Rose Bouthillier is a contemporary art curator and writer based in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Bouthillier currently serves as the Artistic Director of the Bonavista Biennale, and she Co-Curated the 2023 Biennale, Host, with Ryan Rice. Previously, she held curatorial roles at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and served as a curatorial correspondent for the inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018). Her writing has been published in magazines and journals including CURA., C Magazine, BlackFlash, Foam Magazine, esse, and frieze, and she works as the Social Media Manager and Archivist for the online art publication Momus. While at ARCUS, Bouthillier plans to research artists and institutions in Japan, with a focus on those working in relation to oceans and oceanic lifeways, developing opportunities for future collaborations.
www.rosebouthillier.com

Dominica is an duo-national Russian and British artist and a researcher working in the intersection between animation, performance and installation. Her films have been shown in the international film festivals and supported through BFI Network and Arts Council England as well long-listed for BAFTA Awards. Her work have been exhibited in solo shows in Edinburgh, Bath and Leicester (UK) and group shows in Douro Printmaking Biennale (Portugal) , AGA Lab (Holland) , ANNY (USA), Anna Arbor Centre (USA), Megalo Print Prize (Australia). She has collaborated on mural, illustration and performance projects with artists from Kathmandu, Oaxaca, Odissa, New York and London and has travelled around Europe, Asia and America with artist residencies programs. She currently lectures Animation and Illustration at Manchester Metropolitan University. At ARCUS, Dominica will be working on a research project investigating material artifacts connecting British folklore and magic history with Shinto traditions in Japan, drawing parallels between the ritualistic practices between two cultures.
www.nicaharrison.com

Eline De Clercq is a visual artist, writer and researcher in the field of art and ecology. Her practice starts from the intersection of gender and lesbian identity. Her artistic research takes place in the historical garden of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, together with the students she organizes a weekly community event for multi-species awareness. In 2018 she founded Wool Publishing, a platform for intersectional representation in exhibitions and print. In 2019 she started the Gesamthof, a Lesbian Garden located between kunsthal Extra City and Morpho vzw. This art-nature project is the entry point for raising curiosity about decolonial practices and storytelling in an ecofeminist garden. During this residency at ARCUS research, Eline will visit gardens to expand her research into traditional and contemporary Japanese gardening and to create a dialogue about ecology together.
www.elinedeclercq.com

Angelica Ong is an artist working primarily in photography and artist books. With a focus on slow art and language, she explores ephemera, the human body, and everyday subject matter, inviting audiences to discover monumentality in minutiae. She also works in multiple languages, which she often leaves untranslated. Ong has exhibited work in solo and group shows at SITE Sharp Gallery (Chicago), W. Gallery (Chicago), and Mana Contemporary (Chicago), amongst others. Her work has been collected by the Ohio State University Libraries and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. During this residency, Ong will investigate experiences of time in relation to tides and the moon through the lens of poetics towards the development of a new artist/photo book, conducting literature reviews on horology and Japanese haikus, which inherently address time’s passing, compiling observational records of the moon and tides, and investigating alternative processes for producing photograms of waves.
www.angelicaong.art

Photo: Adriaan van der Ploeg

Working with performance, video, research and writing, Michiel Huijben’s practice is concerned with interactions between (architectural) design, politics, and society. In 2013, he completed a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, followed by an MA Architectural History & Theory at the Cass, London. Influenced by his backgrounds in both fine art and architectural theory, his work moves between the languages and aesthetics of both these fields. In recent years, he has presented work at Kunstinstituut Melly and the New Institute in Rotterdam; De Appel, Amsterdam; ExtraCity Kunsthal in Antwerp and Kunsthalle Basel, among many other institutions. During his residency at ARCUS, he will conduct field research in and around Tsukuba Science City, a mixture between garden city, university campus, and suburb, with green spaces between laboratories, offices, and residential buildings. This local research will inform a series of (video) works about planned communities, urban planning, and their relationships to utopian thinking.
www.michielhuijben.nl

Photo: Munzer Hodayfa

Rebekka Hilmer Heltoft is a visual artist with a background in philosophy. Through works that range from drawing, printmaking, film, sculpture and writing she investigates sorrow, becoming, change and the creation of meaning. Her work has been shown in contexts such at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), CPH:DOX (Denmark), Franz Kaka (Canada) and GOMO (Austria). In 2023, she published her first book titled Drawn To The Pencil; Dark Light Glitter. She participated in the artist in residence program at San Cataldo (Italy) and Læsø Kunst & Kultur (Denmark) in 2024. At ARCUS, Heltoft will work on her current research project, which investigates animation film, plants and the possible interrelatedness of the two. During her residency, Heltoft will research the history and cultural context of Japanese animation film and Japanese plants. She will, among other planned activities, visit The National Film Archive of Japan as well as Ibaraki Nature Museum.
https://www.rebekkahilmerheltoft.com

Marlee McMahon unsettles the procedural vocabularies of hard-edge abstraction and constructivism to produce resonant compositions with a defined internal sense of tempo. Led by an intuitive studio process that draws attention to the spatial boundaries of the work, she investigates the dynamic relationship between chromatic interaction and surface tension through abstract painting. McMahon received a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 2017. During her undergraduate degree, McMahon was awarded the Cranbourne Fellowship in Visual Art in 2019, undertaking a residency at the British School at Rome. Following her BFA, she was awarded the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 2020 and received an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2023. During her time at ARCUS, McMahon will fulfill a project of education and development of skills in traditional Japanese pattern making and textile printing.
www.marleemcmahon.com

Mino Ayaco is a visual artist working primarily in mixed-media installation art and videos and organizes exhibitions. Her artistic practice revolves around constructing fictional narratives based on what are commonly recognized as facts, novels, and myths. Mino received an MA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2016 and a BA from Imaging Arts and Sciences of Musashino Art University in 2008. She has organized exhibitions such as Gesit Enclosure (2023), The Garden of Ψ・The Dream of Φ (2022), and Melancholia (2019) in Tokyo. During her residency at ARCUS, she plans to research Kasanegafuchi which is located near ARCUS. Kasanegafuchi is the starting point of the story “Shinkei-Kasanegafuchi,” which serves as the motif for her film Lethe, produced in 2024. Mino intends to research the relevance between this story and the location that feature in it.