ArtAttack Artist Residency
ArtAttack Artist Residency
Creativity, Nature and Community
ArtAttack Artist Residency at a Glance
A Bit of Background
ArtAttack is a local movement with the aim of bringing together artists and the community of Neskaupstaður, East Iceland. Visiting creatives will work with locals in building a vibrant community that attracts visitors, entrepreneurs, and new businesses to the area.
Artists will share their skills and imagination by creating installations, events and happenings, and facilitating workshops during their stay in Neskaupstaður. ArtAttack supports artist led projects that focus on co-creation, inspiring a sense of sharing and involvement of each project by the community.
During the month long residency, artists will experience the culture of rural Iceland in a small town of 1500 people. Living in a beautiful old house in the centre of town, with nature on your doorstep.
Þórsmörk - ArtAttack Headquarters
Þórsmörk, pronounced Thorsmork, is “the house of hundred rooms”. It's situated just above the local pool and within minutes of the town supermarket, restaurant and bar. During their stay each artist has a small private bedroom with shared kitchen, bathroom, and studio facilities. During the residency artists also get free access to the local swimming pool and hot-tubs.
Alternate workspaces can be sourced if required for specific projects, if you think this might be something your idea needs please mention it in your application.
Our Community
Neskaupstaður is a small fishing village located in Austurland (East Iceland). We are known for our bottom-up creative culture with a lively homemade music scene. Our statement as a community is to be curious and open with a creative mind.
Artists
Residencies run over spring and summer for a period of four weeks beginning on either the 1st or 15th (or thereabouts) of each month.
Selected artists receive accommodation, free access to the local pool, materials stipend, and support with their project.
At the end of September we celebrate ArtAttack with a local Street Art Festival, showcasing projects from the year and giving locals a final opportunity join in the creativity themselves.
Our Artists
Sigga Björg
Sigga's visual language is full of surreal, dark humour, fantasy and childhood nostalgia. Her intriguing drawings and murals often explore the push and pull of human behaviour and relationships, the desire to both manipulate and be at one with another, as well as the subtleties of feelings such as loneliness, jealousy, love and fear.
Her method of relentless drawing often reveals human behaviour and emotions in their most primitive and wild form, exploring the sometimes quite vague boundaries between
human and beast.
Sigga created the first public installation of ArtAttack in 2017 on a wall next to the town church.
Emanda Percival
Emanda's writing often explores how our memories manipulation time, space and human interactions. Her project for ArtAttack focused on developing her work beyond the page and into the physical world. Taking topographical keta memories from Neskaupstadur locals she created street plaques (at the local FABLAB) to commemorate, what she believes are, the histories that really create a personal position within a community. You can find the plaques as you explore the town.
Emanda is now working on a book to be released in 2019 that rewrites the memories from the plaques in a creative form.
Maria Sykes
Maria specializes in community projects. She helped establish and settle the ArtAttack residency within the community, through consultation with local leaders and organisers, and by getting to know the people of Neskaupstaður, introducing them the projects’ aims.
During her stay Maria also held Flagg Fabrikkan, a workshop where local residents of all ages learnt how to design and hand-print their own pennant flags.
About 40 inhabitants attended her workshop, each creating a string of pennant flags with Neskaupstaður inspired symbols on them. Some of which can be found strung across the Þórsmörk garden.
Designers & Forests (Jason Dilworth and Megan Urban)
Jason and Megan came to Neskaupstaður with the idea of developing an abstract code to describe the important aspects of the town as defined by its citizens, and then placing markers with the resulting forms in appropriate places around the village.
Once here, they created Neskaupkóða, a pictographic language to celebrate the places and things that make Neskaupstaður special. You can see their pictographs in various locations around town, particularly at the mouth of the fjord.
The Shelter (Jakub Jirásek, Vojtěch Nemec and Martin Petřík)
Jakub, Vojtěch and Martin wanted to create a sustainable intervention that would have an impact on the ArtAttack residency as well as on the public life of the community. Then decided to take care of the garden of Þórsmörk that hadn't been touched in a few decades. They built a long platform table and deck, which is the perfect place to enjoy a group lunch or a quiet coffee when the sun is shining.
Arnór Kári
Arnór was prolific at Art Attack, realizing three mural paintings and multiple smaller works during his time in Neskaupstaður.
They can be found at the skate park, the entrance of the town, and on the side of Sparisjóðurinn bank. Arnór also helped with creating posters and signs for the Art Attack project.
Rán Flygering
During her stay at Þórsmörk, Rán built Passarissukassinn. A take on the classic photo booth where ‘customers’ would sit in the booth, insert any item – coin, stone, sweet – into the slot and wait for their photo to appear. Instead of the traditional camera, Rán sat in the booth hidden from view rapidly sketching the ‘customer’.
Passarissukassinn visited the elementary school and was set up outside the museum and supermarket at various times. Locals, particularly the children, loved the cartoon photos they received.
Jeanette Gostomski
Jeanette combines scenography and architecture to create spaces through installations. At ArtAttack she produced two outdoor net installations. Jeanette’s work was, "In honour of the people that lost their lives and the people left behind suffering, these are the installations to honour them and bring history into the evolving future and the coming generations of Neskaupstaður."
Sebastian Ziegler
Sebastian works worldwide with directors and producers to tell real, cinematic stories for cinema, magazines, television, online media and installations.
During his stay in Neskaupstaðurhe conducted two photographic projects. With the assistance of local Daníel Magnús, Sebastian gained access to local homes, with the aim of documenting their interiors and the individuals that occupy them.
Aunis Ahonen and Anne Yli-Ikkelä
Aunis and Anne collaborated with the local community in painting two indoor murals during their residency.
"First we gathered a colour map from the village. We observed the nature around us, buildings, structures and colours alongside objects and shapes. Then we made a series of sketches inspired by what we had seen.
We selected and combined our sketches and made a final plan for a wall.”
After preparing the walls and drawing outlines of the art work, they invited children and young people of the town to paint the work in a collaborative wall-art workshop.
Body Portal Theater (Spencer Agoston and SheenRu Yong)
At ArtAttack, Body Portal Theatre extended their polymorphic work, Thin Skin. Exploring the fjord and its surrounds, Sheeru and Spencer worked externally developing a group performance with the local VA college – challenged by the whims of Icelandic weather. Their residency culminated with an indoor performance at the old net factory, where they combined scenography, dance and music (created by local musician Daníel Magnús) in a performance based on their experience of the local area.
Stúdíó Kleina (Elsa Jónsdóttir and Björn Loki)
Elsa and Loki’s work focuses on graphic design, type design, illustration, motion and murals.
Receiving additional financial support from Síldarvinnslan, Stúdíó Kleina painted a monochromatic mural on an old tank near the entrance to Neskaupstaður. Their piece was inspired by the fish factory, the main industry of the fjord.
Guadalupe Laiz
At Þórsmörk, Guadalupe photographed teenagers, kids, teachers, farmers, workers, and everyone in between. Her camera was her tool to connect with the community and document the people of Neskaupstaður.
Her two main projects were:
Kids of Neskaupstaður, a potrait session of local children wearing a traditional Icelandic sweater and carrying a personal item, and,
Documenting life on a fishing boat, two days spent on a working fishing boat documenting the men when they leave the harbour for the open sea.
At the end of her stay, Guadalupe held an exhibition, Neskaupstaður through the lens, in which she held a lottery for each of 26 photos.
Aïda Gómez
Aïda works internationally twisting urban landscapes. Utilizing language games, crossword puzzles, and the playful replacement of social codes in our everyday environment, her simple, yet subversive techniques and non-violent materials, reveal hidden treasures and extend social thought into the public environment.
Neskaupstaður inspired her to create two Urban Interventions:
Ladies First, the subtle adjustment of a hiking sign, and,
Phoenix, which can be found enhancing one of the town’s bus stops.
Martina Elisabeth Brümmer
Martina is a versatile artist. During her stay she played concerts with her original songs, gave movement classes and launched her current art project
"THE AUDIO LIT UP BOX - SHARE/INSPIRE/TELL A STORY - no more - no less"
A space where everyone on site is invited to record voice memos with poems, short stories and all kinds of favourite texts, sayings, sagas and jokes. Literature in the broadest sense.
In the end there will be different audio episodes with a selection of collected site-specific sounds and voices of Neskaupstaður with music inspired by all impressions combined.
Yumi Ito
Yumi is a polish/ japanese jazzsinger and composer from Switserland. After being inspired with the country and its nature the summer before she came to Art attack with her music. During her stay she held workshops in composing and improvising and concerts at Beituskúrinn with her original songs
Hrafnhildur María
Hrafnhildur is a young visual artist who focuses on mural paintings. Her project was about finding a story within the town and create an artwork out of that. She interviewed a few of the people from the older generation of the inhabitants and also used stories about the house Þórsmörk which was her main inspiration for her project. She then ended up with a mix of each and decided to represent the story about Þórsmörk and how it got connected with the residence. It’s a message that tells us that we are different and come from different places but still be able to meet and enjoy one of the most powerful things in the world, music.
Get Involved
Your support is important to our work at the ArtAttack Residency and there are many ways you can contribute to become a part of our growing creative community. Keep reading or contact us to find out how you can get involved and take advantage of the opportunity to meet new creative people, experience a different culture, and make art.
Become an Intern
Could you be the next person helping us run the residency? You need to be able to work independently, have a high level of English, a driving licence, and be organized. An understanding and connection to art related organizations is useful, but to the right candidate not necessary.
This internship is not only computer work, it involves all elements of running an art residency: supporting artists’ workshops, moving furniture, painting walls, and, occasionally, shovelling snow (it sometimes falls in spring), and, of course, socialising with the artists and the community, hiking, playing music, and enjoying the intern experience.
Some of our interns have come through the Erasmus Internship Program, which can help them fund their stay.
… or Something Else
ArtAttack is about community, and we welcome anyone in the area who wants to be involved. You can help us in many ways, from supplying materials or spaces for our visiting artists, to participating in workshops, and even the simple act of attending Waffle Sundays to meet artists and offer them a link into the community of Neskaupstaður.
Get in touch to find out how you can volunteer.
Contact ArtAttack Artist Residency
If you have any questions or wish to work with us as a volunteer or intern send a message below, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
Please don’t send applications for the residency at this time, we will announce our next open call on the site shortly, or you can get the news first by signing up to our Facebook page.
+354 8300383