Virtual artist's residencies in heritage places - Online symposium Virtual artists’ residencies in heritage places Saturday 9 November 11-3.00 GMT on Zoom Co-hosted by Newcastle University and Arts&Heritage Newcastle University research team, international partners, host sites, and participating artists discussed the series of pilot virtual artists' residencies undertaken as part of this Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, as it comes to a close. At this event we heard from residency hosts and the four international artists - Nidhi Khurana, Liliya Lifanova, Mohammad Sabir Sabir, Yingmei Duan - as they revealed how they responded to their virtual residencies at National Trust Bateman's (Rudyard Kipling’s house), Van Gogh House (London), Afghanistan Memory Home (online museum), and National Trust 575 Wandsworth Road (London), the home of Kenyan poet and artist Khadambie Asalache. Click on the links below to view our hosts and artists presentations. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/transnationalartinheritagenetwork/symposium/#d.en.1093854

https://ias.ceu.edu/article/2025-03-26/rhyming-drawn-city-exhibition-selected-works-eszter-bornemisza-and-nidhi-khurana

Rhyming – Drawn by the City. Exhibition of selected works by Eszter Bornemisza and Nidhi Khurana (March 7-27, 2025)

March 26, 2025

The exhibition celebrates the work of two like-minded artists brought together by the common theme of the city. Originally trained in mathematical statistics, Eszter Bornemisza is a fiber artist living in Budapest who has worked in mixed media for decades, while Nidhi Khurana is a visual artist based in New Delhi and much on the move in various artistic centres in Europe, expressing herself through textiles, photography, painting – and also poetry. Their meeting across continents and generations was facilitated by CEU’s Institute for Advanced Study where Nidhi was artist in residence in 2023/24 and again in March 2025 for the duration of the exhibition. It was a unique experience for me as an urban historian to enter the exhibition space and see how the texture of the city reveals itself in its ground plan and its selected sites through the common lens of the two artists. It is very rare that one’s research subject, urban topography becomes a muse and one’s research tools, the town plans and maps, are turned into artworks.

Maps and town plans, which some researchers also call the “ground plans of society” are forceful instruments showing processes that have not been laid down in writing: organic growth as well as rigid regulations that were implemented through town planning as an act of power imprinted on the ground. The two artists’ works frequently use the privileged vantage point of maps that show the world from above and enable to see connections and separation. In Eszter’s works a grid of machine-sewn threads keeps together the network of streets and waterways that constitute the city. Creating maps enable the mapmaker to define the cut, the scale, and the symbology, separate features that are highlighted from those that remain hidden or supressed. Nidhi’s prints depicting the catchment areas of rivers or Eszter’s rendering of Budapest’s traffic network do exactly this.

The works also show the process of internalizing the map and creating one’s own mental map, reaching the stage of familiarity with a place when one has a full overview while walking on the ground. Mental maps also include selected favourite places, how Nidhi got to know Budapest during her residency, capturing details from various historic layers of the city: details from Roman Aquincum, from the stairs leading up to the tomb of Gül Baba (a famous dervish from the city’s Ottoman past), and the curious objects on the shelves of the Medical History Museum in a well-hidden eighteenth-century building under the Castle Hill of Buda.

The materiality of the artworks resonates with the materiality of the city. The most prominent material, not physically present but visualized in multiple ways is water, the substance that defines human settlement, and its specific manifestation in Budapest: the Danube. For Budapest, this river marked out its location, the place where crossing was the easiest in historic times, and it also defines the connections of the city, both upstream and downstream. Water is rendered in silver and gold in Nidhi’s works, showing its precious nature, and in the most unexpected materials like reused newspaper, sheets of digital circuits from computer keyboards and old X-ray foils depicting details of the human body in colours from translucent to dark blue how the river indeed looks from time to time.

Eszter’s and Nidhi’s works blended in the gallery mediate the city, Budapest, in multiple ways. They show the layers created in several periods summed up on the map as a palimpsest, with erasures and newly added features. They also reflect the fragility and vulnerability of the city. Eszter’s “Limits of tolerance” series with the rhythmic presence of grid and void is perhaps the most prominent example. They warn us that cities as the most complex creations of human mind and society are also our common liability. But, most importantly, these artworks and the trajectories of the two artists meeting in the gallery space highlight the possibility of understanding – the city, each other, ourselves.

Katalin Szende
Professor, Department of Historical Studies, CEU