Create and Fire Station Artists’ Studios residency recipient: Gea Gojak

Create and Fire Station Artists’ Studios are pleased to announce Gea Gojak as the recipient of the 2021 Remote Residency Award. This award was specifically designed for collaborative socially engaged artists who have first-hand experience of displacement and/or histories of intergenerational migration, and will take place remotely over four weeks in June and July. The remote residency offers a focused professional development opportunity that supports and nurtures the arts practice of a professional artist who is interested in developing or consolidating their collaborative/ socially engaged arts practice.

Gea Gojak is a Croatian theatremaker who uses theatre to explore the way, the means and the language of expression and as an incentive to communicate on relevant socio-political issues. She has produced socially engaged projects that raise questions, communicate with the audience, reveal the world and society as it is, refresh and encourage critical thinking.

Gea believes in the potential of socially engaged collaborative art as a means for people to explore their creativity, express the issues that affect them, and examine different ways of being. She intends to use the residency to develop a multidisciplinary methodology of work with the international community across diverse age groups.

The residency is funded through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create.

The panel which awarded this residency was chaired by Áine Crowley, Programme Manager Arts and Engagement, and consisted of Helen Carey, Director of Fire Station Artists’ Studios and Warsame Ali Garare, human rights activist. Create staff member Jane O’Rourke observed and took minutes.