Cotangent Invited Residencies 2023 - Mark Shorter & Ana Vala.
Tangent Projects are extremely happy to announce that this summer we will be joined by Mark Shorter & Ana Vala.
Mark Shorter is an Australian artist. Working across performance, video, photography and sculpture, he examines our preconceptions around landscape, gender and the body.
The male figure and its conditioning is a recurring element in his work, found in both his own performances and the characters he devises, which include the vaudevillian cowboy, Renny Kodgers; the quixotic journeyman Tino La Bamba; and the temporally adrift, guttural art critic Schleimgurgeln. Often absurdly humorous and visceral, these characters are performance investigations. Conceived to test the construction of self, they stretch and twist the ideologies that sit deep within the form, pressing to a point of distortion and collapse.
Ana Vala works between Visual Arts and Cinema to investigate and speculate on the use of moving images as a means of self-representation and a way to represent the world and its relative notion of time.
Ana uses primordial elements and concepts such as light, reflective and translucent materials, planetary gravity and rotation in order to create videos, optical+sound devices, and installations that induce an off-screen cinematic experience. She focuses on issues such as Material and Immaterial Culture, the Ludens Instinct, Self-Representation, Spirituality and Astronomy. For Ana, the notion of Moving Image begins and ends (in loop) with the first self-reflection in the flow of a river - of water and of algorithms.
She currently lives and works between Lisbon and Barcelona.