This project strand offers short residency opportunities in partner cities for 30 emerging artists. Each UEO city partner will send two artists on a residency to another partner’s city of a different art form, thereby seeking to enrich their professional practice through inter-disciplinary residencies. Artists are chosen on the basis of having demonstrated an interest in the hosting city’s Arts & Society contemporary European theme. They must also practice a different art form from that of the hosting city’s public event. The project offers the emerging artists the opportunity to travel without the pressure to produce work and ideally to experience UEO’s public events.
Mayura Torii (visual artist) will travel to Berlin.
Marseille’s other artist Pascal Navarro will travel to Lisbon
Artist’s Statement
Mayura Torii lets herself be carried by a floating incomprehension, a confusion of genres and values. She records this floating and this confusion, builds them, always in the name of a smile. She reinjects playfulness, a subtle joke, into the pontificating aspect of the concept. In this, she remains amused and skeptical of the Westerner’s overvaluation of performative thinking. She is not simply content with reminding us that there are other worlds with different orientations and hierarchies. By destabilizing without seriousness, she works sensations of joy and astonishment specific to each disorientation. Each one of these works restores to us the trouble of passage, the indecision at the threshold, the delicious thrill of a small mental border to cross. : Extract from “Faux ami(Fozami)” – Frédéric Valabrègue
Artist’s Biography
Mayura Torii was born in Shizuoka, Japan in 1977. After a few years studying drawing and oil painting in Tokyo, she left for the United States and then Berlin. In 2001 she moved to Marseille, where she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and obtained her DNSEP (Higher National Diplomas in Arts) in 2007. Since then, she has combined a teaching career with her work as a visual artist. She exhibits regularly in galleries and institutions. She will be present this year 2023 at the Château de Servières (Marseille) and at the FRAC Picardie (Regional Fund for Contemporary Art).
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