Kai Residency
Kai Art Center’s 2025 residency program invites artists, curators, and writers from Nordic and Baltic states to apply for a two-month residency in Tallinn, Estonia, aimed at fostering innovative practices and building global networks. Five selected participants will join the 2025 cohort for residencies between March-June or September-December 2025, with all costs covered, including travel, accommodations, and administrative support. Applicants with at least five years of professional experience are eligible and must submit their applications by December 5, 2024. More details of the program and information about applying can be found here.
Kai Residency is a research-based residency program that offers visual artists, curators, and writers the opportunity to live and work in Tallinn while immersed in Kai Art Center’s activities and the city’s dynamic art scene. The residency’s small-scale and hands-on nature – it hosts up to five residents each year – allows Kai Art Center to structure each residency in close collaboration with the participant.
Launched in 2019, Kai Residency supports innovative practices and develops global networks. As the only residency for international arts professionals in Tallinn, it bolsters the local art context through exchange, dialogue, and collaboration with Estonian cultural practitioners. Residents are based full-time in Tallinn for around a month. They are provided with shared office space, accommodation, per diem, and mentorship by Kai staff as well as local arts professionals. Additionally, residents present a public talk as part of Kai Art Center’s Residency Circle.
Residents are selected through periodic open calls.
What Kai Residency alumni are saying about the program:
‘The research residency at Kai is remarkably special – it’s visionary and characteristically Estonian in its structure – open and responsive to each person, while also carefully shaped and considered – magical in its synergy. The opportunity gave me a deeply meaningful and contemplative period to truly bond with a city and its creative community, fostering a certain quality of exchange that expands the region past its borders.’ – Fawn Krieger
‘Kai brings diversity to Tallinn and creates movement of creative people. There are outcomes that end up in more projects, more connections more understanding between people from different countries.’ – Maria Plotnikova
‘Tallinn gives a unique opportunity for artists and curators to explore Tallinn, and it’s important for us to see how rich and inspiring the art scene is.’ – Flóra Gadó
Residency grants winners:
Maria Plotnikova (Kyiv/Chicago)
Ceci Moss (Los Angeles)
Felipe de Avila Franco (Helsinki)
Fawn Krieger (New York)
Hilde Methi (Kirkenes)
Flóra Gadó (Budapest)
Viviana Checchia (Göteborg)
TOK – Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits (Saint Petersburg)
belig sag (Amsterdam)
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (Vilnius)
Maija Kurševa (Riga)
Saara Hannus (Helsinki)
Kai Residency participant bios*:
2023 and 2022
Maria Plotnikova (Kyiv/Chicago)
Maria Plotnikova is a multidisciplinary visual artist who works with performance installations, video, painting, and drawing. The subjects of Plotnikova’s residency are related to the war in Ukraine. During her residency in Estonia, Plotnikova researched various attitudes towards the war. She also continued her ongoing project Cuts, reflecting on the experience she and other Ukrainians are currently going through. The residency was part of Estonian Creative Residencies Network LOORE programme. This LOORE grant was funded by Nordic Culture Point (Additional funding to support Ukrainian Artists, residency funding module of the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture).
Ceci Moss (Los Angeles)
Ceci Moss is a curator, writer and educator. She is the founding director of Gas, a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art located in a truck gallery and online. Launched in Fall 2017, this non-profit space has thus far shown work by 80 artists, organized seven exhibitions and received widespread local, national and international acclaim. Los Angeles Magazine named Gas ‘one of LA’s most interesting art galleries.’ Moss has MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from University of California, Berkeley. Her first book Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu will be released in Fall 2019 through the Bloomsbury series International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California.
Fawn Krieger (New York City)
Fawn Krieger examines themes of touch, ownership and exchange in her practice. She has exhibited her work at The Kitchen, Art in General, Nice & Fit Gallery, The Moore Space, Von Lintel Gallery, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Human Resources, Fleisher Ollman Gallery, Real Art Ways, Soloway Gallery, and Neon>fdv. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, NY Arts, Flash Art, and Texte zur Kunst.
Hilde Methi (Kirkenes)
Hilde Methi is an independent curator based in Kirkenes, in Northeastern Norway. She builds up long-term collaborative projects infusing artistic ideas in local contexts. She co-curated LIAF 2019, Lofoten International Art Festival, including The Kelp Congress, in Svolvær and in other villages in the Lofoten archipelago (2018-2019). She conceived Dark Ecology (2014-2016) with Sonic Acts (NL), which over three years commissioned and presented temporary site-responsive installations and performances in the Norwegian-Russian border area and in Amsterdam. Some of the commissioned works were later presented as a spring programme in Salt Oslo in 2018. She co-curated Hábmet Hámi/ Making Form in Sámi Centre for Contemporary, Karasjok, in 2018, presented in Tromsø Kunstforening and Terminal B in 2019. She co-edited The Kelp Congress book published in 2020.
2021
Flóra Gadó (Budapest)
Flóra Gadó is a curator, researcher and art critic. Since 2018 she works as a curator at the municipal contemporary art center Budapest Gallery and recently obtained her doctoral degree in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Eötvös Loránd University. Her recent projects include the group exhibition So Far, So Good at Budapest Gallery, Judit Flóra Schuller’s solo exhibition at Julius Koller Society, Bratislava and the group exhibition Ruritania which she co-curates with Piotr Sikora and Lucia Kvocaková for the next edition of Biennale Warsawa in 2022. In the past years she took part in several curatorial residency and research programs, including MeetFactory in Prague, Brno House of Arts in Brno and the East Art Mags program for art critics in Romania and Poland. Between 2016 and 2019 she was the Vice President of the Studio of Young Artists’ Association, Budapest. Currently, she is a lecturer at Budapest Metropolitan University and co-editor of the essay journal Café Babel.
Viviana Checchia (Göteborg)
Viviana Checchia is a curator and researcher. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand. Previous to this role she was Public Engagement Curator at the Centre for Contemporary Arts: Glasgow (CCA). Prior to taking up her role at CCA, Viviana produced and contributed to a range of international projects, including the Young Artist of the Year Award 2014 (YAYA) in Ramallah and the 4th Athens Biennale. For the past ten years, Viviana has co-directed Vessel, a platform for critical discussion surrounding the cultural, social, economic and political change created through community-based work, based in Puglia, Italy. With Anna Santomauro, she received the 2013 ICI/DEDALUS Research Award for research carried out in the United States, and in 2016 she was awarded the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory laureate’s choice for her contributions to the comprehension of and international interest in Eastern European art.
The Creative Association of Curators TOK – Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits (Saint Petersburg)
TOK is a curatorial collective co-founded in 2010 as a platform for interdisciplinary research-based projects in the field of contemporary art. Throughout their practice, the curators challenge the borders of the territory of art and seek ways of how it can foster social change. Most of their projects are site-specific, multilayered and long-term initiatives aimed at generating new knowledge about the causes and consequences of changing social reality. TOK’s projects deal with current issues in Russia and internationally: migration processes, public space and citizens, development of education, collective memory and amnesia, and the growing role of the media in global society. TOK curates exhibitions, educational events, conferences, summer schools, and issues publications and exhibition catalogues.
2020
belit sağ (Amsterdam)
belit sağ was born in Turkey and is a videomaker and visual artist. She studied mathematics in Turkey and visual art in the Netherlands. Her background in moving images is rooted in her work within video-activist groups in Ankara and Istanbul, where she co-initiated groups such as VideA, karahaber, and bak.ma. She has completed residencies at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York and at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, among others. Her ongoing artistic and moving image practice largely focuses on the role of visual representations of violence in the experience and perception of political conflicts in Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (Vilnius)
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė works as an artist, filmmaker and theatre director. In her creative practice, Barzdžiukaitė explores the gap between objective and imagined realities and playfully challenges an anthropocentric way of thinking. Barzdžiukaitė is one of three artists representing Lithuania at 2019 Venice Biennale with the performance-installation Sun & Sea (Marina), which won the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion. Her latest full-length documentary film-essay Acid Forest was awarded at the Locarno International Film Festival—among others—and it continues to travel to film festivals around the world.
Maija Kurševa (Riga)
Maija Kurševa is an artist, publisher and lecturer at the Art Academy of Latvia, Program Director for the Riga Zine Festival, and, last but not least, cofounder of the artist-run Low Gallery in Riga, Latvia. Her work encompasses various media, including printmaking, drawing, sculpture and animation, attending to recurring characters and themes with a sense of humor. Among Kurševa’s latest projects are the solo show Investigation, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, 2018; Checkered Order; Gallery Māksla XO, 2016; Talk To Me, Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland; NNN, Latvian National Museum of Art, 2017; and Bigger Peace, Smaller Peace, Latvian Railway History Museum, 2015. Kurševa was nominated for the Purvītis Prize in 2017 for her work Joviality.
Saara Hannus (Helsinki)
Saara Hannus is a queer-feminist artist and curator working in the intersections of sexual/romantic relationships and art making. Their practice is influenced and informed by their personal interests and emotions, and they want to highlight the subjective characteristic of curatorial practices, while still actively pursuing the ethical position of a curator and stressing the politics of representation. They are currently working on an exhibition project titled Fantasy 1 & 2 on monogamy. The core questions of Fantasy 1 & 2 evolve around where the limits of monogamy lie, which structures in society and culture are maintained to support it, and can different genders and sexualities, desires and lust exist in monogamy or is it always a white, colonial cis-heterosexual structure?
Felipe de Ávila Franco (Helsinki)
Felipe de Ávila Franco was born in Brazil and holds an MFA from the Finnish Art Academy. Working internationally since 2012, he investigates materiality and industrial contamination under the lens of biopolitics and ecocriticism through sculpture. Establishing interdisciplinary links between the arts, humanities, and natural sciences, his practice addresses the artistic process as a tool to pursue new knowledge, evoking art as a mechanism to activate a deeper discussion on the human conflict with itself and over the misguided notions of ‘nature’ as something separate from the human. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Brazilian Arts and Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art.
* Bios were written at the time of the resident’s participation in Kai Residency.