NAMĀĀK Projects

Namaak a collective project, comprising of new work by a group of artists who share a similar motivation & attitude. They create a production that is all about a way of putting yourself in the world, refusing to define their praxis within the confines of the contemporary art field. The artists participating are not only active in visual arts, but also in music, theatre, performance and printed matter. Together they create an exhibitions that reflects on this idea of synesthesia.

Jorg Hendrix - Den Haag Netherlands

Jorg (killed in a boating accident 2011) was known for his humorous approach to formalism.  About the use of humor in his work, Hendrix said in an interview: "If you approach things with a sense of humor, people immediately assume you're not to be taken seriously. But I think truths about society and human existence can be approached in different ways."

Marischa Slusarski - Venice USA

Slusarski eschews typical standards of "good taste" in art, instead embracing conventional, distinctly American, middle-class values to expose the vulnerabilities of hierarchies and value systems. Working her way through conceptual constructs including the banal and the heavenly, Slusarski merges literal, deadpan beginnings with baroque manifestations that oscillate between abstraction, sculpture and pure spectacle.

Britt Ehringer - Oxnard USA

"Art is a kind of currency in the joint; a good tattoo will fetch you 10 cigarettes.” Of the 10 years spent in a South Asian prison, he says, "Every night, staring at the ceiling, I would imagine art.  Now it's time to unleash the ultimate idiotropic opus." Ehringer’s work is a tour de force into multiple dimensions of memory. For every image from the recesses of destiny, there are others that plunge into the slippery abyss of remembrance and amnesia.

Pad Sander - Berlin Germany

Pad Sander’s Conclave Project began over two decades ago. His work, which operates at the intersection of installation, theatre and performance, investigates questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility.

BlowMouse - Stockton USA

Blowmouse's recent artistic work seeks to unsettle consensual perceptions of our world. However, because of logistics privileging of invisible circulation over the symbols of power and resistance, an art concerned with it necessarily works against conventional notions of art as protest, dissent or intervention.

Vibeke Thorkelson - Fredrikstad Norway

Thorkelson celebrates objects that challenge questions of categorization and authorship; offering, perhaps, a new, more inclusive story that defies historicism. She proposes the poetic silence of the unknown, and opens up a space, freed from the tyranny of history, in which these lovely, mostly anonymous creations can be viewed on their own terms.

Cha Cha Bibiana - São Paolo Brazil

Bibiana focuses on confronting the mystical language of external and internal spheres which expose the vicious fragility of life. Using the metaphor "thin skin," she examines the psychosocial dimensions of self, community, and "immaterial materiality."

Kgosi - Johannesburg South Africa

Artist and musician Kgosi uses basic elements of voice, sound, and pigment (with a touch of magical realism) to create continuity-storytelling through a series of constructions/breakdowns, in which the work is simultaneously the derivative and the original.

Tak Mufuni - Tokyo Japan

Tak Mufuni’s work is deliberately heterogeneous and indefinable, elusive in respect to predetermined patterns. The definition of Tak’s poetic process hangs between the eccentric and colorful story of everyday life and the necessity to mix human characteristics and geographies, cultures and situations, which are not easy to identify.

Mabel Huitzilihuitl - Guanajuato Mexico

Huitzilihuitl shares a peculiar fascination with unstable phantasmagoria and old-school ectoplasm and she brings these vestiges of the past to her images. Huitzilihuitl celebrates life with her haunting tapestries in an attempt to encourage visits by the souls, so they will hear the prayers and the comments of the living directed to them.

Xiang Xong - Shanghai China

Xiang's work explores the most important issues currently affecting humanity, the human condition and human experience in the light of post-colonial discourse, multi-culturalism, and economic and environmental shifts. The power of Xong’s work lies in its ability to confront any viewer—regardless of ethnic and/or cultural origin—with their own position concerning notions such as “nationality,” “identity,” and “ethnicity.”

"Fred" – Manila Philippines

"Fred" is a group of four young artists all named Fred, living on the streets, homeless by choice. Their wildly entertaining and improvisational performances are seen in all parts of the city. To Fred, the group, art is anything with creative intentions, where the word “creative” has been removed from the realm of achievement and applied to another realm entirely.

Mitchell and Chamberlain – Reykjavik Iceland

Mitchell and Chamberlain's videos investigate the vague terrain between pre-programming and autonomy, between present development and randomness, thus delivering surprising insights into the nature of non-teleological processes and a novel understanding of art as a form of prototyping, continuously prototyping the natural and generating the social.

Namāāk Internship Offered

Interns are invited to submit applications to work for this dynamic, ambitious contemporary art collective. Interns will have significant interaction with curators, arts professionals, and Namaak artists. The intern's activities include such things as: assistance with organization of openings, special events, and educational programs; the opportunity to conduct research for upcoming exhibitions; compilation and organization of press packets and compilation of information for grant applications; dissemination of public information; administration and organization of the database, grant files, and archives; and maintenance of artists files and exhibition project binders.

Please have an MFA or the Equivalency.

The internship is unpaid and requires a minimum commitment of 40 hours per week.