f.eks. AIR is an international artist-in-residency program in Aalborg for contemporary visual art founded in 2021. The program seeks to invite international artists for multi-month stays, while working closely with local communities, unique partners, and broader publics within the city of Aalborg and the region of Northern Jutland.
Previously accommodated at apartments in collaboration with the housing association Himmerland Boligforening, and currently at the cultural house Huset i Hasserisgade, f.eks. AIR provides a dynamic context to activate the “city-as-studio”. Artists are invited to collaborate with the broader f.eks. network to facilitate innovative artistic practices, produce critical dialogues, meet new audiences, establish meaningful ongoing collaborations, and integrate art and society together more closely through their work.
Rather than prioritizing traditional working spaces like ateliers, as a post-studio residency, the program focuses on providing a well-kept apartment suited for contemplation, access to the f.eks. network, project development with the f.eks. team, a monthly stipend, and a convivial invitation into different localized social networks.
This creates a rich point of departure for the artists, and allows for a framing device to meet different communities, make art in new situations and unorthodox circumstances, and develop new trajectories and ideas. The f.eks. team works with each artist to develop a specific program in relationship to their practice in connection to the deheirarchicalized f.eks. network, which includes university departments, cultural institutions, private companies, individuals, community centers, cultural associations, and a wide array of diverse and interesting actors, groups, and audiences.
The aim is to support artists to create new relationships between art and other sectors it normally doesn’t come in contact with, push the boundaries for artistic practice, develop collective, cooperative, and community engagement where it might not exist, all while producing relevant critical artistic propositions within the global milieu of artistic and cultural dialogues. The artists are invited to share their outputs from these collaborations with audiences through a variety of public “moments”.
f.eks. AIR is a roaming residency program that is currently located within the dynamically changing environment of the cultural house Huset i Hasserisgade located in the heart of the city of Aalborg. As part of the plans to expand the cultural house in different ways over the coming years, f.eks. AIR’s presence as an established contemporary artistic project seeks to add new values, perspectives, and self-understanding to a cultural house in transition. With many established users, groups, working groups, associations, and communities already using the cultural house, f.eks. AIR seeks to create a unique synergy between the vestiges of the unique cultural house movement that are present at Huset in relation to the daily presence and working practices of International Contemporary artists.
f.eks. AIR was previously located at the new mixed-use real estate development in the center of Aalborg called Spritten. The f.eks. AIR program was in the Høkergaarden building at Akvavitvej 23 - a building that contains an eclectic mix of students, elderly residents, and private loft apartments - a high-rise tower complex in the sprawling iconic former Akvavit Spirit factory development site along Aalborg’s Limfjord.
