Flaxart has currently finished the 2006 / 2007 series of International Residencies. The 2007 / 2008 Residencies will be kicking off again in mid May.

This summer will see the arrival of artist duo of Gregory S. Maass & Nayoungim for a 2 month period. More information on our forthcoming program shall be posted here in the near future.

May 2007

Studio holder Brendan Jamison was the first Belfast based artist go to Khoj aartist run International Residency, New Delhi, India as part of a series of exchange residencies due to take place between Khoj and Flaxart over the coming years. Brendan did a 1 month residency for the month of October 2006. You can see his work from India by following the above link.

Flaxart look forward to hosting an artist in Resident from Khoj in 2007. The Khoj website can be seen on http://www.khojworkshop.org/

May 2007

Follow the following links for information on the recent Flaxart Studios and Queen St Studios seminar collaboration which took place in Belfast over theAutum and Winter of 2007.



Addressing the contemporary climate of political and economic globalisation, this seminar featured a range of artists and activists who engage with and contest processes and sites of exclusion, surveillance and the suspension of human rights under state security practices and corporate imperialism.

Participants examined artists' activist networks committed to global justice; how activist practices are interrogating the function of institutional racism and the biopolitics of neo-liberal capitalism, and exploring forms of global citizenship.

With thanks to the Golden Thread Gallery for hosting the seminar.

www.gtgallery.fsnet.co.uk



This seminar examined relationships and tensions between redevelopment, and the city's marginal and abandoned spaces by presenting artists and activists who engage with spaces under transformation and are contesting the formation of urban spaces into non-public, commercial ownership under market-led redevelopment.

Bringing together a range of approaches (subversive and otherwise) and strategies for experiencing the urban everyday and the formation of alternative public spaces, the session will feature a range of approaches from formal presentations to informal city tours and public actions.

Bring warm waterproof clothing, we will be out and about.

This seminar aimed to identify, interrogate and chart the intersection of personal and collective history at play in Belfast as a post conflict society. Numerous subjective and fragmented memories are embedded in the consciousness of effected communities, bound up in a collective trauma of past events. With the passage of time and the dissolution of narrative, the “labour of memory * generates intangible memorials to physcologically harrowing events. This condition is not unique to Belfast and parallels can be drawn in Argentina, Guatemala, Cyprus, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Rwanda, Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa, Israel, Japan and many other countries.

Our specific interest in this vast field deals with the inter-relationship of memory, trauma and counter trauma in relation to place. In living with the traces of the past of physical, physcological and monumental memory and in acknowledging the transmission of oral history from one generation to the other, how do we now negotiate memories, relics, buildings and spaces that hold political and emotional potency. How can many conflicting subjective perspectives simultaneously claim authorship over the construction of a post conflict history?

“The politics of buildings may be mute but they are potent. They supply some of the dream images by which the polis , the group, identify themselves and therefore they cannot be innocent of their own force as political, in the widest, non partisan sense of the term” (Heaney 1989).

*Elizabeth Jelin