Artist exchange programme with the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, Switzerland – successful artists announced

Castlefield Gallery, in collaboration with the University of Salford Art Collection and Islington Mill is delighted to announce that artists Larry Walker – Tonks (Salford) and Hugo Hemmi (Geneva) have been selected for the first artist exchange programme with the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.eofa.ch/en/

With funding from University of Salford Art Collection (Graduate Scholarship Programme) and Canton et République de Genève in Geneva the pilot project will see an artist exchange between the two cities.

Larry Walker – Tonks is a 2017 graduate of the MA Contemporary Fine Art programme at the University of Salford. Walker – Tonks’ current practice explores our social media habits and our obsession with everything being instantaneous which has served to desensitize people from social taboos, resulting in an unrelenting barrage of messages with unsolicited requests to “send nudes” or to accept an invitation into a faceless stranger’s bed as the norm. He has exhibited as part of several group exhibitions across the UK.

Hugo Hemmi is a Swiss-French artist, his main interest is “relationship” as a form to make art. He develops socially engaged art exhibitions and performances. His recent projects include community art exhibitions in collaboration with the Swiss museum of ceramics (Ariana Museum, Geneva), and MAMCO (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva). Those participative exhibitions invited communities to co-created experimental shows. Besides his social art projects he also creates participative performances creating space of thinking that were activated in galleries such as Kunstmuseum (Luzern), Stanley Picker Gallery (London) and Dampfzentrale (Bern). His work is influenced by the transpedagocial concept of the artist and theorist Pablo Helguera and the concept of social role valorisation by the psychologist Wolf Wolfensberger.

In 2016, he co-founded as a member of collective HALTE an art independent space named « Kiosk » in Geneva, Switzerland. An artistic platform that invites local and international artists to develop in-situ and re-think the art show in this particular public space. Recently the collective created summer residencies and groups shows.

Hemmi graduated from Geneva’s Institute of Social Studies (HETS-IES) with a Bachelor in Community Development and then completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Geneva University of the Art (HEAD), during which he undertook an exchange programme at Kingston University, London.

The aim of the residency exchange is to encourage and develop a meaningful and sustainable relationship between artists and arts professionals in both cities and will see the artists spending time with the arts community in both cities and visiting artists’ studios and organisations.