Invited artists
Golnesa Rezanezhad
Golnesa is a multi-disciplinary visual artist and researcher. Her work covers a broad range of practices: from drawing, painting, weaving, patchwork to video installation. She is interested in bringing everyday objects and craft skills, which are part of people’s material culture, into her practice, alongside making gestures towards modern life metaphors. Through objects, decorations and different types of textiles, she adds individual and collective stories, memories or emotional affinities to artistic work. Her work transitions from the personal and individual to the larger shared social and political condition.
Through her feminist approach and collaborative methods, she transforms a self-reflection (of an artist) into a collective reflection (of a group of people) in the artwork. By involving the skills and material cultures of her participants, she explores the idea of culture and cultural diversity after modernism and with the immigration surfacing waves in postmodernism. In this relationship, also spatial appropriation and locative identity over land, institutional space and public space is her concern and part of the challenge offered by her works.
Salomé Grdzelischvili
Salomé Grdzelischvili works with natural and dyed wool, it is a very enjoyable work for her, like therapy. From this natural fabric, one can make almost anything related to textiles. She mastered the technique of felting and weaving clothes and carpets in her homeland Georgia. Her dream is to open her own small studio where she can present her artworks, tapestries, rugs and other decorations, as well as other designs and accessories.
Rae Sita Pratiwi
Originally from Indonesia, Rae Sita Pratiwi is a creative and social engineer based in Ghent. She is passionate about environmental and humanitarian issues. Her artistic practice and research is currently evolving around batik and textiles, using natural dyes and sustainable materials.
Rae uses batik as a way not to forget her roots and culture. As a foreigner living in Belgium, the question of identity is always something intriguing to her. By definition, personal identity is a concept that someone develops about themselves over the course of their life. It can therefore include aspects of life that one has no control over, such as where one grew up, the language one speaks or the colour of one’s skin, as well as choices one makes in life, such as how one spends one’s time and what one believes in.
Ramzi Hassan, Samineh Hamdard & Jamileh Ahmadzi
Ramzieh, Samineh and Jamileh are three women born in Afghanistan. Jamileh has been a teacher and an embroiderer and has made many embroideries in her homeland and now in Belgium. Jamileh and Ramzi have learnt many embroidery techniques from their mothers, other women among their friends, relatives and also at school in Afghanistan. They embroider pieces for their homes, to give as gifts to their loved ones. Moreover, in the last few years of living in Belgium, they have passed on their own skills to interested people by participating in artistic projects such as ‘Who is afraid of Fatima Sultan?’
Mirra Markhaëva
Mirra Markhaëva is a visual artist born in 1992 in the small republic called Buryatia. Her work includes illustration, graphic design, typography, painting and sculpture, but she is especially passionate about creating murals.
Hana Miletić
Born in present-day Croatia, Hana Miletić lives and works in Brussels. She investigates the remainings and transitions of political change where her gaze focuses on the formation of subjectivity, at the level of the individual as well as the community. Her pluralistic practice includes sculpture, textiles, performance, printmaking, workshops and writing.