Arts at Cern
Arts at CERN and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia are pleased to announce the selected artists for the first edition of Connect, an international programme intended to foster experimentation in the arts in connection with fundamental science. Two fully funded artistic residencies are to be awarded in 2021: Connect, a three-month residency at CERN aimed at Swiss artists, awarded to the artistic collective AATB; and Connect South Africa, a dual residency for a Swiss artist and an artist from South, West or East Africa, awarded to the artists Ian Purnell and Kamil Hassim.
Connect is a residency programme launched by Arts at CERN in collaboration with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Over the next four years, Connect will open a series of artistic residency opportunities that will take place at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) and at partner scientific organisations in various countries, such as Chile, South Africa, Brazil and India.
“Space and time, black holes, the Standard Model of particle physics, cosmology concepts… these are some of the topics the selected artists are keen to explore during their residencies and I am eager to see how they will give them new form and meaning when they join the CERN community,” says Mónica Bello, curator and head of Arts at CERN. “With Connect, I hope to offer artists a platform to bring forward new perspectives on the dialogue between art and science.”
AATB, the collaborative practice of Swiss artists Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet, is dedicated to the idea of experimenting with industrial robotic systems and automation processes. With their project, they aim to explore representations of space and time using industrial robotic arms, bringing both small atomic events and massive cosmological events into a human-scale format. With CERN researchers, they hope to define a precise framework and ideas to later develop an art installation. AATB will spend two months at CERN, followed by a remote residency of one month in dialogue with scientists at CERN and with the curatorial support of the Arts at CERN team.
