About, Artists, Residencies, Exhibitions, Weather Station, Programs, Digital Programs, Publications, Support, FAQs

currently lives and works in Toronto. His practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video and performance. The domestic sphere has been an ongoing area of research in Akhavan’s work. Earlier works explore the relationship between the house and the nation state and how trauma of systemic violence enacted upon civilians can be inherited and reenacted within the family lineage — the home as a forked space between hospitality and hostility. More recent work has shifted focus onto spaces just outside the home: the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes.

Akhavan’s work has been exhibited at the Darling Foundry, Montreal; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Power Plant, Toronto; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Germany; Performa 11, USA; Bucharest Biennial 5, Romania and the Belvedere Museum, Vienna. Akhavan was the recipient of the Berlin Kunstpreis 2012.

Fogo Island Dialogues 2017 Participants:

Born in Toronto in 1982, Nadia Belerique received her MFA from the University of Guelph. Recent solo exhibitions include On Sleep Stones (2018), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; The Weather Channel (2018), Oakville Galleries; and There’s A Hole in the Bucket (2019), Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. Her work has also been exhibited at venues such as Tensta Konsthall, Sweden; Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna; Vie d’ange, Montreal; The Power Plant, Toronto; and Arsenal Contemporary, New York. Belerique was long listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award and has completed residencies at Walk & Talk (Azores, Portugal) and Fogo Island Arts (Newfoundland, Canada), among others. She lives and works in Toronto.

Brenda Draney holds a BA in English and a BFA in Painting from the University of Alberta, as well as an MA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The 11th winner of the annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2009, Draney was also a finalist for the 2016 Sobey Art Award. Her work has been exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto International Art Fair and MKG127 Gallery, Toronto, and was recently included in 90X90: Celebrating Art in Alberta at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Draney is Cree from Sawridge First Nation, situated by the town of Slave Lake, Alberta. Her practice is based on her experiences and the relationships formed between her current hometown of Edmonton and the northern community of Slave Lake, where she was raised.

Flaka Haliti (born 1982, Prishtina) lives and works in Munich. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Prishtina University in 2006. Between 2008 and 2013, Haliti continued her education at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main and completed a PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (MUMOK); Castile-Leon Museum of Contemporary Art (MUSAC); ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe; 54th October Salon, Belgrade; Gallery Martin Janda, Vienna; Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt; Kosovo National Gallery, Prishtina; Brussels Biennial 1; Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Vienna Fair; Artist Run Sweden Art Fair, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad; SpaPort Biennial, Sarajevo; Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade; and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main.
Haliti represented Kosovo at the 56^th Venice Biennale (2015) in an exhibition curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport of the Republic of Kosovo. She is a winner of the Muslim Mulliqi Prize 2014, organized by the National Gallery of Kosovo, and recipient of the Henkel Art.Award (2013), granted in cooperation with Museum of Modern Art Vienna and KulturKontakt Austria. She was nominated for the 54th October Salon Prize, Belgrade in 2013 and received First Prize Agriculture and Banking (2009), organized by Städelschule and Rentenbank.

Born in Berlin, Leon Kahane grew up in the setting of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). His artistic practice is closely linked to his family history which is one of Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to Germany. Kahane studied at the Ostkreuz School of Photography Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts. His video and photographic works address themes such as migration and political protest from a conceptual perspective that examines the complexity of visual media as a document of social reality. Kahane lives in Berlin and Tel Aviv, two cities with very different backgrounds that determine and propel his multifaceted approach. He is a recipient of the 2017 ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts.

Augustas Serapinas is based in Vilnius, Lithuania. He received his BA in Sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Art in 2013. As a part of his ongoing project called Secret Places he creates site-specific installations that are indiscernible from their surroundings, building secret studios in ventilation shafts and other hard-to-access spaces for the purposes of reading, discussion, thinking and writing. In 2014 he received “Best artistic debut of the year” prize awarded by the Culture Ministry of Lithuania. Recent shows include: How to gather? (6th Moscow Biennial); Phillip, Lukas & Isidora, Salts, Switzerland; The Future of Memory, Kunsthalle Wien; Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art after Identity Politics, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Utopian city, Survival kit 6, The Latvian Center for Contemporary Art; Unanswered Q, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius and Beginnings, Vartai gallery, Vilnius.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1965, Nicolaus Schafhausen is a curator, director, author and editor of numerous publications on contemporary art. Since 2011 he has been the Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts, an initiative of Shorefast, a charitable foundation based in Newfoundland, Canada dedicated to finding alternative solutions for the revitalisation of areas prone to emigration. Schafhausen is the Artistic Director of Tell me about yesterday tomorrow (November 2019 – August 2020), an exhibition at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism about the future of the past. He has curated numerous international exhibitions such as Media City Seoul 2010 and the Dutch Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. He was the curator of the German Pavilion for the 52^nd (2007) and 53^rd Venice Biennale (2009) and curator of the Kosovo Pavilion for the 56^th Venice Biennale (2015). Schafhausen also co-curated the 6^th Moscow Biennale in 2015. In addition to curating exhibitions, national pavilions and other projects, Schafhausen has led institutions such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. He was Founding Director of the European Kunsthalle, conceived as a project to examine the conditions and structures of contemporary art institutions independent of local government mandates. In 2019 he stepped down as Director of the Kunsthalle Wien, a position he held since 2012, for political reasons, observing that the future of such cultural institutions was thrown into question by rising nationalist policies in Austria and elsewhere. He has called for stronger support from independent state institutions and cultural administrations in times of right-wing populist movements. In the future, Schafhausen aims to work beyond the boundaries of conventional institutions.