2022 Artists' Residency

This year’s residency brings together three artists whose practices explore the intersections of technology, biology, and speculative futures. Working across moving image, installation, and immersive environments, they each draw upon contemporary digital culture to construct complex narrative systems that question how we perceive and inhabit the world today. Throughout June, Jake Elwes, Joey Holder and Omsk Social Club will be based on Sarvisalo, responding to the unique location and the wider cultural landscape of Finland.

Since 2010, the Collection has been inviting international artists to the island to undertake residencies as an alternative way of supporting artistic practice—offering time and space to think, research and create freely, without the immediate pressures of exhibition-making. Whether staying for a week or a month, many artists use their residency to develop site-responsive works, while others propose projects to be realised in the future.

Jake Elwes (15 June – 5 July)
Elwes investigates the aesthetics and ethics of artificial intelligence, probing both its capabilities and its inherent biases. Working across moving-image installation, sound and performance, they seek to queer datasets and demystify predominantly cisgender and heteronormative AI systems. By finding illuminating qualities in the limitations of machine learning, Elwes produces works that challenge assumptions about identity, visibility, and technology.

Joey Holder (5 June – 5 July)
Holder constructs speculative narratives informed by scientific research, marine biology, and digital aesthetics. Through immersive, multimedia worlds, she collaborates with experts in fields ranging from genetics and behavioural psychology to oceanic ecosystems. Her work explores themes including deep-sea lifeforms, speculative evolution, magick, non-human time, and alien ecologies. By weaving these ideas together, Holder creates infrastructures that expose the invisible networks underpinning contemporary existence.

Omsk Social Club (22 June – 5 July)
Omsk Social Club merges live action role-play (LARP) with contemporary art practice to generate immersive scenarios where fiction and reality collapse into one another. Their participatory works invite audiences into speculative worlds that probe belief systems, politics, and social structures. By dissolving boundaries between artwork and participant, Omsk fosters spaces of collective imagination where alternative ways of living and being can be rehearsed and experienced.