Mallika Roy

Mallika Roy (b. 1991, Chicago, USA) is a diasporic artist who facilitates open sites of creative education. Her guiding belief is that alternative communications for, amongst, and on behalf of dispossessed and alienated peoples can serve to disrupt and re-imagine the political economy. She synthesizes critical theory, art, ethnographies, and other research and presents them in publicly accessible forms like websites, graphic design, fashion and adornment, curriculum, workshops, and social media.

Mallika’s framework for understanding social change has been primarily informed by her BA in International Studies and Urban Studies from the University of Michigan, the Center for Political Education’s community course on Marxist thought, Movement Generation’s A Just Transition Zine, and her upbringing in Eastern philosophy. Her work is constantly challenged and reinvigorated by the youth she has partnered with in Detroit and San Francisco since 2012.

Aleyda Rocha

Based in Mexico, Aleyda Rocha's practice is focuses on data ethnography, social impact design and educational technology. She is interested in how to understand, think about, and interact with data - particularly, how we can make data experiences that are aesthetic, tangible and consider all of our senses.

Rocha graduated from Monterrey Center for Higher Learning of Design’s Digital Art Program. She currently researching how safety policies and violent events influence gender identity and garment in Mexico. The project traces how, from the post-revolution war, the identity of Mexican men have been dictated by the constant state of ferocity.

She is a founding member of RevoltosasMX – a non-profit dedicated to generate speeches and narratives that challenge the existing power dynamics at workplace in order to push forward gender equality in Mexico.

Identifying as a curious wanderer, Rocha has navigated industries including technology, advertising and public sector innovation. She spent two years as Creative Program Manager at Google, developing groundbreaking digital projects in Latin America with the goal of leveraging the power of technology for both users and brands.

Catriona Robertson

Catriona Robertson is a sculptor based in London. She holds a BAFA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins, London (2010) and forthcoming MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (2019). Catriona also works as a Technician in 3D fabrication at Central Saint Martins, London teaching students at Foundation, BA and MA level.

The making and un-making process is an integral part of her sculpture, working with constructive materials and some found objects to create sculptural assemblages that have an architectural resemblance with a raw sense of formation. Drawing from the in-between moment that may be overlooked at first glance, her work evokes performativity in a solid form; the potential state in which there is an element of chance or possible destruction. Her sculptures create an opposition of material and surface – forming tension and fragility, whilst questioning the permanence of the material against traditional sculptural practices.

Catriona was recently artist-in-residence at the Merz Barn, Elterwater, UK and co-ordinated a summer residency programme for Royal College of Art Students in July 2018. In 2015 she was awarded the REFRESH grant by Central Saint Martins for an artist residency in Onishi, Japan at Shiro Oni Studio, as well as artist-in-residence at Liebig 12, Berlin from December 2011-February 2012.

Catriona has exhibited at: the Merz Barn, Elterwater, England, (July 2018), the Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art Kensington, London, (June 2018), ‘WIP Show’ at the Sculpture Building, Royal College of Art, Battersea, London (January 2018), and at the Futuro House, SafeHouse London (February 2016) and Central Saint Martins, Kings Cross London (January 2016). As well as international exhibitions at the Galeri Mejan, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm (August 2016), the Futuro House, exhibition during artist residency in Onishi, Shiro Oni studios Gunma prefecture at the civic Centre, Onishi, Japan (July-August 2015) and was further selected for the ‘Kanna Art Festival’ selected Shiro Oni artists, Fujioka Gunma prefecture, Japan (September 2015).

Image 1. Connected – 2016. Exhibition at SafeHouse, Peckham, London.

Image 2. Un-Monument 2018 , Royal College of Art Battersea, London. Concrete, steel, resin, polyurethane, plywood, plaster, acrylic.  50 x 70 x 410 cm.

Image 3. Moulded 2017, Concrete, plaster, thistle, plywood. 78 x 42 x 30 cm.

Image 4. Merzsaüle 2018, Merz Barn Elterwater, Langdale England. On show until October 2018.  Concrete, slate, slate clay, plaster, plywood, found objects (steel, newspaper, rope, card, plastics).

Belić, Westerlund and Müller

Working collectivly Belić, Westerlund and Müller work with structures of relationships and varying forms of acts of imitation. They develop performative works through a process of learning from internet sources. 

Maria Gordana Belić received her BA in Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway and her MA degree in Fine Arts from Valand Academy of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her practice uses inter-biographical stories, meetings or events which become magnetic mantras, where companions, nervous technique or collaborations modify the narrative. Things are repeated, looped and multiplied through various formats. She is fascinated by structures around support and what it means to struggle with personal problems in pubic.

Per Westerlund works with animation depicting sensational bliss using Windows Paint. While the angular shapes of the medium resist painterliness he uses the movement of the images and coloring to create impassioned effects. Recurring motives include naked skin, wind and sun light, and images sometimes paraphrase stereotypes from the romantic era. The rhythmic feature of the animations has recently led him to work with music videos. He graduated from Oslo Academy of Fine Art in 2013.

Daniela Müller studied Media Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts and Fine Arts at the Academy of the Arts in Oslo, Norway, completing her MA in Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts in 2013. From 2012-15 she curated the ad-hoc gallery “One Night Only Zurich”. Müller's practice employs acts of appropriation to examine the purposeful conditions of language. She copies, loops and recontextualises mundane material, such as commercial signs, leaked pictures, spam mails and prophecies, leading toe moving images, installations and collaborations.

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy

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.

www.larryachiampong.co.uk

www.davidblandy.co.uk

Vika Adutova

Vika Adutova's artistic practice is rooted in the research of language and perception. Vika uses video, sound, drawing, and sculpture, working primarily with the subject of the affect of time on human and non-human life, and language as the tool of description.

Born in Tashkent and previously based in New York, Adutova is currently living and studying in Oslo, and is an MFA candidate from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts due to graduate in 2018.

Eva Funk

Eva Funk is an Austrian artist and writer based in Berlin. She was educated at the Berlin University of the Arts and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her recent practice makes use of repetitive motifs across different contexts, building up large scale installations with performative interventions in the investigation of relationships between objects, language and spirit often in relation to notions of failure.

Funk works with physical bodies (of people and objects), as well as writing. She has self-published artist writings under rotato press, and is interested in the book as an alternative to the exhibition. Funk has exhibited and performed in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland and Canada.

Araiz Mesanza

Araiz Mesanza is an artist and illustrator whose work is mainly developed through drawings. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from the Basque University (Bilbao, Spain) and specialized in illustration at Escola Massana (Barcelona, Spain).

Mesanza has worked as a freelance illustrator since 2009 and in 2011 she co-founded Ediciones Armadillo, an artist collective and publishing outlet releasing an annual collaborative illustration fanzine and other projects. Having relocated to Oslo in autumn of 2016 (currently working from VORTA atelier at Middelalderparken), Mesanza's recent work has largely focused on producing "introspective landscapes" that explore her relationship with her new surroundings.

Tyler Matthew Oyer

Called an "interdisciplinary gospel immortalist" by Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Tyler Matthew Oyer is an artist, writer, organizer, and educator based in Los Angeles. By researching diverse modalities of activism (ACT UP, queer theatre, Brechtian theatre, surrealism, underground cabaret, and punk) his performance works generate an intergenerational dialogue around politics, seeking new ways of articulating the connection between various systems of oppression from the past to the present in an attempt to grapple with our collective political future.

Oyer has performed at MoMA PS1, REDCAT, The Getty Museum, dOCUMENTA (13), Hammer Museum, Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, Munch Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach, Bergen Kunstall, Rogaland Kunstsenter, The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, High Desert Test Sites, Highways Performance Space, Human Resources LA, Silencio Paris, MIX NYC, and the Orange County Museum of Art. He has written works of performance including CALLING ALL DIVAS, GONE FOR GOLD, Shimmy Shake Earthquake, La Bola Negra, and 100 Years of Noise: Beyoncé is ready to receive you now. Oyer is the founder of tir journal, an online platform for queer, feminist, and underrepresented voices. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2012 and has offered workshops and lectures at CalArts, Bard College, Occidental College, University of Southern California Santa Barbara, Penn State University, Southern Exposure, and Grand Central Art Center. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson is an American artist working with painting, video, sculpture and photography. These practices are thematically linked by an interest in animist objects and the way images shape desire. His references range from the commercial still-life to science fiction, often utilizing small assemblages or dioramas as points of departure.

Born in Ojai, CA., he attended the University of Arizona as an undergraduate, and received his MFA from New York University. His work has been exhibited in New York as well as Antwerp, Baltimore, Berlin, Melbourne, and Seoul. He has participated in residency programs in Florida, New York, Nebraska, and Michigan.

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. 

Kristin Nango

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.

Magnus Myrtveit

Magnus Myrtveit studied BA Fine Art at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art, his current work searches for deeper meaning in the act of browsing the internet and juxtaposes “cutting edge” technology with primitive techniques of making art in the consideration of ideas of impermanence in technology.

Matthew Musgrave

Matthew Musgrave (b. 1985 UK) lives and works in London, is interested in a kind of thinking through painting, how painting has a tendency to figure and to abstract, how it meanders and wanders, continually merges the past into the present on and on. Things often begin with something close to hand, a chair, limb, some grass or foliage, a tree, window, weather, something seen or remembered, moving paint around until something begins to make some sort of sense.

He studied painting at the Royal College of Art (2011) and Chelsea College of Art (2008). Exhibitions include: The Value of Liveliness, White Crypt, London (2018); Pink Density, Clovis XV, Brussels (2016), Only with a light touch will you write well, freely and fast, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2015) & Supplement, London (2016); All the best/yours sincerely, Galeria Alegria, Madrid (2016); To Paint a Line, Maki Fine Arts, Tokyo (2015); Around, Supplement, London, (2014); Head to Head, Standpoint, London (2014); Paintings, Supplement, London (2012); The Milkplus Bar, Josh Liley Gallery, London, (2010); The Library of Babel, Zabludowicz Collection, London, (2010); Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Gallery, London (2009).

Image 1: 'Setting Out', 2016, Oil on linen, 40.5x35.5cm

Image 2: 'The Eyes Have It' installation shot, 2016, 53 Beck Road, London

Image 3: 'Of a Bush', 2012, Oil on linen, 25x20cm

Image 4: 'Around' installation shot, 2014, Supplement Gallery, London

Ebba Moi

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

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.

Patrick McElnea

Patrick McElnea (b. 1981) is based in Los Angeles, California. His work uses pigment, pixilation, and phrasing to visualize imaginations that underpin culture. Recent photographs forage through fantasies of selfhood, inheritance, and flesh. Pictures are made in pairs; the same scene fabricated in different materials, like short stories told in separate languages. McElnea’s video projects similarly explore how images are collaboratively made or misinterpreted under institutional care such as preventative medicine, primary education, and art therapy. He has had solo exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset Projects in New York, and Daniel Weinburg Gallery in Los Angeles. He earned his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2008 and his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2004.

Image 1: Alone In the Vault, 13 x 22.5 inches, archival pigment print, 2019
Image 2: Older Brother, 19 x 26.5 inches, archival pigment print, 2018
Image 3: His Brother, 25 x 36 inches, archival pigment print, 2018

Image 4: Translantic, 63 x 95 inches, archival pigment print, 2018

Image 5: Jan's Shorts, 15 x 21.5 inches, archival pigment print, 2018

Anna Sofie Mathiasen

Anna Sofie Mathiasen (b. 1995, Copenhagen) lives and works in Oslo. She holds a BFA from the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo (2018), where she will complete her master studies in 2020. Working with mixed media installations, writing, analogue and digital, photography, film and animation, she investigates and mediates archives, which she collects and assembles from her surroundings and personal sphere.

By processing and presenting the material continuously using a variety of methods Mathiasenn produces images and narratives that explore different ideas and relations she has about, and with, the material. Mathiasen has exhibited at RAM Galleri, Akershus Kunstsenter, and Akademirommet.

Image 1, 2: Exhibition at RAM Galleri; Vi mødes i mørket og giver hånd, 2018.
Photos by Istvan Virag

Image 3, 4: Stills from film Excavation, 2018. Cinematographer Vegard Landsverk

Eliza Naranjo Morse

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

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).

www.Ragna.no