Why I Built AIR

I built AIR because the residency itself was the artwork I wanted to make.

This is the move that took me twenty years to be willing to say plainly. The residency at Ramana's Garden in Rishikesh in 2010, which became CRE8 Foundation in 2011 and ran across forty countries, was an artwork. Spielraum Gallery in Berlin in 2005 was an artwork. Thaillywood, the residency I directed in Thailand from 2009 to 2011, was an artwork. AIR Trancoso in Brazil. AIR Ubud in Bali, which opened in 2015 and is still running. AIR Tempo, the four-house format. All of them are artworks.

The Western model of an artist's career assumes the studio produces objects and the institutions distribute them. The artist's role is to make the objects; the rest is logistics. I have never been able to feel that distribution and frame-building are downstream of the work. They feel like the same activity. Beuys called this erweiterter Kunstbegriff — the expanded concept of art — and I have been reading that idea since I was twenty and I still don't think it has been taken seriously enough.

A residency is a form. The form has rules. AIR Ubud has these rooms, these meals, this rhythm, this relationship to the artisan studio next door, this set of permissions and refusals. The artist who arrives at AIR encounters all of those decisions as the work. The residency is the work. The fact that other artists then make work inside AIR is what AIR does — the way a sculpture sits in a room and reorganizes the room is what the sculpture does. AIR reorganizes the time of the artists who pass through it. That reorganization is the operation.

This is also why the frames are not branding and not businesses on the side. They are how I afford to make the studio work without depending on the gallery system to tell me what to make next, and they are also the work. Both. Not one or the other.

— Ole Ukena, 2026