Studio grant holders in Stockholm 3 June – 30 July 2019

Emily Vey Duke born 1972, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Cooper Battersby born 1971, Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. They live and work in Syracuse, New York.

Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke are Canadian video artists making works that take emotional connection as their fundamental goal.

While on the Iaspis residency, they will be writing, reading, drawing, shooting, writing music toward the completion of a single channel video work.

Fox, Photo: Emily Vey Duke och Cooper Battersby

Duke and Battersby have a longtime interest in animal husbandry: companion or captive relationships between humans and animals. During their time in Sweden they will seek out people and animals in these relationships and record their images and stories. This will include animal rescue societies, zoos, game farms, refuges, pet stores and meat, egg and dairy farms. They will also be interested in meeting people with special or unusual relationships with their companion animals. This work comes broadly out of an interest in advancing the rights of non-human animals, and more specifically out of research into post-humanism.

Battersby and Duke are tenured faculty at Syracuse University. Works shown at: Whitney Museum, Walker Center, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Videonale, the New York Film Festival. A book about their work, The Beauty Is Relentless, was published in 2012.

Their latest work, You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born, recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.