Ayman AlAzraq

Ayman Alazraq makes films, photos, and mixed media artworks. His short film The Passport was screened at the National Museum of Cinema in Turin (Italy), the Cologne International video art Festival (Germany), among other places. His video and photography installation You From Now On Are Not Yourself was screened in venues in Spain, Norway, Denmark, and the Gaza Strip. In 2015 Alazraq’s short film Oslo Syndrome was presented in the Statens kunstutstilling in Oslo, Dubai International Film Festival, and London Palestinian film festival. In 2017, he produced the interactive installation WALL-1 in collaboration with Emanuel Sviden. WALL has been exhibited in various places, including; Podium Gallery, Oslo, 2017; Tabaklera, Spain; 2 Theaterhaus; Jena, Germany, 2018; Westfalischer Kunstvrein, Munster, Germany, 2019. Public Art Norway (KORO) permanently installed the work at the University College of Western Norway. You're going to miss me when I'm gone, artwork projection on the City Hall wall 2020. The film, Into My lungs was screened at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo in 2022.

Images 1-4: still images from the film ‘Into my lungs’, 2022.

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)

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

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.

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.

Maria Jonsson

Using sculpture, installation, and performance, Maria Jonsson's practice investigates ways in which art can create social spaces. Different strategies and methods help facilitate processes that are both artistic and interpersonal. Her art is either based on, or inspired by human relations and there social context.

Jonsson is born in Colombia, raised in Sweden, and currently based between Bergen and Oslo. She holds an MFA from the KMD, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design 2016.

Jasmine Hinks

Jasmine Hinks (1989) is a British curator and writer based in Stockholm, where she is currently completing her MA in Curating Art at Stockholm University. Hinks’ practice investigates the relations between artwork, context and audience. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, her projects unpack and re-think curatorial approaches, with a specific interest in spatial and textual framing. Ongoing research focuses on the affordances of public space – and the public sphere – within the expanded art field and in a broader social context.

In 2016, Hinks presented the curatorial project Codified Environments: Renderings of Public Space at Färgfabriken, Stockholm. The exhibition featured works by filmmaker Lucia Pagano and artist Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, and constructed an extended platform for dialogue around notions of public and private. Her curatorial approach has grown out of her experience working alongside artists in self-organised platforms in her native Scotland.

Ina Hagen

Ina Hagen (b.1989, NO) is an artist and writer based in Oslo. She holds a BFA from the National Academy of Art, Oslo (2014). Her work constantly shifts the roles of artist, curator, assistant and collaborator in dealing with the mediation of art as artistic practice.

Hagen has exhibited at: INCA, Seattle (Solo); Tidens Krav, Oslo; Kunsthall Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Podium, Oslo; Kurant Visningsrom, Tromsø; Quartier 21, Museums Quartier, Vienna, among others. She was awarded a one year studio grant at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo in 2015, as well as being artist-in-residence at BAR Project, Barcelona from March to May, 2017.

Currently she writes for the Scandinavian online art journal kunstkritikk.no, and is vice-president of the board of UKS (Young Artist’s Society). Since July 2016, Hagen has been running the not-for-profit space Louise Dany together with artist Daisuke Kosugi from their home, studio and adjacent store-front.
 

Image 1, 2: Ina Hagen, Round Robin Reveries: Gathering for the Other Magic Fountain, Barcelona (2017), Montjuïc, Barcelona. Photo: Christina Inocencio

Image 3: Apichaya Wanthiang, Ban # 1 Practice Models (2016). Two day workshop at Louise Dany, Oslo. As part of the group exhibition Roaming curated by UKS (The Young Artist’s Association). Photo: Margit Selsjord

Image 4: Sondra Perry, Resident Evil Seminar, 2016. Seminar at Louise Dany, Oslo. Image courtesy of the artist and Louise Dany, Oslo

Rodrigo Ghattas

Rodrigo Ghattas (b.1989) is a Peruvian-Palestinian artist and cultural producer. His practice travels between a range of different media; site-responsive installations, social sculpture, creative writing, daily performativity and art intervention. Artistic concerns involve perception of public space and connections between temporality and social discovery, new visions of the unfamiliar within everyday settings.

He holds a BFA in Sculpture from PUCP (Peru) and is a current MFA Art and Public Space candidate at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo, Norway. Ghattas is the founder and director of Machaqmara Center for the Arts (MQA) which he has been running since 2014. Additionally he has been working as OSLO PILOT artistic collaborator since 2016 . His work has been exhibited in Thailand, Peru, USA, Norway, China and Italy.