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2020

COLLIDER: IN-RESIDENCE ARTIST RESIDENCY

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our latest Collider residency will be run as an experimental In-Residence Artist Residency, facilitated via virtual interactions and workshops.

The making of art tends to be a solitary practice. Artist residencies have for years, facilitated peer review and the sharing of knowledge in refreshingly new ways and spaces. In the midst of a global pandemic, we invite artists to draw parallels between their own studio practices and today’s need to observe social distance and self-isolation. By destabilizing the very agency of the residency model in adapting it instead to a virtual interface, we explore and question its efficacy while attempting to configure new ways of cohabiting space, expanding platforms for art production and engagement, and building meaningful communal relationships.

At another level, in continuing our thematic focus on exploring our engagement with the land, we propose to better understand our shared resources and emotive functions, as a human species when collectively faced with an unseen/ microscopic contagion. Can creative practices build bridges and pave new roads in the making of congruous interactions and harmonious living? Toward developing this ambition, we encourage artists to think of containment as a renewed freedom toward rethinking locked positions and revitalizing ideas of mutual co-existence.

With over 300 applicants from 62 countries delivering thoughtful, innovative and inspiring proposals. After a rigorous adjudication process with a jury of arts professionals, the Collider: In-Residence Artist Residency celebrates a selection of ten artists from around the world all of whom are responding to the themes in rich and inventive ways.

2019

COLLIDER: PLANETARY

This inaugural project employed a peer nomination process to invite 30 local artists to make Contemporary Calgary and the former Centennial Planetarium their studio and community hub. Visitors to Collider will encountered a dynamic and vibrant space of creativity and collaboration in an open studio, long-term residency environment that responds to our City's appetite for inclusion and diversity while showcasing the extraordinary talent in our own backyard. Generating new work for Contemporary Calgary’s fall exhibition Planetary, residents were asked to consider ideas ranging from galactic exploration and speculative futures to meaningful memories triggered by the historic context of the former Planetarium.