Zsuzsanna Ardó

Zsuzsanna Ardó is an Arts Council Award-winning visual artist, curator, writer and the founder of Creatives without Borders.

Her studies as a visual artist include training at the Royal Drawing School and the Royal Academy of Arts. Her work has been selected for various awards and artist’s residencies by Arts Council England, Canon Fellowship, Arctic Expedition in the High Arctic, Art Students League NY, and Deutsche Börse at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.

She curates projects as the art director of Creatives without Borders. Venues include Antarctic research stations, an Arctic art museum, NY concerts, a French castle, the British and European Parliaments and various universities and galleries. She continues her work on juries and at artist residencies and teaches internationally.

Recently she has worked  as artist in residence of the St Henri Foundation in the Pyrenees, and the Centre for Art, Science and Technology by the Seine near Paris.

Work in 2018 includes a solo exhibition in Florence, local research of the Early Renaissance swerve in Giotto’s approach to the body and creating new work for PlanetBody, her climate-change-through-art series. She has been invited to work as artist in residence in a Lighthouse jutting into the North Sea and in an Elizabethan Hall built on a 12th century manor house in Yorkshire’s glaciated Jurassic and Cretaceous land with more than two hundred million years to look back on, connect with, touch and feel – how many to look ahead?

Reflecting on the installation that Ardó will co-create with Miladys Parejo, the Director of Encounters, especially for the 2018 Edition, she wrote: “My journey ‘In the Same Boat Upside Down’ starts with a boat in the Arctic. The sights and sounds of the weeks spent working on an expedition in the High Arctic are as vivid on my mind as they were on board of the boat and ashore of the Arctic.  What is the dynamics between the (perceived) centrality of the self and the (perceived) peripheries of the planet, the polar regions – and creates connections between them? How can we re-imagine the planet as part of ourselves? Can the centre and periphery trade places through imagination and art? How does climate change locally impact on the shorelines in England, e.g. on the South coast and in Brighton… and how does climate change interconnect with demographic and migration pattern changes, refugees and the list goes on.  
 
The journey continued on another boat, this time on the Nile, where Mila and I started first started talking about art and boats, especially one particular boat that has made its global journey all the way from India and found its home in Encounter Art Space in Brighton. This is the well-travelled boat you are encountering in this installation.”

Another of Ardó’s installations is shown below. You can discover more about her work on her website.