Fact Residency: Theresa Baumgartner @180fact

Fact Residency: Theresa Baumgartner @180fact

Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

When Theresa Baumgartner was at studying at art school, prior to her transition into audiovisual art, she became obsessed with making paintings on a huge scale, so huge, in fact, that by the artist’s own admission they worked just as well as sculptures as they did paintings. By the time she had completed her studies Baumgartner was disenfranchised with the world of fine art and found herself gravitating towards the visceral energy and emotional chaos of the experimental noise and punk shows of her youth. Seeking a more democratic space for her practice, she has ploughed her own furrow, oscillating between installation work, live performance and art film, yet these two formative experiences of painting and punk have continued to inform all of her work.

Whether fucking with the male gaze with artist Abyss X, reflecting on defeat and failure with musician Sam Slater, submerging us in the sounds of oceanic noise pollution with field recordist and Cabaret Voltaire member Chris Watson or translating the sonic disruption of producer Muqata’a into textural, painterly visuals, Theresa Baumgartner draws from her experience to imbue her work with emotional potency. As she levels: “I’m more interested in the emotional part in anything. At the end of the day I’d rather have people reaching back into themselves, being overwhelmed or just able to forget about themselves.”

For more information about Theresa Baumgartner and her work, you can visit her website and follow her on Instagram.

Fact Residency: Theresa Baumgartner

Jack Jelfs – Billy Takes A Break

Against The Clock: Stiff Pap

DRONE OPERATØR - Bot Møther

Zoë Mc Pherson - I Expect Nothing (Straight)

$Lyra Valenza - Joy Divided Lyra Valenza are back for the first time since their 2020 EP, Nightshade Edition, with ‘Joy Divided’, the first single from their debut album, Low Gear No Pressure. Working in collaboration with artist Signe Dige, the Danish duo bring the intricate club construction to life with a video exploring abandoned urban spaces using janky 3D scans. “I love ‘poor’ 3D scans,” explains Dige. “They have a sensitivity and vulnerability that you often don’t see in digital media. Everything can be adjusted and controlled when working digitally, so I truly adore these fractured copies of real places, as it maintains a kind of soul within its flaws.” “In big cities, we are surrounded by people, causing these urban places to exist in their function for us, Dige continues. “But when abandoned and taken out of their context, these places become a physical space of memories and time.” Winding our way through neglected streets, all crumbling concrete and lurid graffiti, Signe Dige patchworks together a glitched-out assemblage of 3D scans and CGI, following a suspended thread of fluid, as though the track’s glistening synths have manifested as material in virtual space. “Each space shares their abandonment and connection,” adds Dige, “while we follow a lead all the way up to the top of town, to a line of people waiting to enter a new beginning.” In this way, her patchwork of scans merges domestic environments – bedrooms with doors left ajar, the transient hallways of apartment buildings – into public space, with street-level entrances to subways twisting out into open-plan living rooms and tiled pavements. The result is part collapsing dreamscape, part broken metaverse, a breakbeat-assisted study of digital space and the ways we can inhabit it. ‘Joy Divided’ is taken from the debut album from Lyra Valenza, Low Gear No Pressure, which arrives later this year on their label, Petrola 80. You can find Lyra Valenza on Instagram.$ $Louis-Jack & Jăk Skŏt - Tondal (Screen Test) Artists and directors Louis-Jack and Jăk Skŏt hold up a kaleidoscopic lens to contemporary club culture, queer communities and collective celebration in Tondal, a film project that transplants the medieval morality narrative Les Visions Du Chevalier Tondal, which narrates the tale of a rich and wayward knight whose soul is lead through heaven and hell by a guiding angel, into the chaotic hedonism of a London nightclub. Drawing particular inspiration from French artist Simon Marmion’s 1475 illumination of David Aubert’s manuscript, as well as Hieronymus Bosch’s 1479 hellscape, Tondal’s Vision, the artists have assembled an incredible cast of talent, including movement artist Magnus Westwell, CGI artist Enes Güç, designer AGF Hydra and producer and sound artist IVVVO, to capture a lone revellers hallucinogenic journey, untethered from reality and enveloped by a nocturnal fantasy. “The global pandemic has made us all critically attuned to the importance of shared communion,” the directors assert. “In its wake, Tondal presents an urgent reflection on how our sites of collective revelry, once radical spaces of communal liberation, are being pervaded by hyper-individualism and commercialisation. Often lost and alone, but longing to find his place in the night, Tondal’s journey champions the idea that collectivity is actually still achingly proximate; a personal and socially transformative spectre haunting even the most de-socialised spaces.” In a gesture of narrative subversion, Louis-Jack and Jăk Skŏt queer the moral drive of Les Visions Du Chevalier Tondal, exploring the libidinal charge of club environments and positing communal celebration as a powerful strategy for navigating the relentless seeping of neoliberal economic interest into contemporary club culture, a collective retaliation against corporate osmosis. In the screen test presented above, a forerunner for a larger work in the making, this is achieved via a prolonged study of the body in complimentary states of disorientation and bliss, Magnus Westwell’s choreography perfectly capturing the overstimulation and dissociation of a lone dancer lost in the rave. Caught between the visceral physicality of instinctive movement and the sudden addled expansion of internal emotional landscapes, the frenetic intimacy of our protagonist enacts a heightened empathetic mode driving outward and inward simultaneously. The sheen of AGF Hydra’s apparel, picked out in neon lights, translates the lysergic illustrations of Marmion’s manuscript into a modern aesthetic language of sexual expression. Stroboscopic flashes reflecting off sweat speckled skin and latex shimmer lend the cinematic vision of director of photography Matthew J. Smith a hyper-saturated, computer-generated aesthetic, blurring the lines between media in a multidisciplinary homage to the director’s germinal act of literary adaptation. Bodies entwined, faces turned heavenward and mouths open in ecstasy, Enes Güç envisions a sudden opening up, an intimate revelation of the inner complexity of our protagonist’s experience, rendered as a tangled mass of bodies, flesh cast as CGI statues, writhing together in an infinitely repeating somatic fractal, movement captured in stasis. The echoing cries of IVVVO’s eerie industrial score reverberate around this impossible structure, as weapons grade bass and percussive barrage melt into elongated vocal drones, a instant of surreal time dilation presenting a ravers eye view of the club as it might be depicted by Hieronymus Bosch, a frame of chaos exquisitely captured. Emerging transformed, blinking under purple spotlights, it’s clear that our protagonist has been exposed to some deeper understanding, the original allegory of the Tondal narrative reconstructed as the fleeting potential for political and sexual liberation. Quoting Frederic Jameson in his 2009 book Valences of the Dialectic, Louis-Jack and Jăk Skŏt leave us on a note of optimism: “From time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived, or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays of light from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are possible.” Tondal (Screen Test) Credits: Directors – Louis-Jack & Jăk Skŏt Director Of Photography – Matthew J Smith CGI Artist – Enes Güç Choreographer – Magnus Westwell Composer – IVVVO Stylist & Costume Designer – AGF Hydra Editor – James Stubbs Curator – Charlie Mills Story & Script Consultant – Walter Donohue Dancers – Oscar Li, Kibrea Carmichael and Max Cookward$

Domingæ - Æ (Part III) Asæse

Fact Residency: Theresa Baumgartner