Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2025-26

Dear friends of the Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen,

In a time when the imperative to look closely and research thoroughly is increasingly shunned, the Fellows Bita Bell, Kandis Friesen, Jeanna Kolesova and Olia Sosnovskaya of this year’s Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2025–26 dare to direct their perceptive attention toward specific landscapes and specific physical gestures. Each topic is carefully situated within its context, each context revealing the intricate entanglements between personal agency, collective memory, history and political transformation. The outcomes of their work unfold as thorough inquiries into resilience and decay, memory and embodiment, showing how artistic research can operate as both testimony and transformation. They remind us of the potential of sustained research—work that is neither hurried nor diluted for the sake of quick and attention-grabbing consumption.

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.

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.

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, 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).

The Fellows presented themselves, their work and their projects as part of the Start Up Lectures 2025 on Friday, October 24, 2025, at 6 p.m. in Büchsenhausen.

Further events:
* Büchsenhausen Focus Weeks 2026 (March 16 – April 3, 2026)
* Final exhibition of the Fellowship Year 2025-26 at the Kunstpavillon of the Künstler*innen Vereinigung Tirol (21.05.2026)
* Events accompanying the final exhibition: TBA

Further up-to-date information on our fellowship program and our events can be found on our website, on Facebook, on Instagram and in our newsletter.

We wish you exciting and insightful experiences with the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory!

The Team of Büchsenhausen