Within the Artists-in-Residence programme, CCA is delighted to host Iván Navarro from Chile. Navarro (1972) works with lights, mirrors and fluorescent lamps. He creates social and politically relevant sculptures and installations. Since the beginning of 2019 he lives and works in New York. In Chile, he grew up under the dictatorship of Pinochet, and Navarro's choice of media and materials as an artist is closely linked to his childhood. Pinochet used light and electricity to control humans. Often he turned off the power so people could do nothing but stay home in the dark. As a result of that all of Navarro's works, in one way or another, have a reference to the subject of "control." Navarro studied art at the Pontifical Catholic
University of Chile and obtained his BFA in 1995.

Within the Artists-in-Residence programme, CCA is delighted to host Ursula Mayer from Austria. She has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, at the royal College of Art in London and she holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College in London.

Mayer was born in Austria in 1970, and today she lives and works between London and Vienna. Ursula Mayer's price-winning and internationally exhibited practice spans a range of media, including film, video and sculpture. Her single and multi-channel films are crystalline circuits of images, composed of signs borrowed from architecture, fashion, literature, politics, mythology, geology and science. These references cross multiple temporalities, locations and personae. Using the grammar of cinematography and montage, Mayer’s practice strives to indicate how spatial composition, human choreography and narrative construction inform and contribute to one another. Through her poetic treatment of film Mayer interweaves myth, biopolitics and the semiotics of cinema to visualize and
ruminate upon future posthuman ontology. 

Within the Artists-in-Residence programme, CCA is delighted to host Lucas Simões. Lucas Simões, born in Catanduva (BR) in 1980, is a Brazilian artist
living in São Paulo. He is educated in architecture and design, and his experience as an architect has shaped his ideas of art and opened new avenues of discovery. About the architecture he says himself that a drawing is more than just a drawing: it is the intention that the construction process creates something concrete.

Simões uses materials such as maps, books and photographs, which he then folds, cuts and dissects into new forms. For Simões, material support is important, and through various processes he supports a part of the work. His works are often edited, including burned, incised, distorted - the entire process involves the danger of destroying the work on the way. Today he lives and works in São Paulo where he moved in 2002 after he studied architecture at Politecnico di Milano in
2001. His works have been exhibited in Brazil, Germany, England, USA, Venezuela, Norway, France, Russia and Argentina.

Within the Artists-in- Residence Program, CCA is delighted to host Courtney Smith. Courtney Smith was born in Paris in 1966, and moved from France to Brazil in the 1980s. The move created the basis for her fascination with movement and furniture. Smith is known for her deconstructed furniture sculptures and all the discarded furniture in the streets of Rio inspired her to deconstruct them and put them back together. In 1988 she completed her art and literature studies at Yale University in the USA. In 1990 she graduated from the postgraduate program at the Escola de Artes Visuais in Rio, Brazil. In some of her most recent work, Smith has focused on designing furniture based on “building blocks” so that they can be put together in different ways and thus have more functions.