Johanna Zanon

Johanna Zanon (b. 1988, FR) is a curator, researcher, and art concierge currently based in Oslo. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Oslo (2017), a graduate diploma from École Nationale des Chartes in Paris (2012), and an MA in Art History from École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (2011).

Her research interests include among others fashion production, labor, and consumption. She has published a range of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters (Manchester University Press, Dress, Apparence(s), and LHA). In 2019, she co-organized the fashion labour conference at OsloMet. In 2019, she curated a film cycle on the depiction of the French fashion industry from the early twentieth century. As an art concierge at Clarion Hotel Oslo, she has curated the After 'After Munch' programme (2019-2020).

Her latest curatorial project entitled As Handsome As the Chance Encounter will be on display at RAM Galleri in Oslo in February-March 2020. During the residency at Praksis, she would like to explore the link between fashion production and fashion consumption in late capitalist society.

Image 1: 'The "Sleeping Beauties" of Haute Couture: Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Madeleine Vionnet,' PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2017. Image: Gustave Doré's sixth engraving for Charles Perrault, La Belle au Bois Dormant / Gallica, Public Domain, BNF.

Image 2: Screenshot of the 'Labor in the Creative Industries: The Case of Fashion' conference website, co-organized by Johanna Zanon, at OsloMet on June 11-12, 2019 / Johanna Zanon.

Image 3: Screenshot of the 'Brodeuses' film, screened at Cinemateket i Oslo as part of 'Siste skrik fra Paris: Fransk mote på film,' curated by Johanna Zanon / Cinemateket i Oslo.

Image 4: After 'After Munch', curated by Johanna Zanon for Clarion Hotel Oslo / Clarion Hotel Oslo.

Maria Wang Kvalheim

Maria Wang Kvalheim (NO) works within the field of acoustic scenography. She holds a BA from the Norwegian theater academy. Her work seeks to draw out the sound/acoustic potential of architectural space. She is interested in the relationship between movement and space, and how sensorial work can affect the movement of an audience.

Maria works with Dresden based theater network, fachbetrieb rita grechen. During 2020 she has initiated a online writing circle where ownership of material is shared, and texts are "recylcled" other group members. This project began as a workshop alongside fachbetrieb rita grechen's former work Piece of silence.

Asya Volodina

Asya Volodina is a writer, games designer and artist based in Moscow. Using the medium of larp (live action role play) she challenges the audience to become a part, participant and co-author for her artworks.

Asya sees larps as an experience of a transgressive glissade to unusual reality register. It ives a possibility to talk about post humanity and trans humanity (“1597 seconds”, “Justice Against The Grain”, “Deus Ex Machina”, “Wir. Malevich”, “Escritoires”), time (“Low Season”, “Happy Birthday, Alice!”, “Evening in the Museum”), structure of communities and societies (“The Cost of Living”, “Deus Ex Machina”) in the language of personal experience and fictional situations.

Asya’s larps have been presented in Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), Khodynka Gallery (Moscow), Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm), Bard Graduate Center (New York), Kampnagel Theatre (Hamburg), Live Action Theatre (Moscow). She also collaborated with V-A-C foundation and works with Arseny Zhilyaev.

Image 1: “Justice Against The Grain” by Asya Volodina in collaboration with Sarah Culman, Yury Kviatkovsky, V-A-C foundation, Moscow, 2019

Image 2: “Escritoires” by Asya Volodina, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020

Image 3: “Happy Birthday, Alice!” by Asya Volodina, Live Action Theatre, Moscow, 2020

Geraldine Vanspauwen

Geraldine Vanspauwen recently graduated in art history and philosophy at the universities of Brussels, Oslo and Ghent. She has written on the topics of visualising sound, political philosophy, religion, poetry and language and is currently curating poetic cahiers and evenings as part of the open collective and underground publishing house BRAAK. Together, they believe in the power and use of the written and spoken word, and aim to create a contemporary platform for poetry and thought.

Her current research interests include the poetics of noise and sound as both materiality and magic, interconnecting nature, society and the sacred. She is writing and working on music around Brussels.

Gustavo Valdivia

For almost a decade anthropologist Gustavo Valdivia (PE) has been ethnographically exploring the worlds that are emerging in the high Andes of Peru as the Anthropocene unfolds. His work is principally based in the Quelccaya, the largest tropical glacier on the planet, and articulates an eclectic body of theory, methods, and practices to provide an ethnographically grounded account of those significative moments in which Nature challenges human comprehension and control.

This project, which he started as a Ph.D. student at the Anthropology Department at The Johns Hopkins University, has led him to carry out long-term fieldwork among indigenous alpaca herders, collaborate as a field assistant in 5 scientific expeditions to obtain ice cores from the Quelccaya’s summit, work as a field producer for the documentary BBC series Frozen Planet, and participate as a chapter scientist in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). In 2014, together with Tomás Tello –an experimental musician living in Portugal— he founded the Sonic Melting collective to start producing a set of field recordings of the ice of the Quelccaya as it melts. These recordings offer a sonic narration of Valdivia’s encounter with the Quelccaya that seeks to present an alternative approach to the complexity of the Anthropocene: namely, one which is not limited by visuality.

His work on sound includes collaborations with various sound artists including Stuart Hyatt, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Gazelle Twin, and Mary Lattimore, and has been featured in Motherboard – Vice, The Wire Magazine, GlacierHub, and other media.

Anaclara Talento

Anaclara Talento is an visual artist, researcher, teacher. She has a bachelor and Master of Arts – Plastic and Visual Arts (Uruguayan University of the Republic – UdelaR. National School of Fine Arts Institute – IENBA, 2007 – 2013) and a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) (Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU. Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts – KiT, 2017 – 2019). Talento is a Member of Uruguay’s Contemporary Art Foundation (FAC) since 2007, the Artistic Research Society (SAR) since 2017, Norske Billedkunstnere since 2018 and Unge Kunstneres Samfund since 2019. 

Talento’s work revolves around five main projects: EMH: An Essay on Motherland History (2009 – 2015), Pink Mist (2013 – 2015), Letters to Sebastian, a memory rehearsal: (re) script – (re) stage – (re) enact (2014 – 2021), Love in another language (2019 – 2022) and the Latin American Office of Contemporary Art and Political Subversion (OLAC SP) (2020 – 2025).

Her work is part of private collections in Argentina, Norway, the USA, and Uruguay. She has exhibited individually for the Spanish Cultural Center (CCE Montevideo, Uruguay), at the Engelman – Ost Collection (Montevideo, Uruguay), at Galleri KiT (Trondheim, Norway) and at Galleri Blunk (Trondheim, Norway), and has participated in collective shows in Uruguay, Latin America, Norway, Germany, Argentina, France, USA, Spain, among others.

She has published a book titled Niebla Rosada (Pink Mist), a collection of narratives. (First edition: November 2013, Gatoblanco publishing house) and several papers and thesis in Uruguay and Norway. Talento lives and works in Trondheim, Norway.

Image 1: Emotions without limit vol 1, audio set recorded with Google Translator / female voice in Spanish. Sent through WhatsApp to a random database. Montevideo, Uruguay (2019)

Image 2: The conquest of you, Installation / site-specific, Trondheim Kunstmuseum Gråmølna, Trondheim, Norway (2019)

Image 3: The things that were and the things that were almost, Performatic action, shown at Performance Fest, Galleri KiT, Trondheim, Norway (2017). Curated by Chris Hansen (Norway). Shown at Performance Cycle, CME Subte, Uruguay (2018). Curated by Rulfo Alvarez (Uruguay). Second Acquisition Prize at 49 Montevideo Visual Arts Award, CME Subte, Uruguay (2019). Jury: Valeria González (Argentina), Fernando Gaspar (Chile) and Enrique Badaró (Uruguay)

Image 4: Nice, clever and devastating, Installation / site-specific, shown at Switch, Galleri KiT, Trondheim, Norway (2018)

Djibril Sall

Djibril Sall (b. 1994) is a performer, choreographer, and writer based in New York City and Berlin. Originally born in Dakar, Senegal and emigrating to Memphis, TN at five years old, their work is informed by their life as a first-generation queer migrant and their experience with adolescent cancer. Even after they started life in America, West Africa never left their household; the steaming spices of mafé, Islam, and Pulaar ensured that they were strongly exposed to Senegalese sensibilities. However, being black in America has a way of complicating identities so that new, divergent cultures are formed in perpetually discordant rhythms. Through their work, Djibril hopes to complicate the idea of a singular narrative that is prescribed to the African diaspora. 

They received their BA in Dance from Wesleyan University with a focus on Performance Studies, Queer Studies, and Critical Race Studies. They are an avid student on the production of trauma and the habits that facilitate its continued existence as intergenerational trauma. At the moment they are concerned with how the path to utopia for many communities living on the margins is rooted in closing deep wounds and navigating the ruptures that arise in the process of healing these traumas. The access word into their current project is “chemotherapy,” a rumination about understanding at a young age that one day they will die and how this knowledge has affected their life in terms of priorities and life philosophy.

They have worked with organizations serving the needs of underrepresented communities such as Girls Inc. of NYC and BUFU (By Us For Us). Additionally, they have presented talks at The New School in New York City, Sophiensaele in Berlin, and Dansens Hus in Oslo. In 2019, they received the danceWEB Scholarship in Vienna.

Elly Stormer Vadseth

Elly Stormer Vadseth (USA/NO, b 1993) is a multi-media artist, researcher and educator currently based on a peninsula in the Oslo Fjord and in Boston, USA. Employing embodied research methods and technology, she makes work that seek to imagine, speculatively establish and animate connections within human and more than human ecology(s). Rooted in the body, she works with a range of media including performance, contemporary dance, video, installation, sound and photography. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.  

Recent Exhibitions/ screenings/Projects include Spectra festival ( 2019 SCT), Laboratory For Aesthetics and Ecology, M/Others and Future Humans, (2019-, DK), Henie Onstad Contemporary Art Center (2019, NO), Factory Light, (2019, NO), Difrazioni (2019,IT), Adelson Gallery, Boston (2019,USA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019, USA), Mountain Time Arts, Bozeman Montana ( 2018) and Open Out Festival in Tromsø (2018,NO). In 2018/2019 she was awarded a Tufts Institute on the Environment Research Fellowship from Tufts University and a Postgraduate Teaching Fellowship in Media Arts at School of the Museum of Fine Arts. 

Stormer Vadseth participated in Residency 17, Climata developed with Lasse-Marc Riek and the Goethe Institut.

Laura Stinger

Laura Stinger works in the realm of research, sculpture, video and performance. Their work stages open structures for exploring relational ethics, queer embodiment, and challenging notions of fixed identities within capitalism. In their most recent project, Entheos Cul-De-Sac, sculpture "gardens" and a performance score were used to model non-transactional object-human interactions and self-organizing communities in nature, creating rhizomatic narrative structures.

Laura has presented work at Dixon Place (NYC); PS122 (NYC); New Museum (NYC); Pieter Space (Los Angeles); and Coaxial Gallery (Los Angeles) among others.

Image 1, Still from Lines Lining, a cable access show (2019) 

Image 2, Performance documentation of wrist modification from Doula for the Darkness, Los Angeles (2019) 

Image 3, Members (2019) glazed ceramic

Image 4, Still from live web performance, unnatural history, Los Angeles (2016)

Ina Maria Shikongo

Ina-Maria Shikongo was born in Kalulu Angola and grew up in the former GDR until 1990.  She attended primary school and high school in Windhoek. She completed a 3 year degree course in Fashion Design in France at Lycée Sévigné de Tourcoing in 2005.

Since her return in 2005, she has developed a project called Fusion, where she teaches basic introduction to fashion design at grass roots level around Namibia. There is a need for more culturally diverse programs throughout Namibia. By training the grassroots on design methods, one could help establish a Namibian Cultural Identity.

Her interest in Permaculture started in 2010 and reemerged in 2015, with the creation of Eloolo Permaculture Initiative, together with Donovan Wagner and Stephan Eins. A permaculture system was created at the Van Ryhn Primary School and in 2017 they registered Eloolo Permaculture Initiative as an NGO.

Today Eloolo is working in partnership with the World Future Council and the City of Windhoek at Farm Okukukuna in implementing a community garden with local trainees from Goreagab extension 3.

Eloolo and Tosco have created Clean Travel; a carbon offsetting programme where trees get planted at schools and shelters around Windhoek.

Shikongo’s participation in Live or Buy is supported by The National Arts Council of Namibia.

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.

Job Sánchez

Job Sánchez is an artist from Mexico City who is presently without a fixed address. His post-disciplinary practice addresses power structures. As a consequence of being a migrant, his current work inclines towards collaboration with communities to activate cultural exchange. 

In reaction to a lack of exhibition spaces, he is coordinating sudden ambitions, an online project which operates as an exhibition platform for emerging artists.

 www.suddenambitions.com

Alexandra Neuman

Alexandra Neuman is an interdisciplinary reptile currently based in San Diego, California. Drawing on elements from new materialism and multi-species feminism, her work focuses on perforating the identity of "human" by reshuffling naturalized systems of classification.

She received a BFA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. She is a past participant of the Arteles Residency in Haukijarvi, Finland and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin. Her films have shown at Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image, and the Eyeslicer. She is a Webby Award Honoree as well as the recent recipient of the Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) grant at Calit2. 

Mia Melvær

Mia Melvær (b. 1988, NO) is a visual artist based between Belgium and Norway. She holds a BA in design from Design Academy Eindhoven (2012). Her work oscillates between sculpture and archival research, the personal and the collective.

Melvær has exhibited at Bozar, Brussel; Pianofabriek, Brussel; esc Medien Kunst Labor, Graz; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Hönnunarmiðstöð Íslands, Reykjavik, among others. She is a co-founder of the feminist collective Just for the Record, a permanent contributor to Mothers & Daughters – a lesbian and trans bar, and has written for a number of publications.

Sarah Kazmi

Sarah Kazmi (b.1990 Karachi) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and researcher. Through the lens of food as an artistic medium, she uses anthropological and participatory action research (PAR) to disseminate her practice, her double life between occupations of two, bartender/artist; investigating socio-political change within personal and community-based rituals. Her practice incorporates texts, audio, live readings, installations and image-based works to explore circulation processes of food as strategy for communication and knowledge production, its significance in our everyday life, beyond a consumption culture. Her most recent and ongoing work O.K.R.A (Oslo Kitchen Radio Archive) is a long-term research-based duo project with landscape architect Miles Hamaker; using audio-visual methods to document the increasing gentrification and the inevitable encroachment on the existing communities of central east Oslo.

Kazmi recently graduated with an MFA in Art and Public Space at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She has been selected as a fellow at RAW Académie Session 8 entitled Tour de Table. She has worked as a research trainee for HUMAN Documentary Film Festival 2020 and has also participated at Food Art Film Festival at the Jan Van Eyck Academie. She lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

Kazmi participated in Residency 17, Climata, which was developed with Lasse-Marc Riek and the Goethe Institut.

Sarah Jury

Sarah Jury is a writer, games designer and curator based in London. Sarah has edited publications and co-curated events on feminist digital practices at ICA, the Barbican and Res, London. Sarah has written live action role plays that rethink societal structures either directly, or in abstract non-verbal form for Science Gallery London, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, Tate Exchange, Liverpool and [Space], London and has lectured on themes of role-play and participatory practice at Birkbeck, London and Yale, USA. Sarah is part of Keep it Complex, a feminist collective that confronts political issues through creative ideas and action.

Image credit: 'Challenging Structures' Live action role play by Sarah Jury and Bez Shahriari for Science Gallery London, Feb 2020. Illustration by Rachel Sale. 

Bianca Hlywa

Bianca Hlywa (CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK. She uses various materials (especially SCOBY-Symbiotic Culture Of Bacterial Yeast) to discuss steadfast distinctions presented within culture: between life and non-life, the synthetic and organic, and the good and bad. 

Bianca holds an MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University. She was awarded a second place prize from a juried exhibition at the Barbican Arts Group Trust in London (2018), and recognised as an artist with Exceptional Talent from the Arts Council for a UK Visa in 2019. Bianca looks forward to upcoming solo shows at Verticale Arts Centre in Quebec (2020) and LOA Gallery in London (2020).  

Harriet Foyster

Harriet Foyster (b. 1992, UK) is an artist and writer based in Amsterdam, NL. She gained her BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2015, where she was also the recipient of the Acme Studio Award. She received her MA in Critical Studies at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, in 2019.

Harriet’s practice is strongly rooted in research revolving broadly around ways that material circumstance and ideology converge to construct, reinforce and perpetuate behavioural patterns that strengthen the neoliberal agenda, and how the logics of private property are central to contemporary subjectivity production.

Her works and texts have been shared at PEER, London; fanfare; Amsterdam, Jupiter Woods, London; De Appel, Amsterdam; the 26th Biennial of Design, Ljubljana, and Ambit Magazine, among others.

Angelica Falkeling

Angelica Falkeling lives and works in Rotterdam, NL. They graduated with a BFA from Malmö Art Academy and the International Academy of Art Palestine in 2014 and with an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute in 2017. They received the Swedish Art Grants Committee one year working grant in 2017 and the Mondriaan Fonds Stipend for Emerging Artists in 2018. They make site-specific installations and work with exhibition formats that include live performance, textile, sculpture, moving image, and text-based works. They are concerned about the economic and ecological aspects of artistic production from a queer, feminist, and intersectional point of view. In the scale of the domestic, their persona often appears as a queer instigator, tailor, and storyteller who experiment with different textile craft techniques passed on through cross-generational dialogues, humor and geological time. Their work departs from and within the body. They respond to sites via material recycling and social relations. In their collaborative work, they think through emotional adaptation in relation to the social. They are also trained as a seamstress and regularly create costume designs and take on sewing commissions for other artists such as; Rana Hamadeh, Katherine MacBride, Pilar Mata Dupont, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Katarina Zdjelar.

They currently working on a chapter based exhibition together with Selma Sjöstedt and Sara Lindeborg at Signal | center for contemporary art in Malmö. Their work has recently been part of The Hoodie at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Emotional Channel at Rib in Rotterdam, OC, L.A The Car Show: Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung a self-organized RV touring exhibition in California, USA, A tip’s felt dance at Available & The Rat in Rotterdam, Gift Economy at Pracownia Portretu Gallery in Łódź, Poland, tongue break inhaling at CCA Glasgow, Scotland, and Teaser, Tormentors, and the Infinite Dog at CAC Brétigny in Paris, France. Since 2018 they are also one of the facilitators of the queer art and community space Tender Center Rotterdam.

Falkeling’s participation in the residency Live or Buy is supported by CBK (Center for Visual Art) Rotterdam.

alex cruse

alex cruse is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Since 2016 she has worked as gallery curator within Artists' Television Access, which received an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts grant in 2019.

With Kevin CK Lo, cruse performs as DROUGHT SPA, a multimedia and performance vehicle for technocapitalist critique. They have performed across the U.S. and world. cruse is the author of CONTRAVERSE (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017) and ZERO ENERGY EXPERIMENTAL PILE (Compline, 2020). Other writing may be found in Social Text, ARMED CELL, AMERARCANA, SFMOMA Open Space, CLOG Journal, bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, Elderly, Tripwire (forthcoming), and elsewhere.

alexcruse.xyz
vimeo.com/alexcruse