In October 2021, 9 Flux Artists were in Residence at Arts Quarter Budapest (AQB). Hosted in a former brewery, AQB supports Artist Residencies, festivals, exhibitions and more. Flux artists will create new works together while in Residence and participate in the Open House festival. Special thanks to the Trust for Mutual Understanding for supporting this project.
Participants include Catalina Alvarez, IV Castellanos, Maureen Catbagan, Daniel Fishkin, Caroline Partamian, Nat Roe, Carlos David TC, Moira Williams, and Kemar Wynter.
Bios & Project of participants:
Kemar Keanu Wynter (b. Brooklyn, NY) holds a BFA from the SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design. His work was the focus of recent solo exhibitions titled Pairings (Klaus von Nichtssagend, Manhattan, 2021) and Portions (Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Queens, 2021) and he has previously exhibited in several group exhibitions including Shining in the Low Tide (Unclebrother, Hancock, 2021), I Saw it Hang Down There (Bode Projects, Berlin, 2021) and Flavor Profile (Border Patrol, Portland, 2019). Wynter is currently on consecutive residencies with the ARoS Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark and AQB in Budapest, Hungary facilitated by Flux Factory, New York. Kemar Keanu Wynter is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Drawing upon his years of Friday nights cooking in familial kitchens and a nourished upbringing along the bakery and jerk shop-lined cross-streets of Crown Heights, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s abstract works are a generous stew of language and pigment. Layers of luscious, gestural strokes draw the viewer into fields of color which frequently operate with coded references to his histories; one, storied and generations-long in the Antilles and another budding and burgeoning in the Five Boroughs. Through this interplay of motif and materiality, the viewer’s own tethers to comfort, history and home are brought into focus. Kemar opened his painting studio to the public and sharing a new suite of works on paper. Stepping beyond his home of Brooklyn, NY, Kemar locates himself within Budapest through the cuisine of Hungary’s capital city and records his travels by way of the various eateries that line the river Danube. With this residency, we see the introduction of new media into his practice, namely watercolor. Having primarily worked in oil pastel to this point, this presentation is the first chance for the public to engage with these burgeoning works and reflect on this newest foray in Wynter’s practice.
moira williams is a disability culture activist. They are part of a new generation of disabled artists, curators and organizers bringing fresh perspectives to contemporary arts through intersectional Disability, Somatic and Ecological Arts. moira’s often co-creative work reframes embodied difference as a distinct resource resisting aesthetic ideals; weaving together multiple scales of time, accessibility, queer ecologies, performance and gatherings with interdependent ways of leading to imagine, co-create, disrupt, celebrate, experience or imagine experiencing disrupted spaces and futures that make room for *“access intimacy”, deepening our ecological meanings and questioning systems of power and influence.
Carlos David TC (born Caracas, Venezuela, 1984) is a Queens based artist and experimental filmmaker. His work explores identity in the digital space, coming of age in the era of reality tv, and mobile content creation as a mean of communication. By combining humor, alter egos, self interviews, obsolete technologies and infinite digital storage the artist attempts to blur the line between performance and reality by experimenting with the documentation of the “process behind the work” as a performance of its own. The constant need to articulate an identity through documentation produces different sets of self-portraits that are presented via moving image, screenshots, screen recording, films, memes, music videos, text based work, performance and site-specific installations.
Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist influenced by her training in dance. While at AQB, Caroline performed research of
Her work has taken on the form of composition, graphic notation, translation and transcription, sound environments, books, video, and more. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists’ and her own works-in-progress and experiments. Inspired from research completed at Artpool Art Research Center, Caroline is making a graphic notation print in collaboration with @hurrikanpress. You can also follow and listen to her Hungarian music specials series here: @otherdesertradio.
During her residency at AQB, Caroline has been researching Hungarian language, text and music, namely from the 1980s Soviet era as they relate to censorship and the desire for communication between artists in Hungary and abroad. Much of this music was published in a series of radio programs, the first of which covered Hungarian Punk, the second covering Hungarian Electronic Music, and the third covering Hungarian Jazz & Classical music.
Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. Composer, sound artist, and instrument builder. Completely ambivalent about music. Daniel studied with composer Maryanne Amacher and with multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart. He has performed as a soloist on modular synthesizer with the American Symphony Orchestra, developed sound installations in abandoned concert halls, and played innumerable basement punk shows. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press (Nature Journal, 2014); as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung. He is the only luthier that studied with the daxophone’s inventor, Hans Reichel; Daniel’s instruments have traveled the world, and are played everyday by players based in Canada, California, Norway, Germany, France, Japan, Kazakhstan, and Australia. Daniel received his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan University, and has taught analog synthesis at Bard College. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Composition and Computer Music at the University of Virginia, and teaches Musical Instrument Design at the Cooper Union, NYC.
IV Castellanos is a gender deficient Queer Trans* mx Indige POC. One’s work bridge’s abstract performance art, sculpture and group task based vignettes. The anchor is the futility of labor and generating an action without a ‘purpose’ or with no inherent value; questioning value structures. One is the steward and co-founder of Para\\el Performance Space in Brooklyn, NY. Select performances: Queens Museum, Panoply Performance Lab, Dixon Place, Gibney, Judson, Danspace, is a Franklin Furnace Recipient 2019 and has been on the Chez Bushwick, Culture Push, Judson, BIPAF, and the Artists of Color Council selection panels.
Maureen Catbagan is a Filipinx American, multi-media artist based in New York whose work engages social collectivity, examines relations between identity and experience, and explores new forms of empowerment. Collaborative projects include Object II Body (with artist IV Castellanos), Abang-guard Duo (with artist Jevijoe Vitug), Flux Factory, and HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?. They have also written critical essays with Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser. Catbagan has exhibited in venues such as ARoS Museum in Denmark, Witte de Withe Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Contemporary Museum of Honolulu. IV and Maureen Catbagan developed “Object II Body Studies”, a collaborative performance project that utilizes industrial objects found in various art institutions, and was adapted specifically for the facilities at AQB. The movements focus on intimate object to body transfers, restructuring their use to investigate the multiple dynamics between labor and tension. View the film on Youtube.
Catalina Jordan Alvarez grew up in rural Tennessee with a Colombian mother and an American father. Her work across video, performance, and text often highlights strange elements of cultural norms and movements of the human body. Her films have screened at festivals including New Orleans, Los Angeles, Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, Edinburgh Short, Oxford, and Palm Springs. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH and a resident artist at Flux Factory in Queens, NY.