Would you set sail on a residency inside a commercial cargo ship? A group of seven intrepid artists will do just that as part of the innovative Container Artist Residency. Culled from over 2,000 applicants who submitted proposals following the announcement of the program in October 2015, the winners are Mari Bastashevski, Tyler Coburn, Tuur Van Balen and Revital Cohen, Erin Diebboll, Ferenc Gróf, Christopher Page, and Samson Young.

The program, which is sponsored by a shipping company, takes each artist on a fully-funded trip of up to six weeks on the route of their choice, providing studio space and accommodations aboard ships as well as an honorarium and production funding. The work produced during the residencies will be exhibited in a set of international exhibitions taking place between spring 2016 and summer 2017.

Photo: Zim Integrated Shipping Services.

Residents were selected by a panel of jurors comprised of curators Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Neils Van Tomme, and Xiaoyu Weng. All seven winners are under 45 (the majority are in their thirties), and hail from places as disparate as Hong Kong and Hungary. Many work in several mediums, mixing fields like research, journalism, teaching, and writing with their visual art practices.

“While the project takes the maritime shipping industry to be the embodiment of the infrastructures on which contemporary art relies and today’s dominant cultural-economic force, we are looking forward to seeing how this specific context for art-making can impact different kinds of practice,” said residency founder and director Maayan Strauss in a statement.

Photo: Mayaan Strauss.

Strauss, an artist herself, established the residency as a way to turn the international commercial marketplace into a backdrop for the kind of artistic production that can help put emerging artists on the map, so to speak.

“The art world itself has become such an industry, and residencies play a big role in the professional pathway from the MFA toward group shows and gallery representation,” she told artnet News’s Brian Boucher in October.