Rhyax lab + collective
This project is an offering : a hub and a physical location for collectivity between artists based around creative practice, community, and inspiration. We feel these kinds of spaces are necessary and increasingly vital to our emotional and artistic survival. The idea for the project came from conversations over years - about the repercussions of artistic isolation, individualism, and alienation within our communities.
We decided to create an alternative: an artistic space that is not attached to market mentality and bottom-line sales as a metric, but instead offers alternative ways of showing/exhibiting/distributing work that is communally-oriented. This project is intended to have many stages of unfolding. We are open to the forms it will take as it continues to expand and create community, and respond to the space, landscape, and political climate.
Founding Members
Amber Bemak
Iva Radivojević
Rosalia Ramirez
Sierra Pettengill
Active Members
Amber Bemak
is a filmmaker, artist, and educator whose creative practice is based in experimental and documentary film. She often works cinematically and performatively with her own body to represent symbolic cultural codes and structures of power. While living between India and Nepal, she produced and co-directed a feature-length documentary on the spread of Tibetan Buddhism to the United States, collaborated on on a five channel video installation commissioned by dOCUMENTA(13) engaging with queer, post-porn, and ecological discourses, and created a series of five short films detailing women's empowerment initiatives around radical communal healthcare, sustainable farming practices, and land rights for landless communities, among other projects. In Mexico City, she co-directed and was the editor for an award-winning experimental queer video-performance trilogy with collaborator Nadia Granados which has showed widely and internationally. She’s working on the performance documentary 100 Ways to Cross the Border, her first feature length film as a solo director. Her work has been seen at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, the Schwules Museum, and the Tamayo Museum. Festivals include Oberhausen, BAM cinemafest, Sheffield Docfest, Ann Arbor, DocLisboa, Morelia, and the European Media Art Festival. She has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.
Iva Radivojević
was born in Belgrade and spent her early years in Yugoslavia, Cyprus and eventually NYC. She is an artist and filmmaker who currently divides her time between Athens and Lesbos. Iva's films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Rotterdam IFF, CPH:DOX, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, DocLisboa, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and were commissioned by ARTE La Lucarne and Field of Vision. She is the recipient of the Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jerome Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship, Princess Grace Special Project Award and Film Fellowship. Avenue of The Living, her new art book was recently published by Big Black Mountain Press. She’s a PhD candidate at Villa Arson in Nice.