Meet Concordia MFA student Abi Hodson, winner of the 2025 Jorisch Family Artist Residency

Abi Hodson, a Concordia Master of Fine Arts (MFA) student, has been awarded the 2025 Jorisch Family Artist Residency Award. The prize includes a four-week summer residency at the Amelie Redlich Tower of the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria.

The award is named for Georg Jorisch’s family, who fled Austria or were killed under Nazi occupation. The Gestapo then looted their stored art collection, including works by Gustav Klimt.

As a boy, Jorisch escaped to Montreal, where he later sought restitution for the stolen works. After nearly 20 years, his family finally received a settlement, which they shared with the works’ current owners — the Museum der Moderne.

Jorisch then donated part of the multimillion-dollar settlement to establish this prize at Concordia, in collaboration with the Museum’s restitution efforts.

This year, the Jorisch Family Artist Residency will offer a unique space for Hodson to develop their research and artistic practice, which explores bodily relationships to space and place.

Can you tell us more about your practice and the themes you explore?

Abi Hodson (AH): This idea of transforming the human body into something else is central to my practice. Currently, I’m exploring a process that I call “creature-ing the body,” where I transform the body into a more-than-human entity. Through green-screen body suits and video work, I layer movements and combine them with footage of disrupted sites. I’m interested in how these interactions might create new, composite bodies that expose our connections with the beings, materials, landscapes and cityscapes that make up our worlds.

How do you envision your work evolving during your time at the residency?

AH: The residency provides an opportunity to deepen my research into how bodies interact with and transform the urban landscape. One question that has been central to my thinking comes from artist and writer Camille Georgeson-Usher: “Where does the marginalized body fit within the structures of our urban environments, structures that have been built against accommodating us?” I want to explore how we can enmesh ourselves with the cityscape and queer the body’s relationship to the built environment, and if those actions, in turn, transform the cityscape.

Which aspects of your practice are you most excited to experiment with?

AH: I’m looking forward to experimenting with video, movement, and zine-making. I plan to shoot footage of Salzburg’s spires and domes, which I will then integrate with my body through video editing. I’ve been working on this investigation in my sculptural practice, so it will be exciting to bring this into my video and movement work. I also plan to create a zine, which has become an important part of my process. I will use it to document my research and collage images and reflections. I also hope to collaborate with a local LGBTQI+ organization to involve the community in the project.

Which elements of the Museum der Moderne’s environment do you think will most inspire your artistic exploration?

AH: Two current exhibitions are particularly interesting to me. Body // Society, curated by Katharina Ehrl, explores the body as a site of both individual agency and societal projection, which resonates deeply with my own work. In In Motion. Video Art and Its Political and Social Dimensions, curator Jürgen Tabor brings together video works that explore the political urgencies of video art, which aligns with my interest in how bodies and spaces are interconnected and politically charged.

I look forward to engaging with both the museum’s curators and the staff, whose support has already been invaluable.

How do you see Salzburg’s location and architecture influencing your work?

AH: The city’s architecture will be a huge source of inspiration. I am particularly drawn to the spires and domes, which puncture the skyline and were built to symbolize a merging of earth and heaven. The divine aspirations of these structures will inform my research in queering the body’s relationship to the built environment. What can these architectural forms teach me about my desire to puncture the barrier between my body and the cityscape? I’ll let you know when I find out!
 

Learn more about Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts and its funding and awards.