Tamira Sawatzky
Partner, Public Studio

PUBLIC STUDIO is the collective art practice of filmmaker Elle Flanders and architect Tamira Sawatzky. Since 2009, Public Studio has employed a diverse range of media resulting in large-scale public art works, films, immersive installations, lens-based works and socially engaged projects. Public Studio was founded with the intent of exposing the antagonisms that define issues of public space and its disappearance, as well as the effects of globalization on our everyday landscapes. Their multidisciplinary practice has engaged topics such as war and militarization, ecology and urbanization, and political dissent. Central to their work is a desire to bridge notions of the aesthetic and the ethical, and question the role art can play in not simply “making meaning,” but “making meaning matter.”