Since 2025, Atelier Circulaire has been developing a reciprocal residency project with the Gwangju Museum of Art in the Republic of Korea. This partnership led to a first exchange: the hosting of two Korean artists, Jisoo Kang and Hyesung Jung, in Montreal in May 2025, followed by the sending of two Atelier Circulaire member artists, Ariane Valade and Tucker Frederick Kapp, to Gwangju for a research and creation residency taking place in January and February 2026.
It is within this context that Tucker Frederick Kapp will open the doors of her studio at the Gwangju Museum of Art’s International Residency Program to the public from February 20 to 22, 2026, from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
During this two-month residency, Tucker Frederick Kapp will devote himself to a literary and visual practice, exploring, through poetic research and artistic experimentation, the aesthetics and meaning of material artifacts in a post-natural-disaster context. Having inherited family photographs destroyed by a millennial flood in 2024 in the United States, he realized that even when toxic and deteriorated, what lay before his eyes still remained a trace. Piles of unsorted photographic papers had fused into sculptural bricks; emulsions had melted, sometimes leaving faces within a marvelous abstract marbling. Fundamentally unremarkable images (for example, a random horse in a random enclosure) had acquired personality, texture, and a language, though not the one originally imagined. This visual material forms the basis of a new project, The Shapes of Forgetting and Letting Go, which he conceives as a memorial rescue gesture and an inquiry into what becomes of images, narratives, and archives in the era of climate upheaval. There was nothing better than that large white cube in Gwangju, which he affectionately named my “Dream Cube,” for living within a timeless space and delving into the labyrinths of memory.
Dates: February 20–22, 2026, 1:00–6:00 p.m.
Location: International Residency Studio
52 Haseo-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju, South Korea
This international residency project is made possible through the financial support of the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
Atelier Circulaire also extends its thanks to the Gwangju Museum of Art and the Québec Government Office in Seoul for their collaboration and for making this first reciprocal exchange possible.
