Sophia Efstathiou

Sophia Efstathiou is a philosopher of science working on the interfaces of science, art and everyday life. She is a senior researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) currently leading the Research Council of Norway project MEATigation: Towards sustainable meat-use in Norwegian food practices for climate mitigation (2020-2024). Efstathiou holds a Master of Physics degree in Mathematics and Physics (Warwick, 2000), an MA in Philosophy (UCSD, 2006) and PhD in Philosophy and Science Studies (UCSD, 2009) on The use of race as a variable in biomedical research. Her research has received EU, NSF, Max Planck and White funding and invited by the Athens Biennale (2012, 2018), Ars Electronica (2020) and Cornell Biennial (2020).

Ageliki Lefkaditou

Ageliki Lefkaditou is a historian of science, an award-winning science museum curator and documentary producer focusing on the art of natural world storytelling. She is a senior researcher at the University of Oslo, where she currently works on a Research Council of Norway funded project focusing on the history of intelligence testing. As a producer she is involved in two documentaries dealing with climate/nature crisis and human-animal relations, both supported by the Norwegian Film Institute. She has curated several science museum exhibitions, among which FOLK – From Racial types to DNA Sequences, winner of the 2018 British Society for the History of Science Great Exhibitions Prize.

Image 1: FOLK – From Racial types to DNA Sequences, 2018–2019, exhibition curator, photo: Håkon Bergseth / Teknisk Museum

Image 2: Blind Spot, 2019–2020, exhibition curator, photo: Håkon Bergseth / Teknisk Museum

Image 3: Klima2+, 2020, exhibition curator, photo: Håkon Bergseth / Teknisk Museum

Image 4: A Call from the Wild (in development), film still, producer, photo: Asgeir Helgestad

Eleena Jamil

Eleena Jamil is founder and owner of Eleena Jamil Architect (EJA), one of Malaysia’s leading architectural practices. Her work is founded on researching the specific social and climatic imperatives of individual briefs within their broader cultural frameworks.

She was shortlisted for Dezeen Architect of the Year in 2018 and won the Iconic Architecture Award 2021 by the German Design Council for End-lot House. She recently led About Making, a short research project supported by the British Council that explores the roles, processes, and worldview of traditional Malay house craftsman ‘tukang’ and their relevance to contemporary making of sustainable architecture.

For more information visit www.ej-architect.com

Image 1 - 2: WUF09KL Bamboo Pavillion

Image 2: Bamboo Playhouse

Image 3: Kampung Endah Library

Don Lawrence

Don Lawrence is an award winning architect, based in Oslo, Norway. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union in New York City and a Masters degree in Architecture from the Arkitektur og Designhøgskolen in Oslo, Norway. In 2013 he established Don Lawrence Arkitekt AS which focuses on projects bordering between art and architecture´s potential for to develop senses of place.

Don discovered his interest in architecture as a young boy in Jamaica through combining his love of hand-drawing and his curiosity for the natural sciences. He has always been a dreamer and enjoys nothing better than crafting thoughtful architectural solutions.

For more information visit www.don-lawrence.com/index.html

Image 1-2: Tree house design

Image 3: Apollo cabin

Image 4: Bee garden

Image 5: Wooden pavilion

​Tanja Thorjussen

Tanja Thorjussen (b. 1970) is an artist living in Oslo (NO). Her artistic medium spans between drawing, sculpture, performance and art in public space. Through speculative research her artistic practice revolves around how ancient art can inform the present.

At the upcoming exhibition at Archeological Museum – University of Stavanger (NO) in 2023 she is making artworks about historical objects from the collection, speculating on its meaning through artistic methodology such as drawing and intuitive listening.

Her current artistic focus is on the mystic and spiritual in nature and bodies of water, hydrofeminism, and the science embedded in indigenous knowledge and ancient mythology. Thorjussen holds a BFA from KHIB in Bergen (NO) and Parsons The New School in New York (USA) and is educated as curator from Telemark University. She is the initiator of LOCUS since 2006 and PAO - Performance Art Oslo since 2012 and from 2019 she is elected chairwoman of Tegnerforbundet (The Norwegian Drawing Association)

Nina Sarnelle

Nina Sarnelle is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles, with a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and additional training in vocal performance and movement improvisation. She is co-founder of two artist collectives, the Institute for New Feeling and dadpranks. Her work includes intimate participatory performances, large public events, music composition, video, text and sculpture. Her practice thrives on the energy of collaboration. Driven by an intuitive style of research, Sarnelle’s projects attempt to reconcile powerful abstract systems with the most personal or mundane parts of everyday life.

Her work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern (Turkey), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), NADA (Miami), Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (Lisbon), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Black Cube (Denver), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Recess (NY), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Jardin Essential (Brussels), UNSW Galleries (Sydney), Project 88 (Mumbai), Kevin Space (Vienna), Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum (Genova), Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe), Mwoods (Beijing), MoCA Cleveland, Human Resources (LA), Borscht Festival (Miami), SPACES (Cleveland), Threewalls (Chicago), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Miller Gallery (Pittsburgh), and featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, Creators Project, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.

More information available at www.ninasarnelle.com.

Lindsay Seers

Lindsay Seers works in London and lives on the Isle of Sheppey. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she now works as a lecturer on MA Fine Art. Her works are in a number of collections including Tate collection, Arts Council collection, Artangel collection and the collection of MONA, Tasmania. She has won several prestigious grants and awards such as the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Award, UAE; Le Jeu de Paume production award for the Toulouse Festival, France; the Paul Hamlyn Award; the Derek Jarman Award; AHRC Award; a number of Arts Council and British Council Awards in support of her works and she also received the Wingate Scholarship from The British School at Rome 2007/8.

She has shown her large scale works internationally at a number of museums and art centres including SMK (National Gallery of Denmark); Venice Biennale 2015; Hayward Gallery, UK; MONA, Tasmania; Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; Kiasma, Finland; Turner Contemporary, UK; Tate Triennial, UK, TPW, Canada, Sami Centre for Art; Norway; Centre for Contemporary Art 'Poland and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Recent new commissions include Suffering, Unconformity Festival 2016, Queenstown, Australia; Nowhere Less Now, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Wales 2016; Nowhere Less Now 5, Turner Contemporary UK, 2016.

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy

David Blandy & Larry Achiampong led PRAKSIS's inaugural residency, "New Technology And The Post-Human," in March - April, 2016. Through their work, Blandy and Achiampong examine ideas of communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate cultural hierarchies and the “fiction of the self”.

Blandy and Achiampong have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, both individually and as a duo, at venues including Tate, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; and MOMA PS1, New York. Their 2014-15 hip-hop-inspired collaboration Biters was funded by the Arts Council of England and is “unique, in that it unifies both appropriation as a methodology and “biting” [the stealing of taggers’ or hip-hop artists’ personal styles] as an existential state”, critic Morgan Quaintance has written. “Biters…is a project about attraction and repulsion, and in hip-hop Achiampong and Blandy have recognised a musical genre pulsating with all the contradictory energies of hierarchical value systems, based on race, privilege and subjection”.

Video: David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Finding Fanon 2, 2015

Commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. Finding Fanon 2 is made using the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

www.larryachiampong.co.uk

www.davidblandy.co.uk

Eliza Naranjo Morse

Based in Northern New Mexico, USA, Eliza Naranjo Morse works across disciplines from sculpture and drawing to social projects involving cultivating land and working in public schools and the local youth detention center.  Through her interdisciplinary work she seeks to celebrate place, and to consider the intangibles of life including spirituality, balance, resourcefulness and renewal. 

Eliza Naranjo Morse studied drawing at Parsons School of Design and at the Institute for American Indian Arts, and ultimately graduated from Skidmore College with a B.S. in art in 2003. Naranjo Morse has shown her work in a number of international venues including, among others, at Cumbre de el Tajin, Veracruz, Mexico; Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinburg, Russia; Chelsea Art Museum, New York, New York; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM, USA; Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ, USA; Berlin Gallery Phoenix; School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe. A participating artist of the Site Santa Fe Biennial in 2008 she is also a 2007 awardee of the King Artist Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe.

Natasha Marie Llorens

Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based in Marseille and New York. Recent curatorial projects include “We the Watchers are Also Bodies,” at Hercules Art Studio Program in Manhattan, "The Exposed Suture" in Marseille, and "Mine are True Love Stories...." at the Skowhegan offices in New York. Llorens has held curatorial residencies at Marra Tein in Beirut and at Triangle Arts Association in New York, and is currently the 2017 Entrée Principale curatorial resident at Rond Point Projects in Marseille, France.

Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Modern Painters, BOMB Magazine, Pastelegram, WdW Review, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Ibraaz, and elsewhere. Institutions taught at include Columbia University and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Curatorial Studies MA program at Parsons in Paris. She is currently developing a PhD at Columbia University, focused on the representation of war in Algerian national cinema between 1965 and 1979.  

Image 1: Kerry Downey at "In This Hello America" as part of Action Club's collaboration with Douglas Paulson, April 2011, Double Session, a thesis exhibition for the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College curated by N. M. Llorens. Photo: Douglas Paulson.

Image 2: Natasha Marie Llorens photographed by Natalie Hope O'Donnell.

Benjamin Lignel

Benjamin Lignel is an artist, writer and curator. He was the editor of Art Jewelry Forum between January 2013 and December 2016, and edited three books under AJF’s imprint, including the first book-length study of jewelry exhibition-making.

His most recent curatorial project was Medusa, Jewellery and Taboos (2017) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in collaboration with Anne Dressen and Michèle Heuzé. Benjamin has lectured extensively on craft, and likes to organize (or co-organize) symposia on jewellery, of which The Public and Private Lives of Jewellery (Zimmerhof, 2011), Forgetting Jewellery (Paris, 2017) and The Fuzzy, the Fake and the Double - Trouble in Ornament (Paris, 2017).

He is a guest teacher at the Akademie der Bildende Künste (Nürnberg) and at Alchimia (Florence), and a mentor in the Handshake 4 pedagogical program (New Zealand). Ben regularly contributes essays to magazines, monographs and museum publications, and is currently working with co-editor Namita Wiggers towards a series of publications on jewelry and gender. He lives in Montreuil (France).

Gender and adornment research, documentation archive from San Francisco field trip, November 2016, photo: Lignel / Wiggers.

This research was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, Inc., which was administered by Art Jewelry Forum.

Syowia Kyambi

Kyambi’s practice probes issues of race, perception, gender and memory. Her work examines how contemporary human experience is influenced by constructed histories, creating installations that include a performative practice to narrate stories and activate objects, exploring cultural identities, linking them to issues of loss, memory, race, and gender.

Based in Nairobi and of Kenyan and German origin, Syowia Kyambi has received commissions by the Kenya Institute of Administration, the National Museum of Kenya and the Art 4 Action Foundation in Kenya. She is an alumnus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been the recipient of several awards and grants, including most recently the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, being shortlisted for the Financial Times Emerging Artist Award and recipient of the Art in Global Health Grant from the Wellcome Trust Fund in the United Kingdom.

Her work has been exhibited in museums in Belgium, Finland, Kenya, Mali, Sweden, Germany, Zimbabwe, France, United Kingdom, Mexico, South Africa North America and Ireland

Gereon Krebber

Sculptor Gereon Krebber studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Royal College of Art, London, and has exhibited extensively since the early 2000s. His work has featured in solo and group shows in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, London and elsewhere, and he has received commissions to develop public work in Bonn, Bochum and Viersen (DE). Awards received include the UK’s Jerwood Sculpture Prize (2003) and the Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Stipendium (Duisburg, 2009).

His working processes probe questions about sculpture as a discipline in relation to site, time, language, communication and the body, and extend across a highly experimental range of media, including writing and speech: for example, via the Laberflash, a new form of performance that he has developed, in which participants’ bodies, voices and thinking processes become unexpected new media for sculptural experimentation.

International Collaborative Drawing Project (ICDP)

International Collaborative Drawing Project (ICDP) is a global participatory initiative which uses drawing as a starting point for cooperative creation. Founded in London in 2010 by artist Ivan Liotchev, the project works with diverse cultural organisations and communities to develop drawing events, exhibitions, public art, and multi-media spectacles that explore drawing within a wide context.

ICDP has developed projects throughout the UK, Europe and USA, with communities ranging from Hopi and Acoma Native American pueblos in the American Southwest to underpriviledged youths in London and Wakefield, England. Recent projects include: London Brain Project, London (2016); COLLABORATE!, Glyndwr University/Focus Wales, Wrexham, UK (2015); The Kingswood Draw, produced by Emergency Exit Arts for Southwark Council, London (2014); Right Up Our Street, DARTS, Doncaster (2014); Light Up Lancaster, (2013); A Million Minutes, produced by AIR @ Central Saint Martins for Islington Council, London (2012). Ongoing work with The Guinness Partnership facilitates opportunities for social housing residents to create their own public art across the UK.

www.icdpdraw.com/

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Robert Holyhead

Robert Holyhead studied Fine Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, between 1993 and 96, and at the Chelsea School of Art and Design between 1996 and 97.

Solo exhibitions include shows at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, in 2016; PARTS Project, The Hague, in 2016; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, in 2014; PEER, London, in 2012; and Karsten Schubert, London, in 2009, 2010 and 2012. He was a recipient of the five-year ACME Fire Station live/work residency (2005) and in 2009/10 he was commissioned by the Government Art Collection to produce two site-specific works for the new British Embassy in Brussels. In July 2018, he completed a residency at SoART in Austria. He is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin and Paris. In 2018, he was selected for one of the Art Foundation’s 20th Anniversary awards. Public collections holding his work include the UK Arts Council Collection, the UK Government Art Collection, Tate and the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Recent writing projects include What is Seen: a catalogue essay published by Tate for Patrick Heron’s retrospective at Tate St Ives.

Elvira Dyangani Ose

Elvira Dyangani Ose is Director of The Showroom, London. She is currently affiliated to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths and the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada. Until November 2018, she will serve as Creative Time Senior Curator. Recently she was part of the curatorial team of the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2016, and was curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, GIBCA 2015.

Previously, Dyangani Ose served as Curator International Art at Tate Modern (2011 – 2014), Curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, as Artistic Director of Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi Biennial (2013), and as Guest Curator of the triennial SUD, Salon Urbain de Douala (2010). Dyangani Ose has published and lectured on modern and contemporary African art and has contributed to art journals such as Nka and Atlántica.

Seamus Harahan

Seamus Harahan was invited by PRAKSIS in collaboration with Oslo Pilot, and selected the theme of mucker mate around which to form a residency. Harahan's deceptively simple work engages with his surrounding environment, discovering a sensual poetics in everyday, marginal and overlooked subjects and peripheral details. his work was described by Adrian Wootton, Chief Executive of Film London and the British Film Commission, as: “challenging and experimental while also humorous and accessible.”

Harahan is represented in London by Gimpel Fils and has exhibited widely internationally, including at Tate Britain, London, and representing Northern Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. He received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2009, and won the 2015 Jarman Award. He is ex-director of Catalyst Arts Belfast. Harahan lives and works in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Video: Seamus Harahan, Stay here a while, 2008

Smadar Dreyfus

Smadar Dreyfus’s projects excavate scenes of everyday life for reverberations of a wider socio-political context. Focusing in particular on the role of the voice in the enactment of contested public spaces, she uses documentary recordings gathered over long periods of research. Her video and sound installations consist of specific architectural enclosures, designed to immerse viewer-listeners in affective soundscapes, raising questions about communication and translation across cultural and political divides. Writing on the installation Mother’s Day at Extra City, Antwerp, Doreen Mende has observed how Dreyfus“modestly yet decisively conveys a vivid sense of how politics and the burden of history affect the lives of individuals in our present-day realities”.

Dreyfus’s selected solo exhibitions include: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2014, Magasin III, Stockholm 2009, Extra City, Antwerpen 2008, IKON Birmingham 2005 and Victoria Miro, London 2006. Selected group exhibitions include the 2011 Folkestone Triennial, S.M.A.K. Gent 2010, Mediations Biennial, Poznan 2010, ArTLV Biennale, Tel Aviv 2009, MUSAC Leon, Spain 2006, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial, 2005.

vimeo.com/user1148815

Phoebe Davies

Phoebe Davies is a Welsh artist and researcher, presently based at Somerset House Studios in London. Her practice investigates people’s perceptions of their social framing, and she frequently uses collaboration, collective action and Do It Together strategies to make work with individuals, groups and communities.

Through her work Davies often finds herself referencing and exploring collaborative models of working across different social and cultural sectors. Recently, she has investigated ideas taken from areas as disparate as basketball, feminist organisation, science fiction and methods of organic farming.

Recent projects have led  her to work with sex educators, secondary school students, elderly residents in care homes, sports teams and DJs as well as art spaces and institutions, including Tate Britain and Tate Modern (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Fierce Festival (Birmingham), South London Gallery (London), Wysing Arts Centre (London), Steirischer Herbst (Graz, AUT), Assembly (Portland, USA) and SA-UK SEASONS 2015 (Johannesburg, ZA).

The final forms of Davies’s work are project dependent, and have included live performances, video, audio, print works and constructed social spaces. She currently co-facilitates three research groups: Bedfellows, a radical sex re-education research project; Synaptic Island, a London-based womxn and non-binary DJ collective; and Art is Action, a UK-based social practice research group. In 2015 she was awarded the British Council’s Social Practice Fellowship for the International Cultural Exchange U.S.Program, and she is currently supported by Syllabus III, an UK-wide alternative peer-led learning programme for artists.

Selected extracts from A Navigation by Phoebe Davies and Nandi Bhebhe, 2017. [Please listen with headphones/speakers, as audio is sensitive]

Robert Bordo

Robert Bordo makes thematic paintings that integrate a notion of formalism with a range of personal and theoretical narratives. Since the mid-1980s, his work has been exhibited extensively and internationally in solo and group exhibitions.

Highlights include shows at the National Exemplar Gallery, Bortolami Gallery, Alexander and Bonin Gallery, MoMA PS1 and the Brooklyn Museum (all New York); The Suburban, Oak Park, IL, Mummery + Schnelle, London, the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Collections in which his work features include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE. Awards and fellowships he has received include the 2014 Robert de Niro Sr. Painting Prize, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Canada Council Arts Grant, the Tesuque Foundation Arts Fellowship Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Ballinglen Fellowship, a Hermitage Retreat Fellowship and a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has designed sets, costumes and posters for the Mark Morris Dance Company, including designs for Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2017 revival of Dido and Aeneas. As Associate Professor of Art he led the Cooper Union’s painting program from 1996 until 2017. He lives and works in Columbia County and Brooklyn, NY.