Introducing Lara Dahlmann and Tessa Mars

Artists in residence, October to December 2015

In the final quarter of 2015, Alice Yard is hosting two artists in residence, Lara Dahlmann (October to November) and Tessa Mars (October to December).

Lara Dahlmann is a German artist, living and working in Hamburg. She graduated with a diploma in illustration from the University of Applied Sciences and received a travel grant from the DAAD/German Academic Exchange Service to visit Trinidad and complete her studies in 2000. She later participated in residencies at Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Trinidad in 2006, and at La Paternal Espacio Proyecto in Buenos Aires. Dahlmann has exhibited in various spaces in Hamburg and Berlin, and at the Leopold-Hoesch Museum in Düren. For more information on her work, visit www.laravlaska.com

Tessa Mars is a Haitian visual artist living and working in Port-au-Prince. She completed her bachelor’s degree in visual arts in France, at Rennes 2 University in 2006. From 2006 to 2013 she worked as a cultural projects coordinator at Fondation AfricAméricA. Her work has been exhibited in Haïti, Canada, France, Italy, and the United States. In 2015 she was awarded a travel grant by the French Institute (“Visa pour la creation” programme/Afrique et Caraïbes en Création), and is subsequently in Port of Spain for a three-month residency at Alice Yard. During her stay she will be shaping her personal mythology and exploring how new surroundings influence our narratives. For more information, visit www.tessamars.com

Both artists will give public presentations of their work at dates to be announced.

AY24/7: Alex Kelly

.

The latest in Alice Yard’s 24/7 series of artists’ installations is a mural drawing by Alex Kelly, part of an ongoing exploration of the concept of “force ripe.” The work at Alice Yard, writes the artist, “seeks to examine the roles that education and the rapid acquisition of wealth have played in the development of the current social and cultural realities of Trinidad and Tobago since it gained independence in 1962.”


About the artist:

Alex Kelly is a contemporary artist working in Trinidad and Tobago. He recently graduated from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Arts. Over the period of his study at the university, Kelly participated in several public art projects.

He has exhibited in three group shows with the University of the West Indies, and in 2012 produced the mural Slave at the Night Gallery, Woodbrook, Port of Spain. Most recently, Kelly participated in the Caribbean Linked III artists’ residency and exhibition in Aruba, where in August 2015 he spent three weeks producing original works and participating in engagements that have expanded the scope of his practice from a national focus to a regional one.

Kelly is one of the resident artists at Granderson Lab, Alice Yard’s adjunct incubation space in Belmont, Port of Spain.


AY24/7 is an ongoing series of artists’ works installed in the Alice Yard Box, a modest gallery space accessible to viewers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

A conversation with Ivan Sigal

Friday 9 October, 2015, at 7 pm

Kabul, Afghanistan, 2004, from White Road


Ivan Sigal is a photographer, writer, media producer, and executive director of Global Voices. His book White Road, published in 2012, is a meditation through images and text on the aftereffects of history, the restlessness of travel, and the possibilities of human encounter, based on his experience living and working in Russia and Central Asia from 1998 to 2005. A more recent project, The Karachi Circular Railroad, reported for the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, circumnavigates the Pakistani city, telling stories about its past, present, and possible futures.

On Friday 9 October, 2015, at 7 pm, Sigal will give an informal talk at Alice Yard on his photography and reporting projects, the compulsion to document, and how photographs can find truths behind the grand narratives of nations and official histories.

All are invited.