Shift Äskhult

In the residency Shift Äskhult, we aim to enable exchanges between contemporary art and cultural heritage. Äskhult is the base for the residency artists Cora Jongsma, Kristina Müntzing and the artist duo Klára Petra Szabó / Tamás Szvet to which they respond to questions concerning the ongoing digitalisation of the world we live in today and how this alters the access we have to the past and present. The signature of Dutch artist Cora Jongsma is her unique way of capturing the landscape in the material felt. She calls her artworks Feltscapes and they can be read as memory maps for how the land has been formed and cultivated by humans. The Swedish artist Kristina Müntzing is interested in the development of the textile industry and the use of mee-mawing, a secret way of communicating which combined mime and sign language by early radical textile workers. The artist duo Klára Petra Szabó and Tamás Szvet from Hungary use animation, textiles and performance to investigate new ways of digitalizing traditional techniques.  

The artists experiments in the crossover that exists between digital and analogue techniques, where archive material, technology and narratives are woven together to create a hybrid. They work with the textile cultural heritage in the village as a carrier of memory and traces, which been witness to the radical changes of the past. The village population, local artists and those with knowledge of the village’s local history are important sources of knowledge for the artists.