Ptarmigan operated in Tallinn from 2011-2014. We no longer maintain any presence in Tallinn, but this website will continue to serve as an archive of the activities produced at Ptarmigan during these years.
Jaana Kokko is a Helsinki based visual artist with a background in arts and economics. She works primarily with video, but also in the fields of photography, text and drawing. Her works revolve around the subjects of language, representation and alienation. In her practice Kokko is interested in polylog, showing through dialog how our world consists of different individuals and their interpretations of reality in their historical context. Since 20111 Kokko is working on her practice-based dissertation in political and social arts.
Marko Timlin is a sound artist, composer and performer. He lives and works as a freelance artist in Helsinki, Finland. Timlin develops his own electronic and digital musical instruments that he plays live in concert. One of his main artistic interests is the conversion of light and body motion into sound. In recent years he has developed amongst others the sensor-based digital musical instrument Sensor-Sound-Machine, the Solenoid Orchestra and at the request of Finnish Artists´ Association Muu ry the Sound-Disk-Machine. Timlin’s music has been performed world-wide in galleries, museums and concert halls including performances in New York, Toronto, Montreal, Berlin, Köln, Stockholm, Helsinki, Paris, London, Valencia and Nanchang. He also composes music and designs interactive sound installations and multichannel speaker setups for theatre plays.
His newest project “Bits and Pieces” will be based on the use 130 floppy disk drives. Although computer-controlled, its sound production will be entirely mechanical. This work will be presented in 2015 as a sound installation as well as a musical instrument for live performances.
Marko and Jaana's residency is part of the Axis of Praxis project with MoKS, supported by Kulturkontakt Nord.
Jasmin Schaitl (AT) is a live, action-based artist with a visual arts background. She works site-relatively, creating installation environments, where the witnesses‘ perception of space and time is modified through her actions.
William “Bilwa” Costa (US) is an artist who works in the performing, sound, and visual arts contexts. He works internationally, generating research, lab, and performance projects, actively cultivating opportunities for artists to work together on new interdisciplinary experiments.
In July 2013, Jasmin Schaitl and William “Bilwa” Costa began a collaborative duo. Since then they have performed, led workshops, and have been artists in residence in Vienna, Berlin, Helsinki, Tallinn, Tartu, Oslo, and Istanbul. Their work addresses the physical relationship between two performers while exploring the correlation between, and potentials of: duration - ephemerality, proximity - distance, transformation - alteration, and duality - unison.
Using limited materials, each performance focuses on simultaneous actions, and the point where these actions phase, oscillate, and/or conjoin. These actions are repetitive, consistent, clear, precise, thorough and definite. Without narrative, they leave the audience time to assess the actions and interpret or propose her/his own meaning, content and thoughts.
Additionally, they have worked in trio and group projects including: 三 (3) movement-sound- action with Akemi Nagao, sound/map with Aya Imamura, an untitled video project with Christian Konrad Schröder, and sub_space with Akemi Nagao, Stina Nilsson, Aya Imamura, and Irene Cortina Gonzalez.
Sara is a visual artist with an interdisciplinary approach to scenography and performance making. Currently based in Slovenia and often in transit, her work is a constant investigation into the relationship between physical perception, space and place. She creates and documents work using physical materials, drawing, movement and her voice. Other work includes ongoing research that combines butoh with objects, materials and costume as performance.
Meera has a background in Fine Art and Scenography. She is concerned with the architecture in which you place yourself and your work. Finding ways of manipulating the structural walls, expanding and shrinking a space to fit your needs. Transformation, refraction and the sea. She is concerned with both static work and choreographed movement of the body. She likes to make work as quickly as possible.
Kaspars Lielgalvis is an artist who works throughout the culture field, with interests including urban development, interdisciplinarity in contemporary art and the creation of self-organized structures. He is based in Riga, Latvia.
Having studied as a textile artist, Kaspars started his professional carrier as a graphic designer. Parallel to his job in advertising agencies, he was a member of the performance art group “Totaldobže” from 2001-2004. In 2005 he started a new business – decorations for different kind of commercial and non-commercial events. Very soon, together with scenographer Davis Licitis, they became one of the most wanted decorator firms in Latvia, having clients starting from the theater festival Homo Novus and ending with larger business enterprises. After 2008, due to the economic crisis, the decoration business collapsed and Kaspars founded an artist-run initiative where artists studios, exhibition space and residencies were located next to each other, in Riga's former factory VEF. Since then, he has been busy with the development of the Totaldobze Art Centre, which became an important platform for cross-over creation and meetings between artists, poets, musicians, dancers and representatives from other culture disciplines in Riga.
During his Ptarmigan residency, Kaspars will work on the Black Holes project. Black Holes has been developing since 2011 and has become the foundation and primary activity of Art Centre Totaldože. The aim of the Project is to develop cooperation with foreign art institutions in order to dissolve borders of local art environments and create works that would become part of an international movement.
Brett Sroka is a composer and sound artist for film, dance, installation and his own ensembles in which he plays trombone and laptop. He has released five records of original music, performed at BAMcafe, the Sonic Circuits Festival, the Guggenheim Museum and the Teatro Fondamenta Nueve in Venice, Italy and scored a variety of films that have appeared at festivals in Maine, Texas, Paris, Hamburg and Beijing.
After graduating from Manhattan School of Music, Sroka made his first record, Hearsay, for the Fresh Sound-New Talent label, with classmates Jason Moran and Eric Harland. He has led the minimal, electro-acoustic trio Ergo on three releases, most recently If Not Inertia from Cuneiform Records, with guest Mary Halvorson. Cherubim, a melody/noise/drone duo with guitarist Yuko Pepe, has just released their debut record with the Zeromoon label. Sroka has received grants from the Queens Council on the Arts, the Finlandia Foundation, twice been a fellow at the I-Park Foundation, a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Electronic Arts at Alfred University. While in residence last past spring at the Vilnius Academy of Art - Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, he completed a new suite for Ergo which will be released in 2015 and developed Sine Qua Non, a performance/sound installation, which was premiered at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY in January of 2014.
Nikki Kane is an artist, project-maker and cultural producer based in Glasgow, Scotland. She has a background in History of Art (University of Glasgow 2010) and experience in public art and cultural events. She is a committee member for Market Gallery, involved in the programming and management of this artist-run space, and since 2012 has undertaken key project coordination for NVA’s Speed of Light, a public art performance touring UK and international locations.
Through her practice she is interested in collaborative working and in notions of place and space, visual symbols, and social structures. She seeks to create provoking and engaging experiences through curation, facilitation, performance and installation. She is concerned with exploring and drawing attention to constructs and structures that are present within our surroundings and interactions, and to layers and details that are present and may be overlooked.
Recent activity has included walking performance works exploring experiences of everyday space, and in March 2014 she undertook a self-directed residency with The Bothy Project on the Isle of Eigg in which shapes, patterns and layers of place were considered alongside reflections on community, remoteness and collective work and living. She also collaborates and facilitates as part of WHATEVERSHALLWEDO??, a collective of artists and non-artists exploring opportunities for creative practice outsides of traditional modes of funding, making and presenting.
In August 2014 she will take part in a workshop and residency in Italy exploring ideas around collective living and working, and in Autumn 2014 she hopes to develop her practice through further study with a research-based Masters degree exploring both academic and practice-based outcomes. Whilst at Ptarmigan in Tallinn, she plans to present a gathering event as part of their Strange Meetings Club series, a curated film screening and discussion, and a walking performance work exploring layers of meaning and experiences of a place as collective, a resident and a visitor.
Will Slater is a London-based artist and writer who works mostly with performance. In 2012 he graduated from Wimbledon College of Art with a BA in Fine Art: Print & Time Based Media.
He has performed lectures and broadcasts in various venues around London with his lecture entitled, 'Beginnings of a Media Event', which he also took to the live art event, Tempting Failure in Bristol 2013. Will has also taken part for the past three years in the international artists' network, Mileskm. This started as a collaborative exhibition between British and Spanish artists in Madrid, and has developed into an annual residency, focussing on exchanges of ideas and collectivity, which he'll be co-organising in Spain this September.
When staying with Ptarmigan, he will be attempting to develop a new project called 'What We've Learned While Walking' with the journey of walking being the work itself. This comes from interests in psychogeography; specifically how walking as a replacement of public transport can change one's perception of a city, and help investigate people's conflicts with modernity.
The Axis of Praxis residency programme (shared with MoKS) returns in 2014 with a visit by Kimmo Modig. In his own words:
I'm Kimmo Modig and I'm an artist living in Helsinki. I'm coming to Tallinn to, most likely, meet people and write my play that will premiere in November. I'll set up a public event maybe a concert or a performance while I'm there.If you wanna know what I do, check these things out:
