts and sounds associated with the detection, interpretation and transmission of information, Nicolás Lamas attempts to render these various inconsistencies generated by the representation. He creates a world filled with possibilities, permanent interactions, ellipses, attractions and repulsions, inversions between horizontality and verticality, incompatibilities between void and matter, distortions of logic. Lamas develops a meticulous network that ultimately allows the “”system”” to find its own balance in the imbalance.
Timur SiQuin
Si-Qin’s work explores the intersection of human life, natural and digital worlds. The artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent references new developments in science and technology to challenge the separation between the human world and the biological laws of the natural world.
“Technology and culture are as much a product of nature as seashells and plants.”
