Adam Basanta - Eastern Bloc Mentor
Adam Basanta is our Eastern Bloc mentor. Adam's mentee will benefit from one year of membership with Eastern Bloc, as well as a one year access to the creative lab and coworking facilities and resources. The mentee will also be offered a two hour consultation with the center's General Director regarding career development and grant writing.
Adam is the mentor for you, if you are interested in: installations with kinetic and sonic components; the critical investigation of technology, systems, and environments; performing with machines; learning how to learn a skill you don't yet know how to learn.
Born in Tel-Aviv (ISR, *1985) and raised in Vancouver (BC), Basanta lives and works in Montreal since 2010. Originally studying contemporary music composition, he has developed a broad, experimental, autodidactic artistic practice in mixed-media installations, sculpture, and print media.
Across various media and techniques, he in vestigates technology as a meeting point of concurrent, overlapping systems; a nexus of cultural, computational, biological, and economic forces. He is particularly interested in the troubled intersections of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and often seeks to confuse, balance, and synthesize these seemingly oppositional approaches.
He views art-making as a form of continual search and discovery, a way of engaging and becoming in the world. This guiding principle - of continual change, risk-taking, and acquiring of new skills - underpins the diversity of resulting practice, methodologies, and output media with which he engages.
Since 2015, his works have been exhibited worldwide including the Musée des beauxarts de Montréal (CAN), WRO Biennale (POL), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Cite International des Arts - Paris (FRA), Arsenal Art Contemporain (CAN), Galerie Charlot (FRA), iMAL (BEL), National Art Centre Tokyo (JPN), V Moscow Biennale for Young Art (RUS), Serralves Museum (POR), Edith-Russ-Haus fur Mediakunst (GER), York Art Gallery (UK), and The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe (USA).
His work has been awarded in Canada (Prix Pierre Ayot 2019, Sobey Art Award Longlist 2018 and 2020) and internationally (Japan Media Arts Prize 2016, Aesthetica Art Prize 2017). His work can be found in institutional and private collections.
