All events will be free and open to the public, and will be held in English. After each talk, you are invited to stay for refreshments and continue the conversation with the artists. 

📅 September 18: Eszter Virók & Tekla Benczi 🕑 5.30 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

📅 September 29: Vaiva Vinskaité 🕑6.00 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

📅 October 6: Amie Sillah 🕑6.00 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

📅 October 20: Liis Ojamäe 🕑6.00 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

📅 November 3: Alison Owen 🕑6.00 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

📅 November 17: Melissa Joseph 🕑6.00 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

📅 November 24: Kara Rooney 🕑6.00 PM 📍 Il Punto|The Point 

🎟️ Free entry

• September 29: Vaiva Vinskaité is a graphic design graduate and a young activist. Around two years ago, she started consciously relying on people and their relationships for her projects; over time, they became more socially responsible and critical. This gradually led her to volunteer and work with Lithuanian and international organisations supporting social groups such as women, the youth, refugees and people on the move. At one point, it seemed to her that she had moved away from art, but during recent months of direct contact with people, she has noticed how art, exactly, has been helping her find languages when words are not there. "A scribbled bird doesn’t know borders".
• October 6: Amie Sillah  is a visual artist working in photography, sculpture, and performance. Sillah is from The Bronx, NY, and currently lives and works between Los Angeles, CA, and New York. She earned her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles (2024). Her work centers on her and her family’s lived experiences in The Gambia and The US, and on her relationship with photography as a medium to explore the complexities and diversity of Black diasporic life. Her practice engages themes of power, performance, desire, and obscurity. Through recounting and re-enacting stories and gestures, her work documents and celebrates the people around me whose existence is a living protest to sanctioned violence. Sourced from archives and stories, her practice draws from personal sources and is communal in its sharing. 
• October 20: Liis  Ojamäe is a sociologist and Associate Professor at Tallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. She earned a PhD in sociology in 2010, and her research focuses primarily on Urban and Housing Studies, social dynamics in urban spaces, and the processes of urban transformation. Her interests also include housing policies and markets, urban sustainability, and qualitative and mixed-methods research. Throughout her academic career, she has participated in numerous interdisciplinary research projects, addressing issues related to housing, urban development, and social change.
• November 3: Alison Owen is a multidisciplinary artist who works with ceramics, installation, and collage. She is interested in the ways in which works of art and artifacts are presented and re-presented over time. She collects and repurposes old materials such as art books, travel guides, and interior design manuals, using them as a starting point for her collages and paintings. Her site-specific installations and ceramic objects adopt the language of the archive and museum exhibition, often incorporating objects and debris found on site. By reorganizing and regrouping elements over time and in different exhibition contexts, she invites unstable and fluid narratives to infiltrate institutional and domestic spaces. The various depictions of vases and sculptures, cut from books spanning decades of changes in printing techniques and paper quality, offer a way to trace objects over time and allow her to view these artifacts as things that are mutable, contingent, and fluid in their meaning. Similarly, each new iteration of a composition becomes an opportunity to explore the nature of materials in space, placing each element with careful attention to light, color, form, and the history of the rooms that house them.
• November 17: Melissa Joseph is an artist based in New York. Her work explores themes of family history, materiality, and the politics of how we occupy space. She intentionally references women’s labor and toil, as well as experiences tied to her background as the daughter of an immigrant in rural America and the cultural influences of life in the diaspora. She has participated in several artist residency programs, and her works are part of the permanent collections of the Akron Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Ruby City, the RISD Museum, the ICA Miami, and the Flint Institute of Arts. She is also the recipient of the Brooklyn Museum’s 2025 UOVO Prize, has been selected as a 2026 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in the Craft/Sculpture category, and regularly contributes to BOMB Magazine.
• November 24: Kara Rooney is an interdisciplinary artist and critic who works with performance, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Language is the driving force behind her work, which aims to create meaningful and distinctive encounters between individuals through the creation of constructed environments, collaboration, poetry, and movement. Rooney has received grants from the Jumex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the DUMBO Cultural Space Subsidy Program, and the Santo Foundation. In addition to her artistic practice, Rooney has held various positions as an art critic, instructor, and guest curator. Rooney earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2009, where she has long served as a faculty member. She is currently the curator and programming director at CLEA RSKY CDMX.

🎭On September 18 at 5:30 PM, the Siena Art Institute will also host a special performance: a puppet show curated by our Hungarian student Eszter Tünde Virók and her collaborator Tekla-Enikő Benczi, who are in residence at the Siena Art Institute for the month of September as part of the European program “Culture Moves Europe.”