residencies
As part of the SOIL & WATER project, many local and international artists will participate in artist residences hosted by the NIROX Foundation.
current residencies
08 January - 19 February 2026
Robin Rhode (ZA)
Rhode was born in 1976 in Cape Town and lives in Berlin. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands (2021); Kunsthalle Krems, Austria in 2020; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2019; Museum Haus Konstruktiv in 2018; S.M.A.K Gent, Belgium and Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm, in 2015; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland in 2014; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 2013; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus in 2009; Hayward Gallery, London in 2008; Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2007; and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 2004.
Rhode's residency is supported by the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust, and his stay will culminate in a solo exhibition, hosted at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture.
completed residencies
03 November - 15 December 2025
Atang Tshikare (ZA)
Atang Tshikare (b. 1980, Bloemfontein, South Africa) is a Cape Town-based, self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans art and design. He was influenced from an early age by the visual storytelling and graphic sensibility of his father, an anti Apartheid activist and illustrator for various pan-African publications and art magazines.
Tshikare’s work articulates a distinct contemporary African visual language, shaped through an internationally recognised practice. Drawing on his Tswana heritage and broader southern African cultural references, he employs an Afrofuturist and experimental approach across materials including bronze, ceramics, glass, stone and wood. His sculptural forms are informed by zoomorphic and biomorphic structures, vernacular architecture and local landscapes, creating a dialogue between natural and manufactured materials that invites close physical and material engagement.
His residency at NIROX formed the starting point for a new body of work, developed as part of the SOIL & WATER project. This process has been supported by the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust and will culminate in a solo exhibition at NIROX in mid 2026..
18 August - 13 October 2025
Raúl Mirlo (ZA)
Mexican-born artist, Raúl Mirlo, is in residency building up to the exhibition opening for soil & water at NIROX, supported by the NIROX Foundation’s continued exchange with the Casa Wabi Foundation in Mexico.
His research focuses on the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz, a “high and deep poet” who sought elevation through the fall. From this study, Raul will develop a series of ephemeral interventions within the landscape. These works aim to destabilise and reconfigure the terrain’s structure, opening it to new relationships with language, poetry, and time.
28 September - 0 2November 2025
Caroline Le Méhauté (FR)
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
25 August - 23 September 2025
Setlamorago Mashilo (ZA)
Pretoria-based visual artist, Setlamorago Mashilo (Mash), was in residence at NIROX building up to the soil & water exhibition, for the purposes of producing a large-scale, outdoor work, which was supported by the Claire & Edoardo Villa Will Trust.
“During my stay at the Villa-Legodi centre for sculpture at Nirox Residency, I’ve been trying to bring to life a sculptural work that deploys a constellation of discarded found natural material collected throughout my stay. To begin to create metonymical representations of ancestral figures that I call ‘Diviners’. The accumulation and re-aestheticisation of these found materials will hopefully unravel a slew of conceptual and discursive possibilities that centre around our relation with soil and water. I imagine royals, diviners, land workers, merchants, hunters, animals, herbalists, artists and the like, have frequented these lands and immersed themselves in its wisdoms and sustenance, while engaging in the act of resting, which ceased to be a quotidian act of inactivity or relaxation but became a necessary bodily, political, spiritual and creative act of entering into a communion with the land and those who previously dwelt on it. The bigger sentiment of my residency work is that no paths are unfamiliar since the ancestors of yesterday have chartered similar territories and are thus re-enacting their movements in the present time through my stay. This subsequently presents an investigation of the relationship between past, present, and future as being interlaced with and into one another in complex ways.”
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
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.
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 (CH/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.