SAM Residencies welcomed visitors into our studios, offering an intimate look into the processes guiding past projects and ongoing explorations by residents Bruno Ruiz (Mexico City), Chand Chandramohan (Singapore), Irfan Hošić (Bihać), and Oliver Musovik (Skopje).

Across diverse approaches, experimental outputs and research methodologies, these projects initiated by our residents capture a wide range of topical interests – ranging from publishing as a tool for collaboration and reclaiming personal histories to strategies of civic engagement and explorations around ruderal plants. Visitors were invited to engage with these projects and interact with the residents themselves!

Working within the intersections of publishing, artistic research and making, Artist resident Bruno Ruiz shared two threads of exploration that occupy his current practice

The first, his work with the collective Red de Reproducción y Distribución (RRD), which experiments with publishing and its elements of distribution and collaboration, as a tool to make bodies of knowledge public. During the Open Studios, Bruno will share more about his mimeograph machine, an analog copier machine which he uses as the primary instrument for collaboration and dissemination.

Bruno also showcased his research into the Aztec myth of the Quinametzin, a race of giants that are said to have inhabited Mexico. Bruno drafts lines of inquiries into the politics of military involvement in reproducing images of extinct species, such as mammoths, ultimately culminating in QuinametZINE, a giant publication still in the works.

Inspired by “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde, Artist resident Chand Chandramohan’s recent explorations references snake worship as a potent metaphor for transformation rooted in rebirth, and divine feminine power in the gesture titled Works I might have done if I didn’t have to keep fighting y’all (ongoing).

Citing an incident that gave Chand’s practice extensive public visibility, Works I might have done if I didn’t have to keep fighting y’all is a process towards the reclamation of colonial narratives of the “ugly” and the intersection of colonial narratives in Chand’s personal familial history. During Open Studios, Chand showcased the ongoing development of this new multi-disciplinary body of work which include responsive sculptures towards Chand’s immediate environment.

Community & Education resident Irfan Hošić shared insights into strategies of KRAK Center of Contemporary Culture (est. 2020 in Bihac), a multidisciplinary space for education and engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Actively driving discussions around the country’s post-war and post-genocide experience, KRAK serves as an alternative platform for education through culture, science and arts as key agents of social change. As guided by collaborative strategies, social responsibility and environmental awareness, Irfan offered an inside look into the establishment of KRAK in 2020 and the schematics around its various conceptual strands of research and programming.

In his ongoing research into ruderal ecologies, Artist resident Oliver Musovik's photographic explorations celebrate the resilience of life in the margins and the intriguing allure of the “third landscape", a space unattended by man and thereafter taken over by nature. Often dismissed as weeds, these plants occupying such spaces inspire awe with their adaptability.

Drawn to ruderal ecologies, characterized by their tenacity in disturbed or abandoned, residual spaces, Oliver perceives such landscapes as one which challenges conventional notions of botanical beauty and worthiness.

During Open Studios, Oliver will showcase projects on ruderal plants, Ruderal Herbarium (2023 – ongoing) and spaces they inhabit, Overgrown (2023) as well as share some findings on epiphyte plants growing on the surface of other plants in Singapore, also a manifestation of the resilience and adaptability of plants.

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