Artists-In-Residence at Grand Union

About

Cristobal Gracia is our resident from SOMA (Mexico City), and his time at Grand Union forms the second leg of an exchange that we initiated with them in 2015. In September we sent West Midlands-based artist Andrew Lacon to Mexico City to spend a month in residence there.
Katharina Ludwig responded to an open call open to Berlin-based artists, and was selected in partnership with Birmingham-based artist Joanne Masding.

Cristobal Gracia
Starting from the research and connection of historical events, mixing them with a touch of humor, science fiction, irony and violence Cristobal Gracia´s work challenges the construction of a present built and regulated by ideological and power structures imposed over time.

Katharina Ludwig
Katharina’s work operates in the space between film, theatre, language, digital culture and artefact. It is informed by investigations into fragmentation of narratives in the digital age and their influence on established hierarchies and binary oppositions, such as absence/presence, control/resistance or flatness/interruption.

Object and writing/text form the main components of her artistic practice. She creates settings in which objects and texts are combined in immersive installations. She sees the objects she creates and the words she use as props: as placeholders suggesting a purpose or activity, yet ambiguous in their presence and escaping a conclusive interpretation. What happens when objects and language are stripped off their usual context and are placed in another environment?