Recipients of the Reciprocal Residency

The Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry (CCA) have partnered with the Lithuanian Cultural Institute and Kaunas Artists’ House (KAH) to establish a new Reciprocal Residency for emerging artists. Entitled DeMo, the programme aims to create opportunities for emerging artists to participate in residencies, to stimulate mutual dialogue and exchange. DeMo aims to explore the connections between different modernities, that is, to unravel modernity as a phenomenon in the broader sense of time and space and across cultural, scientific, societal and industrial developments.

Our pilot year sends and receives artists between Northern Ireland and Lithuania. These two countries are each at the border of the European Union, Lithuania is a relatively new EU member and the UK, prospectively at the end of its membership. Both countries have experienced contested borders and have rich cultural heritage and world-class art scenes.

The artists participating in the 2020 edition of the Reciprocal Residency Program “DeMo” are Ginte Regina (LT) and Niamh Seana Meehan (NI). They were selected through an Open Call and will be spending February 2020 in Derry/Londonderry (Ginte Regina) and Kaunas (Niamh Seana Meehan) hosted by CCA and KAH respectively. Following the residency the artists will exhibit at CCA with two, concurrent, solo shows of new and existing work by the artists. The exhibition will be open to the public from 21 March–23 May 2020.

Both artists engage in the analysis of space in their works to emphasize the nomadic precarious subject of our times. The reflectivity on borders, limits and fragmented integrity that features in their artistic practice is manifested differently in their chosen medias. The sensibility towards the narrative that closely depends on the space links both artists of the Reciprocal Residency Program DeMo.