Bek Berger - Kone Foundation

During her SAARI residency, Bek will be focusing on slowing down, looking back and reflecting on possible prototypes to reconfigure international collaboration. She will document and observe different strategies of collaborative practice by utilising examples from the last twelve months of curating/instigating projects such as Baltic Take Over, The Shake Down and various co-authored activities within the frame of the 2023 International Festival of Contemporary Theatre, Homo Novus.

In dissecting the documentation of these activities, Bek hopes to be inspired to start generating new prototypes of organisational models from extracting the learnings of the previous twelve months. Bek will use varied and unconventional tools in this exploration, including dialoguing, reading, artistic tarot, horoscopes, walking and cooking. By the end of the residency, she aims to produce several new pieces of writing, a tarot deck and many conspiracies ready to be instigated around the world.

Bek Berger is an artist and curator originally from Naarm in Australia but currently based in Riga, Latvia, in her position as the curator of the International Festival of Contemporary Theatre, Homo Novus. Her practice binds curiosity with innovation in order to design new models of connection, collaboration and reciprocity between artists and communities across borders and art forms.

In addition to her curatorial practice, since 2017, she has collaborated as a dramaturg with Dance artist James Batchelor, presenting in over 20 countries and in such contexts as Centre Pompidou (FR), Tanz Im August (DE), Impulstanz (AT), New Baltic Dance (LT) and Dance Massive (AU). As a producer, she worked for such festivals as American Realness (NYC), Dance Massive (AU), Darwin Festival (AU), Fierce Festival (UK) and Forest Fringe (UK).

Bek serves on the board of the international performing arts network, IETM, was an ISPA fellow in 2022/2023 and in 2020, she was the inaugural international-artist-in-residence at Annantalo (FI) supported by HIAP and the Australia Council for the Arts.