Residency Programmes

Lou Drago was an artist-in-residence in 2025 in cooperation with Wellington City Council and the Loemis Festival.

Lou Drago is a Berlin-based artist working across various mediums. They draw connections between the healing potential of sound, the necessity for collectivity during neoliberal times, queer-feminisms, and meditation and related theories. Their artistic works Suspending Time: meditations for accessing alternate space/time in music, and Dissident Vespers, fuse Drago’s experiential-theoretical research with their sound-based work to create listening occasions for being-together and being with oneself, with others. These works both speculate on altering a listener’s perception of time with the hypothesis that this alternate experiencing of time has expansive and healing potential. Drago’s practice is always collective to varying degrees, and they reject the prevailing notion of the singular artist in favour of acknowledging the pluralities of experiences that contribute to any given work. This trajectory of thought is exemplified in recent works New Feathers and Female Copulatory Vocalisation, in which Drago transcribes and arranges fragments of conversations with comrades into texts that reveal the collective (un)conscious of the group of the selected subjects.
Drago’s recent theoretical research is concerned with finding ways to coalesce all of those who refuse or fail to fit the neoliberal mould in an attempt to reunite what we have witnessed to be an increasingly fractured Left. Aware of the role identity politics have played in dividing the Left, Drago navigates between their commitment to gender abolitionism and other xeno-feminist desires and a politics of Radical Sociability that aims to enact an intersectional affinity-based politics. They curate and produce, t r a n s i e n c e, a regular show on Cashmere Radio, Berlin that focuses on experimental, ambient, drone and experient music that aims to offer anxiety relief to its listeners. They host sonic seances under the name of infinity rug, with frequent collaborater, marum. infinity rug offers a moment where sound, collective learning and intimate care come together to forge a space of togetherness. Drago is a founding member of XenoEntities Network, Berlin, a collective who operated from 2016 - 2020, focusing their research on queer, gender and feminist studies and their interactions with digital technologies. They have hosted listening-occasions, shared music and public conversations across Europe and internationally.

Ethan Braun and Lina Grumm were artist-in-residence 2025 in cooperation with Artspace Aotearoa.

Ethan Braun and Lina Grumm have collaborated on a range of works, including opera, records, and printed matter. Their practices seek out tensions between hyper-refinement and glitch, the intentional and the accidental. These dynamics uncover unexpected relationships between sound, text, image, and performance, using disruption to invite new possibilities for interpretation.

Ethan Braun is a composer known for experimental approaches to sound and live performance. Ethan’s work braids improvisation with algorithmic and computer-assisted compositional models, as well as sampling, in music that harmonises the conceptual, formalistic, and emotional. A frequent collaborator in transdisciplinary contexts, Ethan has worked with choreographers, visual artists, and musicians across various media, with projects presented at venues such as Kampnagel Hamburg, CalArts REDCAT, Rewire Festival, Swiss Institute NYC, and LUMA Arles. Ethan’s concert music has been performed at Roulette Intermedium and Carnegie Hall in New York, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Dutch National Opera.

Lina Grumm works in graphic design and is co-founder of HIT, together with Annette Lux. In dialogue with artists, exhibition makers, and authors, she develops visual communication of artistic concepts, transforming abstract ideas into books, exhibitions, posters, and digital formats. She has collaborated with institutions such as ICA and TATE London, Kunsthalle Bern, Midway Contemporary Minneapolis, and Haus am Waldsee Berlin.

Intimation of Endless Space Given in a Small Window of Time (approximately 10 minutes) is their first collaboration in the form of an exhibition.

Jimmy Robert was an artist-in-residence 2024 in cooperation with Artspace Aotearoa.

Jimmy Robert was born in Guadeloupe in 1975, studied at Goldsmiths University in London and started a residency at the Rljksakademie in Amsterdam before moving to Berlin, where he is currently a professor at the UdK. His artistic expression ranges from photography, sculpture, film and video to collaborative performance.
The Gallery Artspace Aotearoa sets the stage for the first solo exhibition of the artist in the Moana-nui-a-Kiwa region. It presents Robert’s seminal performance Joie Noire, debuted at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin in early 2019 and transformed into an exhibition designed especially for Artspace Aotearoa. The work traverses the full spectrum of life’s edges; the explosive power of coming of age, a weaponised pandemic, and the many, often surprising places we find solidarity. Located in conversation with the gay-club-scene of New York in the 1980s and filtered back through Robert’s practice— primarily emerging from a photo-performance impulse—we are invited to move with our own bodies through constitutive elements of the original performance. This experience of navigation registers sites of self-determination and imposed limitations pointed to in a variety of contexts of Robert’s work.This reconfiguration of the work will include photography, audio, video and spatial interventions.

This will be the second exhibition in Artspace Aotearoa's exhibition cycle 2024 orbiting the question “Do I need territory?”. The exhibition opens on Friday, 19 April 2024 and will run regularly from 20 April to 6 July 2024. On Thursday 11 April 2024, Jimmy Robert will talk about his work in an artist talk.

An Jay was an artist-in-residence in 2023 in cooperation with Wellington City 

An Jay (Andreas Chetkowski) is a German hip-hop artist with over 20 years of experience in the music business. From 2000-2015 he produced and performed in numerous music and theatre projects in Berlin, including the Deutsches Theater, 48 Stunden Neukölln, Berlin Lacht und Interkunst. Furthermore, An jay performed regularly in cultural projects for the German Embassy and the Goethe-Institut in Bulgaria, Poland, Turkey, Tunis and Zimbabwe. Since five years An Jay cooperates on an interdisciplinary basis with artists from different genres, primarily paining and art performance. In his artistic work he plays with the interaction between natural surroundings and digital media. He focuses on the interplay of digital and analog forms of representation.

Next to hismusic, An Jay has worked for the last seven years in Lublin (Poland) and Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria) as a DAAD lecturer. He is also writing his doctoral thesis in philosophy, dealing with information structures in the digital age.

During his time in New Zealand, An Jay will give rap workshops at schools, next to his own performances and lectures. In these workshops he will teach the German language through rhythms and wordplay to help students in their learning process. An Jay visits schools in Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland.

Clara Ehrenwerth was an artist-in-residence in 2022 in cooperation with Wellington City 

Clara is a writer, game designer and executive director at machina eX. Born in 1987 in Blankenburg/Harz, Germany, she studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. From 2008 to 2011 she was co-editor of the contemporary German-language literary magazine BELLA triste and also served as a member of the artistic direction and project manager at the literature festival PROSANOVA 2011 in Hildesheim.

She has received several awards for her literary work, including a prize from the Young Literature Forum Hesse-Thuringia and a working scholarship from the Free State of Thuringia. Since 2014 she has been working with the theater collective machina eX, where she’s the executive director since 2018.

The collective specializes mainly on interactive stage adventure games by exploring the intersection of theater and computer games. By combining modern technologies with the means of classical illusion theater, machina eX creates immersive playable theater pieces that are also walk-through computer games. Their performances have been positively reviewed in the Washington Post and various, renowned German newspapers.

Please find some reviews below:

“Clever computer-game-like entertainment” ”Although [...] fun to play, it also serves as a bizarre sociological experiment.” listed on “11 things to do in the D.C. area”.
– The Washington Post

“Flexibility and the openness give the 'Machina eX' productions their appeal. They are unquestionably among the most consistently conceived connections between game and theater.”
– Spiegel Online

“This is the future of theater! Gameplay and theater: the best of both worlds combined.”
– Bayrischer Rundfunk

Jan Philip Steimel invents, programmes and solders electronic gadgets for theatrical real-life games. He specialises in the artistic exploration of the borderlands between performing arts and technology. Somewhere between theatre, computer games and explorative art installations, Philip is always on the hunt for new ways to make objects, computers and humans interact and interlink. For that, he works in the realms of physical computing and interaction design to create unique and often weird experiences.

Philip teaches game design with the means of theatre, digital theatre technology and is involved in several open source projects. He is a member of the 7 person theatre collectivemachina Ex(real life game theatre) who develop playable theatre pieces that also work as walkable computer games. Since 2010machina Exhas been exploring the crossover area of theatre and computer games combining modern technology with the tools of classical illusion theatre, game design and literature to create immersive theatre experiences. They have developed more than 25 live games that have been performed in Europe, the US and the UK.

In his spare time, Philip is tinkering with code that fills out customs forms and creating storytelling tools or 3D printable models of things that might or might not be useful. His heart beats for open source hardware and he dreams of fablabs and electric elephants.

During his virtual residency, Philip will work on an interdisciplinary performance-project“The Hitchhiking Robot”– a collaboration with local artists and tech talent.

Anna Peschke was an artist-in-residence in 2020 in cooperation with Wellington City.

Anna Peschke works as a director and visual artist in Europe and Asia. Her work creates new forms of expression connecting performance, Peking Opera, Installation and New Music. Since 2012 Peschke has been staging Peking Opera. She is particularly interested in the tradition of this theatrical form, its rules of presentation and use of exaggeration.

After producing “Woyzeck” as a solo performance with elements of Peking Opera she created in 2015 “Faust – eine Recherche durch die Sprache der Peking-Oper” as a co-operation between the Italian theatre-foundation ERT and the China National Peking Opera Company (CNPOC). The German newspaper Tagesspiegel praised her for breaking new ground artistically in China. In 2017 her production was granted an award for being a national flagship project for excellent theatre by the People's Republic of China’s ministry of culture and the cultural department of Peking.

In December 2019 her work “Der Ring des Nibelungen – Peking-Oper trifft Musiktheater“ celebrated its debut in Berlin. In 2015 Anna Peschke was granted the dance and theatre award of the German city of Stuttgart and of the state of Baden-Württemberg, as well as Berlin’s opera award in 2011.

Alongside her theatre work, Peschke is engaged in space installation, collages and stage design. She is especially interested in climate change, rituals and the employment of objects.

During her 2 month residency in Wellington, Anna Peschke will realise an interdisciplinary performance-project “The Quiet Living of Lost Things” – a collaboration of international artists, who will stage a multi-disciplinary and genre-spanning performance telling the story of a one-armed 15-year-old-girl on a fantastical journey. Combining site-specific performance, installation, live radio play and object theatre, it will be an intense and memorable artistic experience. Or talking with the words of this new artists’ collective: It will be deep, dark, risky and beautiful.

Vanja Smiljanić (*1986 Belgrade/Serbia) is a visual and performance artist living and working in Cologne. In her practice she often utilises the model of performance-lecture as a way to bridge fictitious and experiential universes, comprising technical apparatus, diagrams and sci-fi povera sculptures. Connecting otherwise unparalleled reality systems, Vanja's work attests the foundation of ideologies as alienated regimes, recurring to her own body as a vessel for narration, often shifting between the position of oracle and storyteller.

She has shown her work in various festivals and institutions e.g. Schauspiel Köln, Drodesera Performance Festival and Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea Milano.

During her 4-weeks residency in Wellington Vanja Smiljanić is doing a research for her feminist project about author and leader of the American woman’s movement in the 20th century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She is focusing on the work “Herland” (1915), which is about a matriarchal utopia, dealing with an isolated society of woman, their asexuality and egalitarianism. She is working on her multi-media performance-lecture.

In Wellington Vanja Smiljanić will focus on the feminist movement in New Zealand, especially researching the “mana wāhine” und “Pākehā”.

Milan Gessner was an artist-in-residence in 2019 in cooperation with Wellington City.

Milan Gessner is a Berlin-based artist whose work thrives on the expressiveness of the (moving) picture. His creations range from illustration,animation and documentary film making to street art. He often collaborates with other artists to realise their words and ideas.

The collaborations with artists from all over the world resulted in several graphic novels based on spoken word poems, as well as in videoart for theatre. Gessner’s latest major work is the handdrawn animated filmPorcelain, for a song by Joe Madog. The film has been screened in 2017-2018 on many fim festivals worldwide and has been awarded in the staff pick programme of the video portalvimeo.
Gessner works under the pseudonymCité Noir.
Milan is part of the artistic collaboration project "Dry Waters - The Pacific Ocean" which will be presented at the Performance Arcade on 24 February, 6pm.

Hanno Leichtmann was an artist-in-residence in 2018 in cooperation with Wellington City.

Hanno Leichtmann (*1970 in Timișoara/Romania) is a producer of electronic music, soundartist and curator of conceptual festivals for electronic music. Originally coming from improvised music (drums), Leichtmann dedicated himself to electronic music from 1998 onwards. He has made a name for himself with various collaborations and projects in the realm of minimal and experimental music.

Hanno Leichtmann composed the soundtrack to Sasha Waltz's hit piece "Allee der Kosmonauten" and the accompanying film with Lars Rudolph. He has released five albums so far, the latest are entitled „Unfinished Portrait of Youth Today“ and “Minimal Studies”. Leichtmann’s modern version of minimal music has strong connections to dub, ambient and club music.

He released the soundtrack for Christoph Schlingensief’s movie “The African Twin Towers” (2005-2009). His solo project is called “Static” and he is a member of the bands “Groupshow” (with Jan Jelinek and Andrew Pekler) and “Denseland” (with David Moss and Hannes Strobl). With “Groupshow" he set the eight-hour Andy Warhol classic "Empire” to music several times. From 2008 onwards he curated several festivals and club series in Berlin. In addition, he is the man behind the label “picture/disk”.

Leichtmann has been working with sound archives since 2013. For his penultimate work "Nouvelles Aventures" he got a work and research scholarship of the city of Berlin in the field of new music/sound art. At the moment he is working on a sound installation for the "100 Years Beat" Festival at the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” in Berlin. The installation is based only on the sounds of drummers and percussionists who have influenced and inspired him.

Janine Eisenaecher was an artist-in-residence in 2017 in cooperation with Wellington City.

Janine Eisenaecher (*1983 in Stassfurt/ DE) works as freelance performance artist, curator, and writer since 2006. She developed her research-based performance practice within diverse collective contexts in Berlin that she had co-founded, such as the Berlin n@work (2005-2011, with Joern J. Burmester, Florian Feigl, Nicolas Galeazzi, Joy Harder, and Otmar Wagner), the artistic-academic group (e)at_work (2006-2011, with Michael Conrad, Joy Harder, Julia Hielscher-Szegedi, and Sonja Winkel), and the performance duo Eisenaecher/Harder CLAIMS (2006-2011, with Joy Harder). Within these groups as well as in her solo works, Eisenaecher mainly discusses the subjects of work/ labour and collaboration (of artists) as well as the politics and economies in the art field, and herein works on questions about identity, gender, care, solidarity, (post-) colonialism, and racism. In addition to that, she deals with ethnological phenomena (Antropofagia, Vaudou, Cargo Cults), with Rap and Hip-Hop cultures, with relations and interdependencies between art, feminism, and activism, and with questions of self-organisation and institutionality.

Eisenaecher develops representation-critical group, duo, and solo performances in multidisciplinary formats, that basically work with strategies of incorporation/ appropriation, and that always aim at emancipation, self-empowerment, and transformation. For creating her performative, installation-like spaces of reflection, she uses her own and other texts, various objects and materials, her voice, sound and video works. Up to now, she presented her performances in different festivals and events across Europe and North America, mainly in non-institutional art contexts.

Besides her performance practice, Eisenaecher works as a curator and writer, focusing on performance art and culture political questions. She was a co-curator and -organiser of the monthly event Performer Stammtisch in Berlin (2007-2011, with Aline Benecke, Joern J. Burmester, Florian Feigl, and Siân Robinson Davies), of the Platform Young Performance Artists in Berlin (2010 and 2011, with Neil Jefferies) as well as of some smaller performance events in Berlin and Montreal. At the Berlin artist house and art association Flutgraben e.V., of which she is a board member since 2009, she realised the artistic programme and worked on the structures of the association on the basis and through the artistic-curatorial, collective institution-critical practice Inverse Institution (2011-2015, with Soenke Hallmann, Lydia Hamann, Kaj Osteroth, Jo Zahn, and Inga Zimprich). With her colleagues, she is working on a recapitulation, workshop series, and publication on this practice. In the last year, Eisenaecher co-initiated the research project How do we want to work together? (with Karolina Dreit, Aiko Okamoto und Felicita Reuschling) in which, by means of questionnaires and workshops, she investigates conditions and forms of the often precarious collaboration in freelance cultural production.

Eisenaecher studied theatre studies, general and comparative literature, and philosophy at Freie Universitaet Berlin, and she holds an Magistra Artium degree in Theatre Studies. In her thesis PERFORMANCE ART SOUNDS (under Prof. Dr. Doris Kolesch) she investigated the importance of material- and action-based noises and sounds in contemporary performance art, which remains one of her research subjects and her performance practice. Janine lives and works in Berlin.
 

Volker Strübing was born in 1971 in Sondershausen, Thuringia, in the former GDR. He trained as a computer technician under the GDR system, then after reunification went back to school to obtain his Abitur university entrance qualification. After starting a number of university courses, and working in a succession of casual jobs, he began a career as an author and performer with the Berlin public readings collective Berliner Lesebühne. From 1999 to 2001 he worked in an advertising agency, but since 2002 he has lived as a freelance writer. He has written a science fiction novel, three collections of short stories, and numerous contributions to anthologies and newspapers. He also has a blog entitled Schnipselfriedhof (cemetery of bits and pieces) and travels around Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands reading his short stories. He has been a winner at the international German-language slam poetry championships four times in all, in the team or individual category, including at the 2016 event in Stuttgart, with fellow team member Micha Ebeling.

In the years from 2008 to 2012, he wrote, directed and sometimes took roles in travel documentaries shot in the Arctic and the Middle East, and on the Mississippi, in homage to Mark Twain.
In 2013, to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of the writer Jean-Paul, he was appointed as the first “city scribe” for the city of Bayreuth.
He writes, voices and draws the Kloss & Spinne (Clod and Spider) cartoon film series, which now runs to more than 30 titles (including specials), with more than 6 million views to its credit.

Marc Brandenburg was an artist-in-residence in 2016 in cooperation with Wellington City.

Born in Berlin in 1965, Marc Brandenburg grew up in the US and Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. In 2005, Marc Brandenburg was awarded the Karl-Ströher-Prize of the City Frankfurt, he won the scholarship of the senate in Berlin, and was artist in residence in the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy. Marc Brandenburg was awarded the working scholarship of the Kunstfond Bonn e.V. in 2002.

The author Oliver Koerner von Gustorf writes: "Marc Brandenburg combines drawing with spatial, almost filmic experience which takes effect not only in his drawing, but also extends into the third dimension. Since his exhibition Hirnsturm (2002) in the Paul Morris Gallery in New York, where he showed his drawings under black light in a completely black room, he has attempted, in many works and installations, to incorporate the viewer physically in the mental cinema of his drawings, which are always mounted to form a sequence. Brandenburg stages his pictures like a choreography leading from one drawing to the next. What concerns him is what lies in between, what happens when the eye moves from one motif to the next: 'It's a bit like a cut in film, or like the individual frames that make up a film. It's more like trying to depict an aura.'

For his exhibition Normex he developed a huge world of shadows and projections, for which he sampled drawings plotted on transparencies, like film strips. Whereas in the first room, two strips ran round the wall in opposite directions, in the second, black-lit room countless strips created a shimmering, op-art effect – total visual overload. At the same time, in this black-light installation the viewer himself becomes a kind of graphic figure glowing in the dark, surrounded and suffused by hovering images. Brandenburg treats both the drawn and the actual body as a shell, a pictorial space in which images are processed and seen as visions.

At the beginning of the 2000s Marc Brandenburg began producing the motifs of his drawings as transparent stickers in a limited edition. From 2003 he created installations for which he covered windows of bars and museums with hundreds of stickers forming clusters of varying density. In 2009 he designed for the Berlin club Berghain a huge silk-screen collage decorated with sampled drawings of mechanisms from fairground apparatuses, reminiscent of a Rorschach test. Here the body of the picture becomes a resonator, a membrane on which the most diverse images and sensory impressions land. Brandenburg uses the same principle for his temporary tattoos, which he developed for his exhibition Normex. He declares his tattoos – based, like the stickers, on motifs from his drawings – categorically as art, of equal status with his other works. The human body becomes the scene of a mini-retrospective of Brandenburg's works, which can appear anywhere in the city – at traffic lights, in the sauna or in the theatre. At the same time, it is also what the other bodies in Brandenburg's drawings are – a house of images."

Between the 26.02. and 24.04.2016 his works can be seen in the exhibition"Linie Line Linea" at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi in Wellington.

Uta Plate was an artist-in-residence in 2015 in cooperation with Wellington City.

After finishing her studies in cultural education in Hildesheim (Germany) Uta Plate worked as the director of the African-German theatre company ‘Rangi Moja’, consisting of African asylum-seekers and German students. (Publication: 'Fremd bleiben', co-author Wiebke von Bernstorff, IKO-Verlag 1997).

In 1996, Uta Plate started off the project 'theatre in prison' in cooperation with the local ministry of justice in a juvenile prison in Thuringia. During these two and a half years she also ran theatre projects with elderly people living in old people's homes, as well as projects with children staying in homes for asylum-seekers.

In 1999, Uta Plate joined the ensemble of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz where the new artistic team around Thomas Ostermeier and Sasha Waltz started. There she run workshops and after-show talks to accompany each production, offering an approach within the context of the 'laboratory' Schaubühne. Often collaborating with schools and universities, Uta Plate creates passion for theatre amongst young people. In 2010 she was director of the first international Theatre-School-Collaboration of TUSCH, titled IDEAL CITY with pupils from Berlin and Warsaw.

Uta Plate further direct the youth theatre company 'Die Zwiefachen', which devises a show per year through improvisation, movement and writing workshops. The members, from 15-23 years old, all are or were part of a housing programme run by social workers. Some international cooperation took place: with a youth theatre group from England (2005), a Capoeira-Group from Brazil (2006) and a theatre group of Roma-youngsters from Hungary (2007). In 2008 they had a collaboration with the Aahoran Theatre (Nepal) and presented the play at youth theatre festival »Contacting the World« in Liverpool.

Uta Plate has been running theatre and movement projects internationally, at the University of Santiago, Chile (2004), at the University of Beijing/China (2005), at the Hellenic Education Network/Greece (2006), Trondelag Theatre, Trondheim/Norway (2007), University of Art Istanbul/Turkey (2009), National Theatre of Helsinki/Finland (2010), at the conference of children and youth museums »Hands On«, Ljubljana/Slovenia (2011), »Kedja«-Festival, Aarhus/Denmark (2011), Ashtar-Theatre, Ramallah/Gaza (2012). At the BACKA-Theater (Gothenborg/Sweden) she has developed the play »Run for your life« with 10 young people und 5 professional actors. (premiere February 2013).
In autumn 2014 she devises the play »LIVE LIE DIE« with six old, six young and two professional actors at the 'Theater Neumarkt', Zurich. At the academy of Art (Zurich/Switzerland) she lectures theatrepedagogy.

In New Zealand Uta will work with Toi Whakaari students as well as other youth theatre organisations. She will also give performance workshops in youth detention centres.

Maike Wetzel was an artist-in-residence in 2014 in cooperation with Wellington City. She is a writer, playwright, and screenwriter.