The Nida Art Colony is pleased to present the most recent Artists in Residence joining the Colony: Bjargey Ólafsdóttir (IS), Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (FI), Lena Dobrowolska (UK/PL), and Vsevolod Kovalevskij (LT).

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir is an interdisciplinary artist from Iceland. She is not bound to any specific medium, instead she uses mediums that correspond to the concept of the work: film, sound art, performance, drawing and photography. Her works are narrative by nature, telling stories of bored female dentists, rock stars in Japan and women that can see into the future and beyond. Her works are sometimes scary, yet beautiful and always brimming with humor and playfulness. Her practice reveals a collection of symbols that seem to have come into being either in the artist’s dreams, or by entering her consciousness at the moment between sleep and waking. In her recent photo series "Scintilla", Bjargey put forward a world of the invisible and spiritual as an antidote to the materialistic excesses of present-day lifestyles. The work was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography prize and the Godowski Colour photography Award. For more information, please click here

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen, born in Finland, is an interdisciplinary artist. His work is heavily process based and conceptual, and often takes on the subject of the human scale and perception in relation to space. Through repetitive and time intensive activities that involve daily activities like walking, or through productive work with the hands, he slowly adjusts a material or a situation. The works are often poetic. In his most recent exhibition he took a length of rope equal to the distance between his home and the gallery where it was to be displayed and crocheted it into a welcome mat.

Lena Dobrowolska is a polish born artist, residing in Scotland, UK. She works primarily with photography, displayed in the form of book publications. Her work is the precipitation of a much larger intellectual process involving theory, history and literature, oscillating between symbolic and empirical . She has been examining interconnectedness and plateau. Currently she is working with the texts of Thomas Mann and Deleuze and Guttari, experimenting with the form of assemblage incorporating image object and sound. For more information, please visit: www.dobro.me.uk

Vsevolod Kovalevskij is a multimedia artist from Lithuania. He is studying photography both as a means of breaking down political and ideological structures, and as a formal medium. He also works with installation, sound, and sculpture. One of his recent works talks about social identity and critiques the political ideological structure - specifically the viability of "democracy" as a stable governmental structure. He is interested in social aesthetics as a medium. More recently he has turned to drawing. For more information, please visit: www.vkovalevskij.eu