Residencies as an Infrastructural Form by Karin Zitzewitz

22nd August, 5:30 pm onwards

Anant Art, New Delhi

As part of AFA Talks, we periodically invite scholars, researchers and artists from across the world to share in-depth presentations on their practice, research and thinking. These sessions are conceived as an extension of the Foundation's commitment to enabling discourse, creating safe spaces for sustained and unhurried conversations.

Drawing on research into Indian residencies and the experience of founding a university-based residency in the United States, this talk by Karin Zitzewitz explores what makes residencies work: flexibility, temporariness, and the conditions they create for practices that more permanent structures cannot support.

Image: Dan Paz, Process photo for Stacks for Andrea at Highland Elementary, 1978–84, 2022, porcelain, dimensions variable.

Lecture Overview

In the most basic sense, residency programs offer artists a structured space and time in which to do work. They are grounded in particular understandings of what might spur creativity: some insist upon the salutary effects of togetherness with other artists, while others provide the proverbial room of one’s own; some place artists in sites rich with beauty or history, while others offer access to equipment, materials, or art world contacts; some invest with little expectation of return, while others require the deposit of one or more works made on site. Not all artists find residencies helpful, and not all practices can be done well in residency conditions. But for some, they become key drivers of creativity.

This talk will reflect upon two sets of experiences with the residency as an infrastructural form: one based in my research on Indian residencies that exist in parallel to a gallery-driven art world, and the other as founder/director of a residency within a university in the United States. We will explore the roles played by flexibility and temporariness in how residencies can work to make more cumbersome—but also more consequential—parts of art infrastructure to support new kinds of artistic practice.

Karin Zitzewitz

Speaker

VIEW BIO

Karin Zitzewitz

Speaker

VIEW BIO

Lecture Overview

Karin Zitzewitz

Speaker

VIEW BIO

AFA TALKS · LECTURES

Residencies as an Infrastructural Form by Karin Zitzewitz

This talk draws on research into Indian residencies and the experience of founding a university-based programme in the United States to explore how structured time and space shape, and sometimes even transform artistic practice.