OPEN STUDIO of Majhi International Art Residency Program’s 2020 edition in Berlin. For three weeks seven invited artists have assembled, exchanged and laboured together around the guiding theme: “How to shape a society of care? On kinship and multiple homes.”

With the notion of care increasingly a point of departure in art and other discourses all around the globe, this short-term collective focuses on taking matters in own hands – on risk-taking, on rehabilitation, on release. In particular the question how to collaborate with our subjects, colleagues and kin, deceased and living, future and past, is recurring throughout the practices presented. In simultaneously modest and bold gestures alternative realities are build, transitioning memories guarded, and new legacies protected. The contradictions around these positions come to surface as well: who finds their safe space in a gentrifying city like Berlin in locked Europe, can a competitive art industry genuinely be fertile ground for deviant voices, and what is alien and what is home in a world currently both paused and over-spinning?

Majhi Open Studio, Orawan Arunrak, Johannes Büttner, Omar A. Chowdhury, Rajkamal Kahlon, Belle Phromchanya, Bussaraporn Thongchai and Umut Yasat, September 10-12, 2020

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Orawan Arunrak

Growing archive

Collected 2013 – ongoing. Berlin installation 2020

Drawings on photo archive, Lamp from home, table from home, glass plates

Most of Orawan Arunrak’s practice is related to dialogue and conversation. For this work she has picked three photographs from her extensive image archive and used them as a base for drawings. The common thread between the pictures, taken by herself in Sri Lanka and Germany, is a narrative on building, guarding and protecting. By drawing on the photographs with a soft green pencil Arunrak adds a second layer to smoothen contrasts. The images are accompanied by hand written captions with keywords that for her link to what is pictured.