Ground Work Residency 2026

Closing Exhibition, August 28th-30th @ Cosmos 152 (Overtoom 150-152)

When diverse voices cross paths, what grows in the space between them?

This summer, we came together to experiment, exchange and collaborate around the theme of “Völkerwanderung” (migration of people). We invite you to join us and experience what emerged during the second edition of Ground Work Residency.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Olesia Gerasimenko • Shauna Jin • Gergo Sas • Daniela Stojković • Catalin Trifan • Elena Yakimushkina • Weixin Zha

OLESIA GERASIMENKO

This summer, my practice has focused on photography as a form of social exchange, images as carriers of personal and collective memory, and fermentation as a way of reconstructing fragments of home.

In August, I worked with the Warburg Institute’s archives in London, researching the migration of images and tracing representations of winter and snow across different contexts and histories. This research gradually became intertwined with my own experience of migration. Images, memories and recipes move between places: they are reproduced, transformed and recontextualised, acquiring new meanings and taking on new forms along the way.

SHAUNA JIN

This summer I foraged as a way of making: for materials, substitutes, memories, and ways of doing. Mugwort pulled me in through its entangled histories across Europe and China, and dumplings and painting grew from the same logic: half remembered, maybe imagined images, smells and tastes, negotiated against what’s actually available, imported, or cultivated. Looking for ingredients, my eyes could not distinguish what was inheemse, invasive, or weed. What emerges is a messy practice of looking, researching, replacing, and experimenting.

GERGO SAS

This work revisits my migration from Hungary to the Netherlands, reflecting on the memories and experiences that led me to leave home and reconstruct my identity elsewhere. Using my own clothing from the past ten years, I create textile sculptures through weaving, knotting, binding, and reshaping, drawing on the queer histories and possibilities of textile practices. The garments become both personal archive and material for transformation, holding traces of who I have been while asking what we carry, what we leave behind, and what we construct anew.

DANIELA STOJKOVIC

Rooted in personal history, my practice engages with the human body as a site of migration, a place of absent memories, fractured across geographies and languages. It reacts to our current socio-political realities of war, forced migration, and tightening borders as an act of refusing the dehumanisation of those made invisible.

Currently, I am living and working in London while studying on the MA Sculpture programme at the Royal College of Art.

CATALIN TRIFAN

During this summer residency I have been thinking about why so many of us move towards crowded and modern areas? Perhaps is the fear of being left behind or missing opportunities?

Through painting and found footage, my practice explores migration as the movement of memories and collective histories and how it reshapes our relationship to identity and place.

ELENA YAKIMUSHKINA

Migration made me think not only about people who move, but also about the places they leave behind. Perhaps these places remember us longer than we imagine. For years the scars on trees gave me the feeling that the trees were quietly looking back. During the residency I began taking direct imprints from these “eyes”, trying to preserve these moments of being seen.

WEIXIN ZHA

This summer, I revisited migration—the movement of people—a theme that continues to feed my practice. Exploring this collectively was a new experience from which questions of living and working together resurfaced and took shape, some more formed than others. I tried to tie together a few loose threads from the past while new conversations unfolded.

WORKS EXHIBITED

1. Gergo Sas, Untitled, 2026, hanging textile piece

2. Shauna Jin, Untitled, 2026, oil on indigo dyed cotton

3. Elena Yakimushkina, Still Here, 2026, stoneware, oxides

4. Olesia Gerasimenko, Shauna Jin, Weixin Zha, Catalin Trifan, Elena

Yakimushkina, Pickled Memories, 2026, jars,

vinegar, glycerine, coins, postcards, film, vegetables

5. Olesia Gerasimenko, Untitled, 2026, 7 silver gelatin prints on Ilford Galerie Digital Silver

paper, found frames

6. Catalin Trifan, Liliput, 2026, oil on linen

7. Shauna Jin, Untitled, 2026, oil on indigo dyed cotton

8. Shauna Jin, Coarse memory, 2026, Homemade moxibustion products from wild mugwort, mallow, and other materials