HEKLER collective
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
6:00 - 9:00pm
signs and symbols presents an evening with HEKLER as part of artists & allies.
HEKLER is an interdisciplinary collective and collaborative platform that fosters critical examination of hospitality and conflict. HEKLER organizes events, exhibitions, and zines through actions with local and visiting art practitioners and community organizers. Events take place at the HEKLER headquarters in Gowanus and partnering satellite venues. is an interdisciplinary collective and collaborative platform that fosters critical examination of hospitality and conflict. HEKLER organizes events, exhibitions, and zines through actions with local and visiting art practitioners and community organizers. Events take place at the HEKLER headquarters in Gowanus and partnering satellite venues.
Participating Artists
željka blakšić aka gita blak is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb where she received her BFA in 2007; she also received her Master of Fine Arts with Distinction from the School of Visual Arts, Video and Related Media Department in 2010. She explores possibilities and peripheral areas of different media, often combining 16mm film, performance, video and sculpture, her works translates into complex audio-visual systems. Her artistic career began early in adolescence, in the field of music, and she continues to nurture it through performances with musicians in experimental music and visual appearances. Recent exhibitions and performances include D’EST at Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf as part of the Performing Words, Uttering Performance curated by TOK and Inga Lāce; Trauma & Revival project-group presentations at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Krakow; The Witnessing Event curated by Rashmi Viswanathan at Los Sures Museum in NY; It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades! curated by Inga Lāce & Katia Krupennikova at Framer Framed in Amsterdam; BROUHAHA at Recess Gallery, NY; Claim Space at Museum of Modern Art, NY; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, IL; District Kunst Gallery, DE; Gallery Augusta, FI; AIR Gallery, NY; Active Space, NY; Urban Festival in Croatia; Art Gallery of SESI, Sao Paolo, BR etc. She was a recipient of the Residency Unlimited & National Endowment for the Arts Award in NY 2017; Session Residency and Via Art Fund Grant 2016; AIR Gallery Fellowship in NY, 2014; The District Kunst und Kulturförderung Award in Berlin, 2013; New York Foundation for the Artist Program; Paula Rhodes Memorial Award in New York City and many others. Most recently she was a resident at Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy; and MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, Austria.
boško bošković is a Brooklyn based curator and arts worker. His curatorial projects include Monument-Movement, Center for Photography & Moving Image, New York; Not so Distant Memory, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art & National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; Daniel Rothbart – But I’m An American, KCB, Belgrade; Band of Outsiders, CAC, New York; Power of the Brand, Contemporary Art Museum in Banja Luka, Bosnia & Hercegovina; Bite A Bunny for a Day, Exhibition 211, New York; New Paintings – Aleksandra Popovic, MC Gallery, New York; Video Integration, Belef, Belgrade; Performing Body, Marina Abramovic, Speed Art Museum, Louisville.
Boskovic worked at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation managing the European retrospective Specific Objects Without Specific Form which traveled to the Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels, The Beyeler Foundation in Basel and the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. During his tenure as Associate Director at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York he worked closely with artists Los Carpinteros, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov and Johan Grimonprez.
Boshko Boskovic is the Program Director of Residency Unlimited
amir husak is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Combining emergent and traditional media, essay and experimental techniques, Husak's work explores documentary as social practice and investigates digital media representation of history and identity politics. His works have been shown at such diverse places as South by Southwest (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), Sarajevo Film Festival (Bosnia & Herzegovina), Stadtmuseum Graz (Austria), P.O.V./PBS (US), Big Sky Documentary Film Festival (US), TV Cultura (Brazil), and Full Frame Film Festival (US). Husak is both Fulbright and Jack Kent Cooke fellow and he currently teaches in the Media Studies program at The New School in New York City.
Born in Uzbekistan – a Muslim country with troubled ethnic history and totalitarian regime, MARINA LEYBISHKIS’ sense of identity is complex. Her text accompanying documentary photographs, 108km in Exile, 2013-2017, lists people deported to Uzbekistan by Stalin: Tatars, Germans, Chechens, Jews, Koreans, Russians – most to labor camps: “I grew up thinking it’s natural to see many nationalities and religions under the same national roof, but I was unaware of how they got there […], physical, psychological and spiritual deportation none of them has ever really recovered from…”
LEYBISHKIS holds an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. Fulbright Fellow (Greece) 2018-2019. Exhibitions: Yangpyeong Art Museum, South Korea (2018); Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, IL (2018); BnK Gallery, Busan, South Korea (2018); Writ & Vision, Provo, UT (2017); Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, IL (2017); Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, 2017; and President’s Gallery, John Jay College, NYC, 2015 (solo: 108km in Exile).
joshua nierodzinski is an artist and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings, installations, and exhibitions investigate representation, perception, and empathy through multi-sensory modes of presentation. His paintings are characterized by an uncanny familiarity that exists between observational, memory, and lens-based painting. His compositions originate from a personal archive of collected objects, images, and experiences. These sources are a union of public life and private thought and suggest stories that become transformed by the act of painting as presented in Forensic Painting project.
Forensic painting employs conservation imaging to activate the narrative potential in the material and history of a painted surface. The finished painting and the forensic photographs create an image complex that establishes connections between the collective cultural memories and the artist's personal experience. The Forensic Painting project is made possible through a collaboration with the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
jelena prljević is an artist from Serbia, based in New York whose practice exists within the intersection of drawing, animation, and installation. A natural storyteller, she builds her narratives through layering of light, erasure, and regenerative power of shadows. Prljević holds a BFA from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad (SRB) and an MFA in Studio Art in the Art & Art History Department, School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut (USA).
Her most recent project Neither Here nor There was awarded by The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and exhibited at The William Benton Museum of Art, CT. In 2018, her animation Sisterhood was premiered at 13th Athens Animfest in Athens (GR) and officially selected to participate in ProFi Fest, 7th International Movie Festival in Prokuplje (SRB), and SEE a Paris 2018, a South East European Film Festival that will take place in Paris (FR).
nataša prljević is an artist, curator and organizer. She explores the potential for political imagination in the collision of disparate media and collaborative action. Prljević is the Executive and Curatorial Assistant at Residency Unlimited (RU). Curatorial projects include: Zorica Zafirovska: Border Crossing; Nina Komel: Charting Absurd at IDIO Gallery in Brooklyn; Nina Simonović: Hesitations 2; Performances by Dardan Zhegrova/Lola Sylaj and Mark Požlep at De-Construct [projects] in Brooklyn.
Honors include: KulturKontakt Austria Grant; Rackham International Student Fellowship/ Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture Nomination; and a guest artist honor at Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna, Chiang Mai and Poh Chang Academy of Arts in Bangkok, Thailand. Prljević holds an MFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a BFA from Academy of Arts Novi Sad, Serbia.
siniša radulović (b. 1983, Podgorica, Montenegro) holds a BFA and an MFA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cetinje, Montenegro. Honors include Milčik - Young Visual Artist Award (2017), Grand Prix at Herceg Novi Winter Art Salon (2016), and Montenegrin Art Salon 13 November Award (2011, 2016), Cetinje. He lives and works in Podgorica.
Radulović participated in Residency Unlimited, New York (2018); DONUMENTA: 14x14 under construction, Regensburg, Germany; Borderland, Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel, Switzerland (2017); MECONIO, Muestra de Nuevos Cineastas, Máster LAV, Madrid, Spain; 56th October Salon - The Pleasure of Love, Belgrade, Serbia; End(less), Contemporary video art festival, Museum Romeinse Katakomben, Valkenburg, Netherlands; Attitude, Cultural Center Magaza, Bitola, Macedonia; My name is Balkan, M.A.M Contemporary Arts Foundation, Tirana, Albania (2016); Kultur Kontakt, Gallery of the Federal Chancellery of Austria, Vienna, Austria; Flattened Fauna, Atelje Dado, Cetinje, Montenegro (2015); Interactions, Palazzo Calò, Bari, Italy (2014); Ego Sum, Center of Contemporary art of Montenegro, Dvorac Petrovica, Podgorica, Montenegro; Heterotopias, Gallery Remont, Belgrade, Serbia; Bicephalous, Leksand Kulturhus, Sweden (2013).
farideh sakhaeifar is a New York-based artist born in Tehran, Iran. She received her MFA from Cornell University in 2011 and her BFA from Azad Art and Architecture University in Iran in 2008. Sakhaeifar’s work ranges from photography to installation and sculpture and is usually related to her life experiences. She looks to past forms of ethnic, political, and cultural control in order to reflect upon new forms of expression that highlight the human struggle to establish autonomous forms of self-expression. Her work seeks to produce a translational understanding of the social and political struggles in which she has been involved either directly or indirectly.