Monika Zak

Monika Żak (b.1989) is a self-taught photographer and scientist with a special interest in visual perception. She graduated in 2015 from University in Oslo with a Master of Philosophy in Cognitive Neuroscience.

In her latest research, she explored the origins of human colour vision, attempting to investigate whether seeing colours in faces may affect emotion recognition. Through her interdisciplinary work Żak delves into the substance of perception, searching for possible explanations of what determines how we see and what we actually perceive.

Rachel Wolfe

Rachel Wolfe, born 1984 in rural Illinois. Foundational training in dance, vocals, and piano developed into interdisciplinary work in images, installations, drawing, video, fiber, writing, and performance. Wolfe studied formally and practically in several areas including advertising, interior design, sociology, photography, energetic arts, contemporary art, and language. She graduated with a BA in 2006 and MFA in 2015. Her work has been collected and exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Water, ice, and rocks are repeated themes in Wolfe's work. Ideas about Place, Subjectivity, and the Irrespirable drive her aestheticised constructions. With literal and material focus on the relationship between Vision and Body, the works mediate sensual experiences on The Nature of Desire, or what moves a Body. Her art making runs parallel to research in the field of Embodied Cognition.

Tough Guy Mountain

Tough Guy Mountain is an ongoing project focusing on the glories, trials, and absurdity of late capitalism. As an artist collective of over a dozen members, TGM creates presentations of capitalist aesthetic and consumer culture. TGM creates narrative performances where the collective plays a fantastical corporation that treats abstract concepts like Art and Post-Capitalism as its clients.

Nina Torp

Through observation, research and interpretation of historical material, Nina Torp examines how our gaze creates and communicates culture and memories. A key issue in her work is how the past exists/takes place in the present time, and how it is communicated and used through history. The starting point for her projects is often a cultural artifact, an art historical subject or a cultural phenomenon. She presents projects in large installations consisting of prints on fibre-board, video, objects, photographic series and wallpaper.

Nina Torp is educated at the Royal College of Art in London, Kent Institute of Art & Design in Maidstone and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. She has exhibited in galleries and museums in Norway, UK, The Netherlands, Iceland, Japan and Germany. From 2015 until 2018 she is collaborating with archaeologists and scientists at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo where she examines mechanisms for how cultural history is written.

Ruben Steinum

Ruben Steinum (b. 1984, Oslo, Norway) is an artist and co-founder of the digital art sales platform Atelier. Steinum graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo in 2011. In his artistic practice, he works with object-based sculpture, drawing and photography. His interest in pop and everyday culture comes to light through the use of commercial objects, appropriation of brands and in the relationship between the artwork and the title. He is currently working towards an exhibitions at Elephant Kunsthall in Lillehammer and at a sculpture park at Nesodden. He has exhibited at Tidens Krav (Oslo), Arts Incubator at Washington Park (Chicago), Kunsthall Oslo, Podium (Oslo), Rogaland Art Center (Stavanger) and RAKE (Trondheim).

Steinum is chairman of the Young Artists Society (UKS) and board member of Norwegian Visual Artists (NBK).

Image 1: Texas Sweet Chai Latte (Pour Femme) How good can you feel?™ Yogi Tea. Photo: Ruben Steinum

Image 2: Treat Yourself. Sodastream Taittinger, Sodastream Möet & Chandon, Sodastream Veuve Clicquot, Sodastream Laurent Perrier. Photo: Ruben Steinum

Image 3: Freak on a Leash. Photo: Jon Benjamin Tallerås. Project in collaboration with Marianne Hurum

Helle Siljeholm

Helle Siljeholm is a choreographer, performer and visual artist, based in Oslo. She holds a BA (hons) from London Contemporary Dance School in 2003. In 2016 she graduated with an MA in Visual Arts from the Oslo Academy of Art (KHiO).

Her artistic practice involves film, installation, choreography and performance. She has exhibited, performed and produced projects in theatres, galleries, and site-specific contexts in Norway as well as in the UK, Germany, Nordic Countries, Middle East, Asia, USA and East Africa. Siljeholm is a recipient of Ibsen Scholarship award (2011), a 3 year grant for younger artists from Norwegian Arts Council (2014) and Hans Christian Osterø´s memory award (2015), received together with colleague Sara Christophersen focusing on a 3 year project for dance in Palestine.

In 2017 she has exhibited/presented work in Fotogalleriet (Nordic Anthology), Black Box Theatre (Oslo), Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival, Golan heights, Jugenstilsenteret KUBE (Ålesund) and Høstscena (Ålesund). In 2018 she will be amongst other create a new work co-produced by Teaterhuset Avant Garden (Trondheim), a pre- project for Munchmuseet on the Move (Oslo) and a solo show for Akershus Kunstsenter (Lillestrøm).

Image 1: Noder om stein og andre sosiale landskap Jugendstilsenteret og KUBE og Høstscena, Ålesund, Norway 2017 (photo by Marius Simensen and Helle Siljeholm)

Image 2, 3: Detail from exhibition: Looking at chemicals. Fotogalleriet, Oslo 2017. (both photos by Istvan Virag)

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.

Maija Rudovska

Maija Rudovska’s practice is shaped by independent curation, research, art criticism and writing. The focus of her work has been inter-mediation and stimulation of relationships between different spaces, contexts and institutions. Finding a voice from/in the marginalized spaces that in her practice often rooted from the post-Soviet context, she pays particular attention to the in-between space seeking alternative ways of learning and sharing knowledge in the art realm today.

For the last 6 years Rudovska together with Juste Kostikovaite have been running the network platform Blind Carbon Copy that focuses on network building models, alternative education and work strategies between curators, artists and other practitioners. One of the priorities has been the learning, looking for the ways to teach each other as a sort of curatorial strategy. Engaging by creating a lively networking system and structures of self-organization (refusing to being attached to a certain power structure), the platform serves as a place from where to act and to find a voice. http://blindcarboncopy.org/

Rudovska have worked extensively in the Baltic-Nordic region, as well as internationally. Close collaborations include: Contemporary Art Centre (LV), Moderna Museet (SE), Rupert (LT), Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (LT), The Living Art Museum (IS), HIAP (FI), among many others.

Image 1: The Primal Shelter is the Site for Primal Fears (2016). Exhibition view. Photo: Vigfús Birgisson, courtesy The Living Art Museum.

Image 2: Society Acts - Version 2. After Moderna Exhibition 2014 (2015). Exhibition view. Photo: Ansis Starks, courtesy kim? Contemporary Art Centre

Image 3: Image of Blind Carbon Copy website, design by Nerijus Rimkus

Belić, Westerlund and Müller

Working collectivly Belić, Westerlund and Müller work with structures of relationships and varying forms of acts of imitation. They develop performative works through a process of learning from internet sources. 

Maria Gordana Belić received her BA in Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway and her MA degree in Fine Arts from Valand Academy of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her practice uses inter-biographical stories, meetings or events which become magnetic mantras, where companions, nervous technique or collaborations modify the narrative. Things are repeated, looped and multiplied through various formats. She is fascinated by structures around support and what it means to struggle with personal problems in pubic.

Per Westerlund works with animation depicting sensational bliss using Windows Paint. While the angular shapes of the medium resist painterliness he uses the movement of the images and coloring to create impassioned effects. Recurring motives include naked skin, wind and sun light, and images sometimes paraphrase stereotypes from the romantic era. The rhythmic feature of the animations has recently led him to work with music videos. He graduated from Oslo Academy of Fine Art in 2013.

Daniela Müller studied Media Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts and Fine Arts at the Academy of the Arts in Oslo, Norway, completing her MA in Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts in 2013. From 2012-15 she curated the ad-hoc gallery “One Night Only Zurich”. Müller's practice employs acts of appropriation to examine the purposeful conditions of language. She copies, loops and recontextualises mundane material, such as commercial signs, leaked pictures, spam mails and prophecies, leading toe moving images, installations and collaborations.

Vika Adutova

Vika Adutova's artistic practice is rooted in the research of language and perception. Vika uses video, sound, drawing, and sculpture, working primarily with the subject of the affect of time on human and non-human life, and language as the tool of description.

Born in Tashkent and previously based in New York, Adutova is currently living and studying in Oslo, and is an MFA candidate from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts due to graduate in 2018.

Eva Funk

Eva Funk is an Austrian artist and writer based in Berlin. She was educated at the Berlin University of the Arts and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her recent practice makes use of repetitive motifs across different contexts, building up large scale installations with performative interventions in the investigation of relationships between objects, language and spirit often in relation to notions of failure.

Funk works with physical bodies (of people and objects), as well as writing. She has self-published artist writings under rotato press, and is interested in the book as an alternative to the exhibition. Funk has exhibited and performed in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland and Canada.

Araiz Mesanza

Araiz Mesanza is an artist and illustrator whose work is mainly developed through drawings. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from the Basque University (Bilbao, Spain) and specialized in illustration at Escola Massana (Barcelona, Spain).

Mesanza has worked as a freelance illustrator since 2009 and in 2011 she co-founded Ediciones Armadillo, an artist collective and publishing outlet releasing an annual collaborative illustration fanzine and other projects. Having relocated to Oslo in autumn of 2016 (currently working from VORTA atelier at Middelalderparken), Mesanza's recent work has largely focused on producing "introspective landscapes" that explore her relationship with her new surroundings.

Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson is an American artist working with painting, video, sculpture and photography. These practices are thematically linked by an interest in animist objects and the way images shape desire. His references range from the commercial still-life to science fiction, often utilizing small assemblages or dioramas as points of departure.

Born in Ojai, CA., he attended the University of Arizona as an undergraduate, and received his MFA from New York University. His work has been exhibited in New York as well as Antwerp, Baltimore, Berlin, Melbourne, and Seoul. He has participated in residency programs in Florida, New York, Nebraska, and Michigan.

Magnus Myrtveit

Magnus Myrtveit studied BA Fine Art at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art, his current work searches for deeper meaning in the act of browsing the internet and juxtaposes “cutting edge” technology with primitive techniques of making art in the consideration of ideas of impermanence in technology.

Milenasong

As a former student of art & sound, it felt only natural for Milenasong to start painting with musical layering. Ten years ago she released her debut album, SEVEN SISTERS on Gudrun Gut's label Monika Enterprise in Germany.

Touring and meeting interesting artists from all corners greatly enriched her perspectives and process and in interviews she liked to say how much she wanted to break open rules in song-making. Motherhood and ill health temporarily rerouted her focus and her steps have been slower since. Since 2011 she has been working on her next album, started in London, with finishing touches added at Bauteil3 in Berlin, she is developing the end-mix herself in Oslo in 2017. It is a work on shadow-walk and transformation, the things that cannot be controlled, yet ultimately will find its resolution/dissolving in time.

Milenasong also works with illustration, currently fine lining for the newspaper Ny Tid and working on experimental audiobooks for Cappelen Damm/Storytel. Her current waves: Allowing things to be what they are, cooperating with given health, talents and the likeminded, for possibilities to take shape.

Michael McLoughlin

Michael McLoughlin is an artist and researcher from Dublin who makes audiowork, drawings, sculptural objects, video and installations. His artistic approach endeavors to presents an outlet for dialogue/exchange and explores the physicality of places where, and the manner in which, people interact. 

Since the mid-1990s Michael McLoughlin has consistently developed and presented new ways of making contemporary artwork in social contexts. Within the last year he has made site specific audio work in Limerick (Cumann:An Audio Map of Limerick, Limerick City Gallery of Art), Drogheda (Cumann, Droichead Art Centre, & as part of Beyond the Pale, Highlanes) and in Dublin (Rest Here, UCD Sutherland School of Law & Ocean Wonder Resort Revelations, Portrane). His artists book of drawings, I am here because I know you will be too was published by Dublin City Council in 2014.

McLoughlin has been Artist in Residence in Draiocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown (2017), and at UCD College of Social Science & Law in 2015, where he has since begun a critical social and institutional analysis of ethics, art-making and knowledge production in the contexts of social practice in the School of Sociology.

Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas & Siri Hjorth

Siri Hjorth (1986)  and Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas (1985) are two contemporary artists accomplishing high performance, premium, award-winning works that are safe, healthy, and certified sustainable.

When Kjølaas and Hjorth first got married in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in 2016 - they had already been working closely on a series of artistic projects since 2009. They now live and work in Oslo. Their artistic output include ceramics, textile, watercolours, latex and eggs.

Hjorth recently had her solo show “Looner Mooner" at Nebbelux in 2016, and participated in the production of “From Butter to Margarin” in 2017, directed by Pernille Lindstad and organised by “Munchmuseet on the Move” at Gallery 1857 in Oslo. She works with textile, costume and performance, and generates an unpredictable and sneaky world - disturbingly erotic. She opened the National Gallery's new Middle East Wing with a performativ staging of the painting “Marriage in Hardanger” by Tidemann and Gude. Hjorth has shown her work at the Black Box Theatre, Kunstnernes Hus, and Kunsthaus KULE in Berlin. Graduated with a Bachelor in Visual Arts from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2014.

In 2015 Kjølaas won the Debutant Prize at the Autumn State Exhibition. He has toured the country since 2016 with his solo show “On dry things” showcased at different Art Societies around Norway, including Hammerfest, Eidsberg, Haugesund, Volda and Trondheim. He is the artist and author behind “The Institute of Art and Crime” (2014) published by Torpedo Press. Graduated in 2012 with a Master in Visual Arts from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

In addition to their praxis both Kjølaas and Hjorth hold positions at Prosjektskolen Art School, as Prorector and teacher. Together they have started the artist run spaces GAGO between 2009 - 2011, and SALT between 2011-2013. With Marianne Bredesen they have developed the project “Wittgenstein on Vacation” (2015 - 2019) supported by KORO, Art in Public Space Norway.

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.

Gunnlaug Kuløy

Gunnlaug Bina Kuløy uses visual media, audio and sculptural installations to explore the intricate weave of circumstance, coincidence, emotion and decision that define a present situation or a state of mind. In turn this opens up a space to reflect upon interconnectedness in its many forms, and possible future trajectories. Her work evolves around themes as diverse as nostalgia and the immaterial connotations of objects, as well as biodiversity and the extinction of species. It often intersects with the realm of science; negotiating the ground between personal experience, observation and scientific research. Her intense focus on detail often results in the creation of spaces that demand full attentiveness in exchange for a sense of intimacy.

Gunnlaug holds a masters degree in Visual anthropology and has worked in various fields including cinematic production in Cuba, research on visual literacy in developing countries, media in exile and theatre production. The past few years she has divided her time between Oslo and Burma/Myanmar, working on projects related to wild endemic orchid conservation and mangrove forest restoration, resulting in the exhibitions Black Orchid Red Line, Goethe institute, Yangon (2016) and Macro Mangrove, Gallery 65 (2016). Her most recent exhibition Fate Undecided (2017) examined nostalgia in a socio-political context and was held at a site-specific location in Yangon.

Kirsty Kross

Kirsty Kross holds a Bachelors Degree in Art History from the University of Queensland and a Masters of Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts.

Her work has been featured in Bedfellows at Tate Modern London, The Partisan Cafe at The Bergen Assembly, Østlandsutstillingen, ONO and PINK CUBE in Oslo as well as in Berlin at Parkhaus Projekts, Galerie Crystal Ball and Galerie Walden.  From 2000-2010 Kirsty Kross was a co-creator and performer in the music/performance group, Team Plastique and performed extensively across Europe and Australia at clubs and events such as Glastonbury, Kunstsalon Berlin and the closing party of the 2006 Berlin Biennale.

Kirsty Kross’ work combines performance, drawing, music and installation and deals with thehuman condition questioning appropriate adult behaviour and the relationship between the artist, artwork and audience. Her recent work deals with the attention economy, global economic and social changes as well as impending ecological doom. Kirsty Kross moved to Oslo in 2015 and is a board member of Performance Art Oslo.

Photographs by (from top to bottom) Miguel Lope, Thor Brødreskift, Zane Cerpina