Fellow Announced: Venice Fellowships Programme 2024
SCAN is delighted to be supporting Glasgow-based artist, cultural worker and sound freelancer Eye Suriyanon in this year’s Venice Biennale Fellowships Programme, in partnership with the British Council.
The programme is a unique opportunity for creative individuals, students, researchers, artists and professionals at the early stages of their career, to spend a month in Venice during the world’s most important art and architecture biennales. This year, 66 Fellows will spend a month at the British Pavilion during John Akomfrah’s exhibition, where they will spend time invigilating and developing their own creative and scholarly projects.
Speaking on the announcement of the 2024 Fellows, Eye Suriyanon said:
For my month in Venice, I’d like to following up my research that I started during my CCA Creative Lab residency where I explored the archive material of exhibited artists of the diaspora to learn more about how they dealt with identity and sense of belonging. I came across John Akomfrah’s work from the ‘Germans, Speak German!’ (2012) exhibition curated by Mother Tongue and an essay by Isabel Löfgren Arriving Naked: Migration as Creative Form citing the Czech Philosopher Vilém Flusser’s multiple views on migration and the idealisation of ‘home’ is something beyond geographical location, something that cannot be restricted by borders.
I’d like to expand the idea of finding a sense of ‘home’ through language and sound. By listening out and recording pronunciation and phonetics that are akin to English and Thai in other languages. The snippets of research will be shared on social media and the recorded sound will be contributing towards a new piece of work. In the hope that a mutual connection can be form once everything is stripped back, highlighting how we are all connected linguistically and have the ability to speak other language with little effort. As your sound vocabulary and semantic vocabulary are not the same.
To prepare for their month in Venice, the Fellows participate in a seven-week online induction programme with industry experts serving as mentors. They will also meet with John Akomfrah and the British Pavilion curator, Tarini Malik, to delve into the core themes of the exhibition. On their return home, the Fellows co-design showcase events to share their experiences and their projects.
Keep an eye on SCAN’s social media and news pages for more about the Fellowship and further SCAN member and friend activity in Venice.