With artists Tris Vonna-Michell & Henrik Follesø Egeland
Organised in collaboration with Pachinko
Tris Vonna-Michell, Boxed Matter, 2022, courtsey the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels
Residency dates: 23 October 2023 to January 2024
In collaboration with the artist-run space, Pachinko, PRAKSIS is pleased to invite artists Tris Vonna-Michell and Henrik Follesø Egeland to its first duo residency. Vonna-Michell will work to further explore the artistic footprint of his father, Ed Vonna-Michell (1950-2020). Egeland will assist in the production of this work-in-progress as well as pursuing new directions in his own work. Together they will engage with other researchers and audiences, and draw on the history of self-organised art through the lens of the Vonna-Michell family in order to push notions of authorship and forge new ways of working with archival, image and sound materials.
This residency is a pilot that sets out to test how residencies built around individual practices might potentially benefit Oslo’s creative community. It will uphold PRAKSIS’s focus on dialogue and exchange through a series of encounters, workshops and open events taking place alongside the production of a slide and sound installation at Pachinko. This approach grants public insight into different phases of artistic production, allowing a dynamic engagement with the creative process. The residency will run in two phases: phase 1, centred around production, research and experimentation will take place in October–November; phase 2, in December, will open the process to the public through talks, presentations and visits. The residency is expected to lead to an exhibition at Pachinko in early 2024.
Background
Following his father's passing, Tris Vonna-Michell discovered an archive revealing his father's undisclosed artistic pursuits. Working in the field of experimental art and sound poetry, Ed Vonna-Michell had been secretly producing his own art works and publishing others’ since the 1970s through the small press imprint Balsam Flex. He had concentrated on the production of work rather than its presentation, hence the output had been shrouded in a certain level of secrecy.
The residency's central focus lies in Tris Vonna-Michell's systematic exploration of his father's archive—a diverse collection containing obsolete media formats, fragile ephemera, and process-based artworks created from both biodegradable and industrial materials. Through meticulous deciphering and construction, Tris Vonna-Michell is working to interweave narratives between his father’s artistic practice and his own, blurring traditional authorship boundaries and generating new archival entities.
Through his imprint Balsam Flex, Ed Vonna-Michell was active in collaborations, such as those with Bob Cobbing, Throbbing Gristle and Henri Chopin. He also worked on the development of early three-dimensional new media holographic art, and was involved with expanded cinema, auto-destructive art, and the British poetry revival movement.
A unifying thread in the activities of Ed and Tris Vonna-Michell, Pachinko and PRAKSIS is the ongoing nature of collaborative art and artists' publishing. This residency's framework acknowledges this collaborative aspect by offering an extensive educational program, allowing access to the artistic process, and hosting insightful events. Key discussions within the program will revolve around intergenerational and custodial frameworks, countercultural narratives in Fluxus, Concrete Poetry, sculpture, and the management of artistic estates and archives.
About Tris Vonna-Michell
Tris Vonna-Michell works in various media and is based in Oslo and Stockholm. He is currently a professor of contemporary art at the Art Academy, KHiO, Oslo. Vonna-Michell has exhibited widely in museums, biennales and galleries, such as Serralves Museum, Porto, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Tate Modern, London, and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and most recently at Jan Mot in Brussels. Vonna-Michell’s work utilises a plethora of technical devices, modes of presentation and installational approaches, encompassing performance, audio recordings, slide projections, poetry, sound poetry, printed matter, photography and film.
About Henrik Follesø Egeland
Henrik Follesø Egeland (b.1994) is an Oslo-based visual artist and photographer, and a graduate from the Oslo National Academy of Arts (MFA) as well as the University of Roehampton (BFA). Through a technical engagement with photography, his work operates both within and outside traditional photographic representation. Exploring alternative means of photographic recording and reproduction, as well as possibilities of transmutation. This technical experimentation is used as an investigative approach, to explore ideas of landscape, memory and perceptions of reality. Pulling together webs of interconnected yet disparate ideas and notions, into new constellations.
About Pachinko
Pachinko is an artist-run space located in Grønlandsleiret 47C, Oslo. Pachinko aims to present experimental cross-disciplinary exhibition projects by regional and international artists. Through a Nordic network, an open structure and a flexible programme, Pachinko seeks to provide a testing ground for artistic and social discourse. Pachinko is run by Mathilde Carbel and Kristian Schrøder.
