This year Willemijn Calis and Maarten van Aken are selected to go to Dalian for a residency period of 6 weeks. From the 22nd of September until the beginning of November Willemijn and Maarten are going to live, create art works, exhibit and explore in Dalian. You can follow their residency on this blog on the website of ARE.

Willemijn about her work:

My work consists of drawings, stop-motion animations and installations. Mostly the works are dealing with subjects as life and death, decay and destruction and the human condition, in a language that reveals my love for the theatrical.

Before choosing the medium in which to express it I focus on the content of the work. I don’t want to make a choice for one medium and work with that one I see fit, but I am aware of the painterly context of my works. However, in these works I always try to stretch or explore the boundaries of this context.

More and more, the process becomes an essential part of the work. The painted stop motions are for me the epitome of this way of working, the spectator literally sees every step. Like this, the work proceeds from being a story snatched from reality into being its own truth, a player in a parallel reality.

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Stop-motion ‘Heyday’
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Picture of performance ‘The smaller picture’ in Tetem

Maarten about his work:

My work is about light. Powerful light defines a room

and shows itself at the cutting edge of inside and out. In my obsession for light I explore that intersection. A window is an intersection, a gateway, like a painting can be, that is why they often appear in my work. I try to explore different ways of expressing

how light defines our surroundings and senses.

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