Eline Benjaminsen (1992, NO) makes camera based follow-the-money narratives combining video, print- and publication making. Her works are attempts at observing the always weird, often violent and mostly invisible spaces where market fundamentalism, financialisation and ecological crisis meet.
Techniques associated with a documentary photography tradition are fused with experimental and essayistic representations. Her projects frequently emerge from long-term collaborations with researchers and activists, and have examined topics ranging from high-frequency trading to carbon offsetting and land dispossession. The genre here is ‘cli-fi-fi’, or Climate Finance Fiction. This genre, coined together with collaborator Dayna Casey, is related to sci-fi and cli-fi. But where these tend to show fictional, speculative and futuristic scenarios, cli-fi-fi documents the real and existing yet odd and abstract narratives that arise when market logic is used to write solutions to the ecological crisis it itself is producing.
Recent exhibits of her projects include Oslo Kunstforening, Museum MMK Für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Radius CCA (NL) and Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. She has a BA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she studied photography. She’s about to publish the book ‘Collapsed Mythologies- a Geofinancial Atlas’, authored together with Casey and published with Spector Books. She lives and works in Oslo.
1: Installation view: 'The Flora of Finance' at Oslo Kunstforening, 2024. Photo: Tor Simen Ulstein/Kunstdok
2: Still: 'Footprints in the Valley' (4K, 8.30 min) by Eline Benjaminsen & Elias Kimaiyo, 2024.
3: Installation view: 'Footprints in the Valley' at Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2025. Photo: Frank Sperling
4: Still: 'The Flora: Hedging' (4K, 11.50 min) by Eline Benjaminsen & Dayna Casey, 2024.
5. Spread of forthcoming book: 'Collapsed Mythologies: a Geofinancial Atlas' by Eline Benjaminsen & Dayna Casey (Spector Books).
