Start Up Lectures 2025-26
Presentations of Fellows 2025-26: Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova and Olia Sosnovskaya
In the 2025–26 Fellowship year (October 2025 – May 2026), the invited artists and theorists Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova, and Olia Sosnovskaya dedicate their work to questions of memory, political history, and resistance.
The Fellows will present themselves, their work, and their projects at the Start-Up Lectures 2025, which will take place on Friday, October 24, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. at Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen. The event will be held in English.
In her research Echoes of Solo Resistance and Autonomous Protest, Bita Bell explores solo and individual acts of protest in the public sphere through a choreographic lens. By analyzing gestures, spatial orientation, and corporeal choices within specific socio-political contexts, the research focuses on how this way of bodily presence and assertion can catalyze collective attention and social transformation.
Olia Sosnovskaya’s project “Fog is the Bison of History” focuses on the Białowieża Forest at the Belarusian-Polish border as a site of sedimented histories of struggle over collective memory and nation-building, extractivism and conservation policies, border regimes, interimperiality, knowledge production and (non)linearity of political time. The project title quotes a poem by Valzhyna Mort Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison (2018).
In In Zombie Fire, Jeanna Kolesova explores European peatlands as ecological, political, and cultural archives of destruction. Focusing on the Baltics, Finland, Germany, and Russia, the film traces how imperial infrastructures shaped wetlands and communities within them that still bear witness to violent transformation.
Finally, Kandis Friesen’s project Karaganda, Karaganda is anchored in the slow dissolution of the remnants of Karlag, a former Soviet gulag in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Working through site-based research and expanded modes of video essay, the project is shaped by exilic grammars—of dispersal, dislocation, and disrepair.
After the four presentations we cordially invite you to meet and exchange with the Fellows over food and drink.
Fellows 2025-26:
Bita Bell is a dance artist and composer with a BA in music composition and an MFA in dance, based in Vienna since 2020. Her artistic research and practice are based on the concepts of the body as archive, collective memories, visceral sensations, radical softness, and playful improvisations. Her works aim to expose, question, and subvert socio-political matters that disrupt the joy in daily life. She recently completed an Artistic Research Fellowship at THIRD DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, where she self-published a zine titled containing multitudes, at times fragmented. She has performed and worked with diverse artists internationally such as Pussy Riot, Jennifer Tee, and Esben Weile Kjaer. Her Solo performance The Sun Is Gone is co-produced by and will premiere at TanzQuartier Wien in December. She is a recipient of the 2023 Startstipendium for Music and Performing Arts from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture and the 2024 DanceWeb Scholarship for Vienna’s Impulstanz International Festival mentored by Isabel Lewis.
Kandis Friesen works with the disintegrating and dispersed monumental. Her recent work in video, sculpture, sound, and installation uses history as a central material, building provisional structures for resonance, repositioning, and disrepair. She often works in modes of grafting and re-publication (making something public, again), amplifying site-specific histories and the structures which hold and transmit them. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at Galerie im Turm (Berlin), Kunst im Stadtraum (Berlin), Odesa National Fine Arts Museum (Odesa), CAFKA Biennial of Art in Public Space (Waterloo), Roman Susan, at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Montréal), MIX (NYC), Jihlava IDFF (Jihlava), and Images Festival (Toronto). Friesen’s work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies at Rupert, Bemis Centre, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien. She is from Winnipeg and Montréal, and lives in Berlin.
Jeanna Kolesova is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. Their work examines the manipulation of history and collective memory, as well as the impact of imperial infrastructures on human and non-human bodies and landscapes.
Kolesova studied documentary film and photography in St. Petersburg, interactive media at CalArts, and experimental film and new media at the Berlin University of the Arts. Their practice spans film, video installations, performance lectures, and writing, weaving together personal and collective narratives to demythologize dominant nationalist and colonial narratives.
Kolesova’s work has been supported by the Karl Hofer Scholarship (2023), the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2024), Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt (2024), Schloss Wiepersdorf (2025), and the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship (2025–2027). Recent exhibitions include the Brücke Museum, Berlin (2025), Fotograf Festival, Prague (2024), Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2024), nGbK, Berlin (2023), EMOP Berlin (2023), HYBRID Biennale, Dresden (2022), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2021), and the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin (2021).
https://jeannakolesova.com/
Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist, writer and cultural organiser born in Minsk, Belarus, based in Vienna, Austria. Her artistic and research practice intertwines performance, visual arts, text- and workshop-based activities, addressing forms of political organizing, protest choreographies, movement scores and intersections of festivity and the political. Member of WHPH / Decentric Circles self-organised platform https://workhardplay.pw/ and the artistic-research group Problem Collective, focused on strikes, archives, reading practices and tools for engagement with overseen histories and social struggles https://problemcollective.org/. Currently a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Her individual and collective works were presented in Kunsthalle Wien, e-flux, Tanzquartier Wien, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Kyiv Biennial, Biennale Matter of Art (Prague), HKW (Berlin), HAU (Berlin), Manifesta Biennial (Kosovo), documenta fifteen, among others.
Location
Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen