Residencies for humanities and arts post-graduate students currently studying at European institutions, in partnership with King’s College London
Our partnership with The Ivan Juritz Prize offers a two-week workshop residency to three postgraduate students from European institutions. Established in 2014 to celebrate the creative explosion of the modernist era and reward art that seeks to ‘make it new’, entrants to The Ivan Juritz Prize (Centre for Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London) are encouraged to play with form to make us think, feel and question. Winners in three categories (Text, Sound and Visual Arts) receive a £1000 as well as travel to Spoleto, Italy, studio space and accommodation. The 2023 prize is judged by Rachael Allen, Alvaro Barrington and Sadie Harrison.
The 2024 workshop hosts Sofia Haapamäki (Visual Art), David de la Haye (Sound) and Bebe Ashley (Text).
Sofia Haapamäki (b. Åbo, Finland, 1991) is a visual artist based in Helsinki. She completed her MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki from 2021 to 2023, with an additional MFA exchange program at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2022.
She was awarded the Visual Arts Ivan Juritz Prize for her project ‘Traces of Existence’ (working title) a group of interactive installations which – using devices such as drawing plotters, 3D body scanners, and electroencephalography sensors – pit technologically determined notions of identity against traditional ideas of self-expression.
View ‘Traces of Existence’ portfolio
At the core of Sofia’s artistic exploration lies a deep interest in humanity itself. Her works investigate the individual as a unique force entangled within this complex world. Rather than perceiving the concept of self as uniform or undivided, she is intrigued by the multitude of aspects that constitute our being, and the dialogues that occur between these different versions of ourselves. Sofia delves into these subjects by embracing a conceptual approach and lets the works materialize through diverse forms. This leads her to transcend disciplinary boundaries, as she explores unconventional combinations of techniques and materials – including drawing, employing photographic techniques, and object making.
David de la Haye (b. Jersey, 1981) is an award-winning ecological sound artist, composer, bassist, and music technician. He is interested in how sonic arts can raise the cultural value of aquatic environments. He lives in Durham, UK, and is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University.
David explores our perception of beauty, microsound, and more-than-human interaction with nature through meticulous underwater recordings and bioacoustic technologies. He is currently commissioned by the Swiss Academy of Sciences, co-delivering a large-scale project for Creative Scotland, and working alongside Prof. Anne Whitehead on ‘Sounding The Angel’.
He was awarded the Sound Ivan Juritz Prize for his work ‘Plant Based Patterns’. A response to a soundscape that has existed for millennia yet remains a mystery to many even now: the sound of freshwater plants. A trio of improvising musicians created new repertoire based on underwater recordings collected in the North East of England. The work attempts to illustrate the interconnectedness of our acoustic landscape and evoke interspecies dialogue, serving as a timely reminder that nature’s complex beauty continues to inspire cultures even in an age of technological innovation.
Bebe Ashley (b. Stevenage, UK, 1995) is a writer and lives in Belfast, Ireland. She is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her work can be found in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Jukebox and The Tangerine.
Ashley represented Northern Ireland in the British Council Literature Seminar in Berlin and was selected, by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Future Screens NI, as one of nine artists to receive a Digital Evolution Award in support of a project Confetti that explores poetic potential of Braille and 3D printing.
She was awarded the Text Ivan Juritz prize for her work [have] [have doubts] [harbour doubts] – a poetry collection that somewhat charts the author’s desire and progress to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter.
The 2023 prize is judged by Rachael Allen, Alvaro Barrington and Sadie Harrison.
Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (Faber) and co-author of numerous artists’ books, including Nights of Poor Sleep (Prototype), Almost One, Say Again! (Slimvolume) and Green at an Angle (Kestle Barton). She was recently Anthony Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester, and is the poetry editor for Granta.
Alvaro Barrington Alvaro Barrington practices painting in its widest definition to explore the stories we tell about ourselves and about others. As he says, “It’s my way of learning and unlearning things I’m curious about and things I’ve been told.” For Barrington, painting is a way to experience the world we inhabit and to explore the role of painting itself within the long tradition of storytelling. Past exhibitions have looked at birthing and immigration (Sadie Coles, London, 2019); aspirations in the black community (St. George Projects, Brooklyn, 2021); and mass incarceration and notions of time (Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, 2022). During the 2020 lockdown Barrington made a body of work that explored self-love and digital identity creation in isolation (Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 2021).
Sadie Harrison Sadie Harrison is a composer and performer known particularly for the socio-political aspects of music-making with several works challenging stereotypes of marginalised peoples – refugees, Afghan women, the deaf, the homeless – celebrating their creativity and individuality with powerful expressions of musical solidarity. For several years, Sadie also pursued a secondary career as an archaeologist. Reflecting her interest in the past, many of her compositions have been inspired by the traditional musics of old and extant cultures with cycles of pieces based on the folk music of Afghanistan, Lithuania, the Isle of Skye, the Northern Caucasus and the UK. She has been Composer-in-Residence with Cuatro Puntos (USA), Kunstler Bei Wu Sculpturepark (Germany), and Composer-in-Association with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Her symphonic work Sapida-Dam-Nau for the Afghanistan Women’s Orchestra (Ensemble Zohra) was premiered at the Closing Concert of the World Economic Forum, Davos in January 2017 with subsequent performances in Geneva, Weimar and Berlin. Sadie was appointed as Visiting Fellow to Goldsmiths College, London in recognition of her unique compositional research work on Afghanistan. Sadie’s music is published by UYMP with works on ABRSM and Trinity examination board repertoire lists and has been released to critical acclaim on Naxos, Prima Facie, NMC, Cadenza, Sargasso, Toccata Classics, BML, Divine Art/Metier, and Clarinet Classics, with works featuring in several international films and documentaries.