Connected Artist
April - July 2018
Galleri Svalbard, Svalbard Church, Kirkelig Kulturverksted, Triple Canopy, Longyearbyen Film Club and Artica Svalbard collaborated to bring artists Tahmineh Monzavi, Frank Heath and Antonin Pons Braley to Longyearbyen to work on upcoming projects.
Frank Heath
Frank Heath is an artist and filmmaker living and working in New York. He is in Longyearbyen working on a film project. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
Recent exhibitions include Blue Room, Swiss Institute (2017); Backup, Simone Subal (2014); Matter out of Place, The Kitchen, New York (2012). The Hollow Coin has been shown at International Film Festival Rotterdam (2017), True/False, Columbia, Missouri (2017), Festival International du Film de La Roche-sur-Yon (2017) and Sarasota Film Festival (2017). The film was awarded Best Documentary Short at Indielisboa (2017) and the Deframed Audience Award at Kurzfilm Hamburg (2017). Heath is the Editor of the feature film Donald Cried, dir. Kris Avedisian (The Orchard, 2017).
Heath was in Longyearbyen as a Connected Artist for the month of July, working on his ‘You Can’t Be Buried Here’ project.
Antonin Pons Braley
Drawing for more than ten years on long term field studies in Boreal and Austral regions, artist and researcher Antonin Pons Braley (b. 1988, France) composes an Archive of Norths — aesthetic and academic repertoire of „inner and outer Norths”.
Considering in particular polar and circumpolar vegetal cover and marine flora as both topographical languages as well as intimate landscapes, his Archive questions the milieu as matrix by exploring the conversion of man to his environment, mapping „the Norths” as a continuous interplay of mental and geographical constructs.
The resulting artistic and scientific body of work takes notably shape in totem-like sculptures, reliquaries, frescos and tympanum series, sound and image-based compositions, as well as literary and academic essays. Exhibited in major institutions including Paris Decorative Arts or Tokyo National Museum, Pons Braley’s work is represented in public and private collections internationally.
Based in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Antonin Pons Braley is associate researcher at Imaginary North, the International laboratory of compared multidisciplinary studies of the representations of North, University of Québec in Montréal.
During the month of June, Antonin Pons Braley worked as a Connected Artist in one of Artica’s studio on a project about people in the North.
Tahmineh Monzavi
Tahmineh Monzavi (born 1988 in Tehran) belongs to the young generation of promising Iranian woman photographers with a body of work that embodies a mature vision along with a unique and comprehensive outlook on the subjects. She received her BA in photography from Azad University but had begun her activities as a documentary photographer prior to that in 2005 when her passionate eye was enthralled by the existing but not quite publicly acknowledged social issues in her hometown, Tehran. Her documentary photographs venture into the underground layers of the city in order to unveil the unseen and the unwanted, hoping to create a deeper awareness of what is shunned upon or seen as taboo through the public eye. In 2009 she made her first documentary film to allow the more expressive medium of film open up new horizons to her creative and critical thinking yet clear traces of her photographic background could be seen in her approach to this new medium.
During her stay in Svalbard Monzavi spent time on her ‘Red Soil, Cold Soil’ project.
Her stay was a collaboration between Artica Svalbard, Galleri Svalbard and Svalbard Church, Kirkelig Kulturverksted.