2016
Marit Silsand (b.1980, NO) is a visual artist living and working in Oslo. She works with analogue photography, video and site-specific installations. In 2010 Silsand graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where her studies included an exchange program to San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. From 2003-04 she studied at Fatamorgana–The Danish School of Art Photography in Copenhagen. Silsand is a member of Bjørka, a collective atelier space for lens based artists in Oslo.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer, whose films and essays are interested in private and political narratives of the digital. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and University of Cambridge, and is a staff contributor to Frieze Magazine. Recent exhibitions include Tenderflix ‘Futures' at ICA, London and Would you like help? at EMBASSY Gallery, Edinburgh.
Video: Gary Zhexi Zhang, lacoste1, 2015
Ola Wlusek is an independent curator based in Canada and Poland. She earned an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She also studied Art History and Cultural Anthropology at McMaster University. For the past ten years, she worked in curatorial and educational departments at public art institutions in Canada and abroad. From 2011 to 2015, Wlusek was the curator of contemporary art at the Ottawa Art Gallery (Ontario, Canada) where she organized multidisciplinary projects that explored the contesting social, cultural and community histories.
She’s interested in transnational frameworks for the interpretation of art through exhibition-making that is accessible to an audience from culturally diverse backgrounds. Her research focuses on new curatorial strategies and museological methodologies for exploring non-Western, indigenous, and comparative approaches to global modernities. While working collaboratively, she considers exhibitions as experiential, flexible and accessible spaces for cultural production and exchange. Prior to joining PRAKSIS, she will be attending the Curatorial School: Curating the New, at the University of Malta, and conducting research in Krakow.
Merve Ünsal is a visual artist based in Istanbul. In her works, she employs text and photography, possibly beyond their form. Merve holds an MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons The New School of Design and a BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.
She was most recently a participant at the Homework Space Program 2014-15 at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. She has participated in artist residencies at the Delfina Foundation and at the Banff Centre. Merve is the founding editor of the artist-driven online publishing initiative m-est.org.
Line Sanne graduated from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, with a BA(Hons) in Spatial Design, and holds an MA in Nonfiction Writing from Høgskolen i Sørøst-Norge. Sanne has worked as a set designer, visual merchandiser, and installation artist at music festivals, Slottsfjell festivalen and Øya. She is now working on writing a biography about a former refugee and actress, Sara Baban.
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.
Kristin Nango (1976) is a butohdancer, performance artist, therapist and with a special interest in the bodily and philosophical approach to materiality and experience. Her works operates in the field of movement, dance and performance and are often inspired by the human relationship to nature and to the «non- human». She is currently based in Oslo where she is frequently giving workshops in poetic movement and operates as an artist in the collective Oslo Butohlaboratorium in which she is one of the founders and core members.
Ebba Moi's artistic practice relates to the public domain with a community based, participatory approach. Her concerns include the use of democratic space and the management of people's rights and needs. Moi works with installation, sound, performance, curating and dialogue- based art projects, primarily targeting young people across cultures. Moi is currently co-running artist run space Tenthaus Oslo together with artists Helen Eriksen and Stefan Schröder.
hedbergmoi.net
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.
Ragna Misvær Grønstad (originally from Bodø in North of Norway) studied printmaking and drawing and received her MFA degree in 2016, from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) in Medium- and Material-Based Art, and her BA in Visual Art in 2013 (KHiO).
In the catalogue for Misvær Grønstad's MFA show, "The Silent After", Eva González-Sancho writes:
"Misvær Grønstad explores the ways in which we perceive reality through literary texts. Figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Guy Debord and Hannah Arendt navigate her boundless aquatic world—which she refers to as Saltvannsblomstene (salt water flowers)—as representatives of liberation, poetry and punk, the singularity of the individual and his/her emancipation."
Her work is marked by a social critique which is anchored in her belief in the positive potential of escapism, and in the force of the imaginary. In 2014 she was admitted to “The 68. North Norway Art Exhibition” with the print “The Great Escape”.
She graduated with “The Silent After” MFA Degree Show at KHiO, with her project “Conversations in Sáivu” (2016).
Eli Maria Lundgaard (b.1989 in Trondheim, Norway) finished a BFA at Bergen Academy of Art and Design in 2015. She will start on a MFA at Malmö Art Academy in 2016.
She works with video, drawing, collages and sculpture.
Her art is about comprehension. She explores different concepts of the psyche, for instance anxiety or hypochondria. She also questions the subject and its surroundings: how body and environment are shaped by influences, direct intervention, or evolution and natural changes.
The relationship between the natural and the artificial is interesting. Both science and art are curious and concerned the absence of information. We are looking for systems and definitions to put things in. Everything around us should be categorized and organized. These categories and systems come from what we are learned to look for. What cannot be described "physically", but only sensed, leads to speculation and fantasy. What do we do when explanations are missing?
What we cannot see or explain turn into myths, monsters and magic. Fiction and dreams blends with reality and makes a setting we can live within and think.
Maren Dagny Juell is an Oslo based artist working with moving image and installation. Her subjects are alienated, filled with doubt and with a yearning for control and personal development. Maren is interested in the borders of subjectivity and individual autonomy. This is approached with narrative text often collected from online forums and tutorials. The works seeks to embody an investigation into the reality of appearances, surfaces and definition of visual space aided by technology.
Maren studied in London and has an MA from Chelsea College of Art. Recently exhibitions has been at Stavanger Art Museum and Papay Gyro Nights (Orkney and Hong Kong) amongst others. She won an award for video at BEERS contemporary (London) in 2013 and was included in Lights On Norwegian Contemporary Art at the Astrup Fearnely Museum in Oslo in 2008.
Video: Maren Dagny Juell, Tutorial#6: It’s our ability to create stylish meals that separates us from the animals (Bear Grylls)
Tutorial#6 refers to instructional videos by survivalists. Three men meet and have a conversation made up by fragmented quotations collected from instructional tutorial videos and on-line forums about survival. During the meeting, they all make a flower out of gaffer tape, zip-ties and para-cord.
The work was initially made for an exhibition related to the tapestry weaver Frida Hansen (1855-1931) and also includes sculptures. Juell was interested in the gender roles assigned to textile craft and the purpose of these activities (craft clubs- craft as therapy). Her project is a fictional account of themale dominated culture of survivalist preparing for the apocalypse.
Clara J:son Borg (1986) is an artist from Sweden, based in Rotterdam (NL). She graduated in 2016 from The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, with an MA in Fine Art.
The attention of her works and research is directed towards staged situations where verbal language and bodily movement find themselves interacting. By setting up and enacting these staged situations (mainly executed through video and performance) her aim is to provoke moments where verbal and physical communications methods fit loosely to one another. She understands this looseness as a way of storytelling, but also as an invitation to observe different elements of interpersonal relationships, social choreographies, knowledge hierarchies and bodily relation to physical space and images.
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.
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Tze Yeung Ho (b. 1992) is a Norwegian composer.
Tze Yeung's music is created at the crossroads of understanding, reflecting his multilingual upbringing. His works explore the territories of speech, translation in language, dramaturgy and poetics. Working with Scandinavian, Finno-Ugric and Chinese poetry and prose, his music treads on the fragile landscapes of (mis)communication through (un)spoken words. Close collaboration with living writers, storytellers and word-based artists is integral to his practice. His creations usually result in some form of music theatre.
Image: Det här är ögonblicket, 2023, with writer Heidi von Wright. Photo: Dante Thelestam.
Karoline Hjorth (b. 1980) is a Norwegian photographer, artist and writer with a journalism and tall-ship sailing background. She completed her BA Photographic Arts and MA International Journalism from the University of Westminster (London) in 2009. Hjorth's artistic practice explores the space between staged photography, documentary and text.
Her photographic work has received the Deloitte Award at the National Portrait Gallery (London) and her first book Mormormonologene (Eng. The Mormor Monologues) was published in 2011 (Forlaget Press). She is currently working on three books to be published in 2017; Eyes as Big as Plates (with Riitta Ikonen (FI)), Billett Merket (Eng. Personals, Forlaget Press) and Time is a ship that never casts anchor (Hjorth / Ikonen / Mesén). Her recent works have been exhibited at NADA Miami, Pioneer Works (NYC), Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Greenland National Museum, Norwegian National Museum (DKS) and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), amongst others.
Johnny Herbert studied music composition in U.K and Germany before studying art in Norway. He is co-founding editor of Grafters’ Quarterly, a free newspaper publication series. Johnny also works as a writer and copyeditor. He is presently a PhD candidate on the Curatorial/Knowledge research programme within the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, London.
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
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Tiril Guttorm lives in Oslo. Having graduated from the Norwegian School of Photography in Trondheim (2013), she now studies Film Arts at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Through her work Guttorm explores personal family relations using digital photography; most of her family and relatives live in the area surrounding Karasjok in north of Norway. She is currently expanding her work to include moving image as well as still photography.
Vibeke Frost Andersen recently graduated from The National Academy of The Arts in Oslo with a MFA in Art and Public Space. She also holds a BA(Hons) in Graphic Communication from University of Wales Institute Cardiff, a Norwegian post-graduate diploma in education and has completed university courses in art history, sculpture and photography in Norway and the UK. Frost Andersen has run a local design practice for several years, and has participated in art projects and - exhibitions both locally, nationally and internationally. She lectures on a variety of art-related topics, and has developed syllabi and administered new educational opportunities within the arts in Norway.
How does places acquire meaning? What is it that gives us a sense of belonging? Through her practice, Frost Andersen seeks to respond to these questions through an investigation of edge lands, voids and forgotten space. Considering economic, social and political structures governing the appearance and perception of landscape, both physical and mental, her research projects asks if it is possible to see, represent and understand some of the larger forces shaping our time. Frost Andersen works mainly in the media of photography, installation and social interference. By engaging with a site and people connected to it, the work evolves along a path of enquiry and possible outcomes.
The works are executed in a mix of low key materials and digital technology, alternating mediums by how they are related to the underlying idea and how it sits in the public sphere. By which medium is information about a specific topic usually mediated an accessed? What are the common ways of representing a specific theme, and what are the potentialities and limitations of those technologies and techniques? By working with material in this way, Frost Andersen explores the possibility of generating other perspectives with a new local public. The works follow each other, with discoveries made in one project forming the basis for the next.
In this way Frost Andersens practice connects to the overarching problem influencing most of her work: That late capitalism brings with it a sense of totalisation implacably at work everywhere, and that our lives are ruled by abstractions of such immense vastness, invisibility and complexity that they can only be understood parts at a time - if at all.
