As part of the SOIL & WATER project a number of local and international artists will participate in artist residences hosted by the NIROX Foundation.
Below you will find information about upcoming and completed residencies. This page will be updated accordingly.
upcoming and present residencies
07 July - 14 August 2025
Paula Anta (SP)
Paula Anta is a Spanish-based artist, whose work combines photographic images with installations, painting and sculpture. She arranges her work in photography series deriving from ideas which are developed on the ground, mostly through stage settings which form the resulting image by way of installation. The relationship between nature and the artificiality of man-made structures, together with history and voyage, form the core of her work, which, from a conceptual point of view, is focused on depicting the significance of each landscape as a cultural fact in itself. Anta brings nature beyond its actual capabilities but without imposture. Her images create imaginable situations, starting from a landscape or an apparently spontaneous place, without imposing a forced narrative
completed residencies
14 - 27 July 2025
Diane Victor (ZA)
Diane Victor (b. 1964 in Witbank, South Africa) has established herself as a major figure in the South African and International art communities and is renowned for her expert printmaking and draughtsmanship. Victor positions herself within the South African art scene through her bold confrontations with difficult and at times taboo subject matter. Her large-scale drawings and etchings demonstrate a command of mark-making, which she uses to render her subjects in affecting detail. At times, her work seems to pose challenges to social and political life in contemporary South Africa, considering issues of corruption, violence and unequal power distribution.
completed residencies
16 - 30 June 2025
Barbara Putz-Plecko (AT)
Barbara Putz-Plecko is a visual artist and academic based in Vienna, Austria. Her artistic projects are based on an artistically research-based approach, are set up in different media and operate in both analogue and digital fields. The focus is on an in-depth exploration of forms of being, dialogue, interaction, and silent traces.
She has been a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna for 26 years (until 2023) and head of both the Textile Department and the multimedia Department for Art and Communication Practices. A common focus of both departments was on contextual art practices and on the potentials and impact of artistic strategies in communities and systems.
As an artist and researcher, she has collaborated with many academic and non-academic institutions and grassroots organisations, and she has been a supervisor and coordinator of numerous art projects not only in Europe but also in Africa, Asia and Central America. Her long-term research focus is on inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural collaborative processes.
During her stay at NIROX, she will artistically explore the vision of the landscape garden and its cultural inscriptions and implications by journeys into the field. A connection to her earlier works could be established through the consideration of the "garden as body"
17 March - 09 May 2025
Diana Vives & Douglas Gimberg (ZA)
Diana Vives and Douglas Gimberg began their residency at NIROX, presenting Folie à Deux—a body of work shaped by their decade-long dialogue as partners in life and art. The exhibition opens this Saturday at 15:00 in the Villa Legodi Centre for Sculpture.
Directly translated, the title means ‘the madness of two.’ In psychiatry, it refers to a shared delusion, a disorder where belief is contagious between two or more people.
The exhibition brought together six works, arranged in three distinct pairs—one by each artist—which mirrored the resonance of their exchanges and the shifting associations that emerge in dialogue. At the core of their practice is the transformation of matter—living, inanimate, or human—caught in states of entanglement and flux. Their works exist in tension and balance, implicating the past as an active force within the present. Through self-referential, physical, and metaphorical explorations of material, they navigate themes of extraction, entropy, and regeneration.
Negotiating these themes, as well as the dialogues between their individual practices, they developed several works for inclusion within the Soil and Water program.