ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Research findings are often confined to specialised language and academic formats that help capture the complexity of social phenomena but also create barriers to common understanding. I-CLAIM addresses this challenge by awarding six grants to artists across consortium countries with the goal of diversifying how research results are communicated. Art helps convey the perceptual and emotional aspects that often remain hidden in academic writing, offering fresh and more accessible and relatable perspectives on the project’s central themes.
Grants and exhibitions are coordinated by Centrala, a Birmingham-based art gallery, throughout 2025, focusing on six thematic areas: public narratives, public perceptions, the household dimension, alongside the research’s core labour market sectors (agriculture, food delivery, and domestic work). All these works will come together in a final collective exhibition.
ITALY
Italy
Nostalgia ‘n’ Exploitation
Exhibition / 7 May — 11 May 2025
Chris Costa’s Nostalgia ‘n’ Exploitation navigates the complex experiences of Polish and Slavic individuals who, over the last few decades, have arrived in Southern Italy under varying circumstances, some by choice, others by necessity and found themselves caught between conflicting forces: nostalgia, exploitation, racism, and a pervasive sense of dislocation.
‘Nostalgia ‘n’ Exploitation’ by Chris Costa brings together artworks created in response to research undertaken by Ca’ Foscari University exploring the often-overlooked realities of domestic, care, and cleaning work, with a particular focus on the lives of irregular migrants and how they are perceived in public discourse. Artists were invited to engage closely with these findings and collaborate with researchers, offering critical and creative interpretations of the data.
Christian Costa
Artist working with territories, communities, and social groups.
ARTIST BIO
Christian is an artist working with territories, communities, and social groups. They develop long-term public art projects with a relational approach, fostering deep connections with places and people. Their work challenges the economic constraints of the art system, focusing instead on duration, identity, and place.
A translator and writer, Costa has collaborated with L’Orientale University of Naples and the Silesian University of Katowice, while also contributing to Italian arts magazines. In 2002, they co-founded container collective, an artistic group and design studio. Since then, they have led and participated in numerous public art initiatives, including Progetto Isole in Sicily, N.EST in Naples, and Spazi Docili in Florence.
Costa’s projects often explore migration, identity, and socio-economic impacts on space. They have worked in refugee camps, documented the aftermath of the Maidan revolution, and examined migration routes through the Balkans. As Artistic Director and Playwright for Poland at the Quartieri di Vita festival, they collaborate with young artists from diverse backgrounds. Their practice spans installation, video, performance, and sound, using photography as a key medium to examine the relationship between place, identity, and memory.
United Kingdom
Reframing Migration
Exhibition / 7 March — 29 March 2025
‘Reframing Migration’ by Ieva Baltaduonyte, critically examines how lexical choices in four major UK newspapers contribute to the depersonalisation of migrants, often reducing them to faceless statistics or negative stereotypes. Through a combination of photography and text-based analysis, the project aims to humanise and amplify the voices of those often overlooked, reshaping how migration is perceived and visualised in UK media. By juxtaposing migrant portraits with linguistic analysis, the project highlights the disconnect between how migration is framed in the media and how it is experienced by individuals.
Transnational migration is perhaps the most highly contested issue across Europe. For new migrants spatial and temporal displacement is potentially traumatic, resulting in shifting identities where home can no longer be understood as a fixed knowable entity. Ieva is preoccupied with revealing personal and collective narratives where trauma, identity and memory encourage a deeper engagement with cross-cultural dialogue.
By using photography for both personal expression and to foster a critical dialogue with contemporary society, she invites the viewer to participate in societal debates, foregrounding human experiences, and exposing what is otherwise obscured or ignored. Her carefully constructed projects combine politics and aesthetics inviting a dialogical relationship with the viewer.
Ieva Baltaduonyte
Lens based artist and graduate of the Photography BA programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology
ARTIST BIO
Informed by her own personal experience of displacement, her artistic practice engages with topics and issues relating to migratory culture. Central to her work are the psychological consequences of migration, such as displacement trauma, as well as the concepts home, identity and the in-between state. After spending seventeen years living in Dublin, Ireland, Ieva has recently returned to her native Lithuania, where she is currently based.
Transnational migration is perhaps the most highly contested issue across Europe. For new migrants spatial and temporal displacement is potentially traumatic, resulting in shifting identities where home can no longer be understood as a fixed knowable entity. Ieva is preoccupied with revealing personal and collective narratives where trauma, identity and memory encourage a deeper engagement with cross-cultural dialogue.
By using photography for both personal expression and to foster a critical dialogue with contemporary society, she invites the viewer to participate in societal debates, foregrounding human experiences, and exposing what is otherwise obscured or ignored. Her carefully constructed projects combine politics and aesthetics inviting a dialogical relationship with the viewer.