Anke Zürn | Residency
Senegal | Visual Arts
May, July - August 2022 — Visual Arts
Swiss visual artist Anke Zürn will be on residency in Senegal in May and July-August 2022, during which time she will initiate her new project BLUE GOLD, exploring indigo traditions worldwide. Her new long-term project “THE BLUE HERBARIUM” materializes her research process on indigo dye plants, merging materials collected during her residencies and research trips.
Interested in traditional colour materials and the use of plant-based resources in textile dying, Anke will meet textile designers and traditional artisans working with indigo. She will conduct research in local libraries, archives of museums and botanical gardens. During her time in Senegal, she will travel to Saint-Louis to visit local textile artists as well as the archive of the Centre de Recherches et de Documentation du Sénégal (CRDS). In Dakar she plans to continue her research in the ethnobotanical garden in Hann and the garden of the traditional hospital of Keur Massar, as well as the archives of the Musée d’art africain Théodore Monod of the “Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire” (IFAN), which hosts an important herbarium with 8726 different species from the region.
BIOGRAPHYAnke Zürn is an artist researcher from Biel/Bienne with a background in visual art and solid state chemistry. She is currently working on several long-term projects exploring traditional art materials related to the colonial past and post-colonial conditions of today, raw materials resources, international trade, food security, ecological and social conditions. She has several research projects planned in Senegal. Anke aims to establish an artistic research lab (project 150m2 and project INDIGO LABOR) as part of her possible future ‘institute’, the Institut für WERKstoffe (working title), a virtual space linking her to different projects while reflecting on the relation of an artwork (WERK), artists’ working conditions, and art materials available. Intrinsically her work reflects her interest in visual research processes as well as the relations between the visual arts, the natural sciences and traditional knowledge.
