Margarita Dorovska hoped to use her ArtsLink Residency to build on her academic and professional experience through direct contact with U.S. artists and art institutions working in new media and contemporary art. She’s found just what she’s looking for at Chicago’s Video Data Bank, as well as with studio and classroom visits in Columbia’s InterArts department.
Dorovska, one of the 14 ArtsLinks fellows for fall 2012, is the Arts Manager and Curator at InterSpace Media Art Centre in Sofia, Bulgaria. At InterSpace she has collaborated with over 200 artists in multiple ways, including managing grants for emerging artists, hosting residencies, and producing artists’ projects. One of her most significant accomplishments is the production of Transitland, a comprehensive archive of video art from Central and Eastern Europe.
“I am very excited to be researching in the VDB collection, especially their immense archive of artist interviews. It is fascinating to see how the artists, in the sometimes unedited interviews, discuss their artistic process, and to hear them talk about their work in their own words, complete with pauses for thought, laughter, and interruptions,” days Dorovska. “At InterSpace we are very focused on video art, and it is interesting to see how proactive the VDB is in their curation of the collection. We at InterSpace are looking to more established archives such as VDB to help us plan ahead on how to work with databases, preservation, and retrospectives.”
While in Chicago for her five-week residency, Dorovska was also been a guest speaker in the InterArts Visual Narratives course, where she presented and discussed recent work created at InterSpace, describing how artists in Bulgaria use digital tools to create visual narratives. Her studio visits in the Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts program have piqued her interest in non-digital media as well, which may find its way into future InterSpace initiatives. An added bonus to her residency is being able to walk between the Video Data Bank, CBPA, Anchor Graphics, and the InterArts facilities during the temperate fall weather of October. “I love being in the middle of the spectacular Chicago architecture, and finding out about the history of the city and its neighborhoods,” she said. “While the weather holds up, I will continue to explore everything I can!”
For more information on the CEC ArtsLink Residency program, click here.
