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.

Monika Zak

Monika Żak (b.1989) is a self-taught photographer and scientist with a special interest in visual perception. She graduated in 2015 from University in Oslo with a Master of Philosophy in Cognitive Neuroscience.

In her latest research, she explored the origins of human colour vision, attempting to investigate whether seeing colours in faces may affect emotion recognition. Through her interdisciplinary work Żak delves into the substance of perception, searching for possible explanations of what determines how we see and what we actually perceive.

Ola Wlusek

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.

Mari Amman

Mari Amman (b. 1984, Dixon Illinois, USA) is an artist working with allegory. Foundational training in dance, vocals, and piano developed into multidisciplinary work in images, installations, and performance.

In her practice, Amman applies in depth research to contemporary issues relating beauty and the sacred with technocratic and geopolitical times. Her work is collected and exhibited in the US, Latin American, EU, and Asia. She is an EIT Expert Culture Reviewer.

Find out more at:
mariamman.net
lelapin.substack.com

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.

Sam Williams

Sam Williams (b. 1985, Essex, UK) currently lives and works in London, where he studied MA Sculpture and Moving Image at the Royal College of Art.

Sam has exhibited and screened nationally and internationally at institutions including Estuary 2016: Points of Departure (alongside artists including John Akomfrah and Adam Chodzko, curated by Gareth Evans and Sue Jones) Focal Point Gallery (Southend), ONCA (Brighton), Outpost (Norwich), Baltic39 (Newcastle), Independent Dance, Sadler’s Wells, V&A, Lychee One, Tate Britain and Jerwood Space (London); Fragment Gallery (Moscow) and Korai Project Space (Cyprus).

He was awarded the RCA residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2015), the Relax Digital Commission (2016) and the Stuart Croft Foundation Award (2017). In 2018 he received an Artist Network Professional Development Bursary to organise a series of choreographic workshops for non-dance artists, and was also artist in residence at ArtHouse (Jersey) and JOYA Arte + Ecología (Almería).

As part of the audio-visual group Emptyset he has performed internationally at institutions including BOZAR (Brussels), Arnolfini, Spike Island (Bristol), La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris) Kunsthalle Zürich and Kraftwerk (Berlin).

For several years prior to her passing, Sam was a close collaborator with the seminal British choreographer Rosemary Butcher MBE. Together they showed work at The Place (London), Nottingham Contemporary and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). Sam is a founding trustee of the Rosemary Butcher Foundation and will work with her extensive archive towards a gallery retrospective.

Image 1: until they feel – ahead of them – a barrier (2016), film still

Image 2, 3: the actual structure is the material (2018) two channel film installation, film still

Image 4: here and not (2017) two channel film installation collaboration with Joe Moran, film still

Jessica Williams

Jessica Williams (b. 1986, US/NO) is an Oslo-based artist who works freely within the realms of publishing, photography, text, and new media. She holds a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City (2008) and a MFA from the National Academy of Art, Oslo (2014). Her working methods echo those of a hunter gatherer: collecting objects (both physical and metaphysical) that stand in as metaphors for intangible, shared feelings and experiences. The power of language and everyday physicality in the increasingly digital world are constant themes.

Between 2011-2014, she was the driving force behind the small, yet internationally recognized artists' publisher North, South, East, West – NSEW for short. Since 2012, she has regularly given talks and held workshops related to self-publishing and Risograph printing. In 2016, she started producing printed works under the moniker Hverdag Books and in 2018 she co-founded the Norwegian Risograph Society.

Williams' work has been exhibited widely over the past decade, notably at Good Press, Glasgow (solo); KRETS, Malmö (solo); High Tide, Philadelphia (two-person); The New Museum, New York City; Art in General, New York City; Capricious Space, Brooklyn; Open Space, Baltimore, among others. She has also had solo exhibitions in Oslo, Bergen, Barcelona, and Austin, Texas.

Piya Wanthiang

Apichaya Wanthiang (b. 1987, Bangkok, Thailand) holds a BFA from Sint-Lukas Brussel (2009) and an MFA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2012). Wanthiang constructs environments in order to explore how they influence our perceptions, behaviours and interactions. She often works with painterly installations and architecture/scenography. She has exhibited widely in Norway and currently works as an assistant professor at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art.

Image 1: Driftwood and Ghost Hunters, 2018. Landsforeningen Norske Malere, Oslo, Norway. 182cm x 321cm; canvas, acrylics, nails, wood, concrete

Image 2: While The Light Eats Away at the Colors, 2017. Stiftelsen 3,14 Bergen, Norway. Installation view: a painterly installation consisting of 8 large paintings. Measurements variable; canvas, acrylics, wood, nails

Image 3: Driftwood and Ghost Hunters, 2018. Landsforeningen Norske Malere, Oslo, Norway. Installation view and detail; canvas, acrylics, wood, concrete

Image 4: Evil Spirits Only Travel in Straight Lines, 2018. UKS (Young Artists’ Society), Oslo, Norway. Installation view showing entrance corridor, heated clay sculpture, alternating ‘breathing’ led cycles, heated clay scuptures and Spirit Festical and Mayflies video. Measurements variable; wood, drywall, foam, clay, textile, projection, heating cables

Merve Ünsal

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.

Ahmed Umar

Ahmed Umar (1988) is a Norwegian/Sudanese cross-diciplinary artist based in Oslo. He came to Norway as a politcial refugee in 2008. In 2016 he received an MFA in Medium and Material-based Arts from  the department of Ceramic Arts at the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo (KHiO).

Since his graduation, Umar has exhibited in several galleries and museums, both nationally and internationally including; FORMAT, Kunstnerforbundet, Kunstnernes Hus, Museum of Cultural History (Oslo), and Kunsthall Oslo. In 2017, Umar won the Debutante prize for his installation Hijab (Annual protection) at the Norwegian Annual Art and Craft exhibition. His work have been collected by institutions such as Drammen Museum of Art and Cultural History, and Oslo Municipality Art Collection. He also is a board member of Oslo Open art festival.

Bianca Turner

Bianca Turner (Brazil, b.1984) is a multimedia artist, holds a BA in ‘Performance Design and Practice’ from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (2011, London, UK) and a Master of Arts in “Scenography” from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (2013, London, UK).

She exhibits regularly since 2014. A special mention should be made to the individual exhibition “Memory, body as resistance”, at Airez Gallery, (Curitiba, Brazil) in 2018; Among her collective exhibitions the most relevant is at Mostra Verbo of Performance, at Vermelho Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil. She also exhibited in São Paulo at the Red Bull Station, Galeria Ponder 70, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Itaú Cultural, Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, SESI Digital Gallery, DAHAUS, among other collective exhibitions. In New York at the residency ‘Arts, Letters and Numbers’, in Leipzig at the residency ́Pilotenkueche ́.

Her research is on the subjectivity of memory: Is memory material or immaterial? Is memory embedded in objects? – A quest that doesn’t have the intention to be solved but yet to be the source for many artworks. ‘My work explores the documentation of the ephemeral. I explore the immaterially of an object or a place; the invisible, the subjective, and the unspeakable. I think of memory as built in the present rather than something from the past; and I am interested in traces and layers as textures of memory and nostalgia.’

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Tough Guy Mountain

Tough Guy Mountain is an ongoing project focusing on the glories, trials, and absurdity of late capitalism. As an artist collective of over a dozen members, TGM creates presentations of capitalist aesthetic and consumer culture. TGM creates narrative performances where the collective plays a fantastical corporation that treats abstract concepts like Art and Post-Capitalism as its clients.

Nina Torp

Through observation, research and interpretation of historical material, Nina Torp examines how our gaze creates and communicates culture and memories. A key issue in her work is how the past exists/takes place in the present time, and how it is communicated and used through history. The starting point for her projects is often a cultural artifact, an art historical subject or a cultural phenomenon. She presents projects in large installations consisting of prints on fibre-board, video, objects, photographic series and wallpaper.

Nina Torp is educated at the Royal College of Art in London, Kent Institute of Art & Design in Maidstone and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. She has exhibited in galleries and museums in Norway, UK, The Netherlands, Iceland, Japan and Germany. From 2015 until 2018 she is collaborating with archaeologists and scientists at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo where she examines mechanisms for how cultural history is written.

Magnus Tomt

Magnus Tomt (b.1994, Norway) is an artist based in Tromsø, primarily working with appropriation within an interdisciplinary practice. He is currently taking his BFA at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art.

His current work is concerned with the indecisiveness of contemporary art. He focuses on progress, value and autonomy as sites for material self-reflection and conceptual exploration. Tomt has exhibited at: Bodø Kunstforening, Bodø; Sortland Kunstforening, Sortland; Alta Kunstforening, Alta; Meieriet, Leknes among others.

Image 1. Cats Don’t Like Dead People, 2019

Image 2. I Guess I’ll See You In My Dreams, 2018

Image 3. Untitled (I Feel Alive), 2018

Image 4. Only Reactionaries Have Plans After The Revolution, 2019

Neja Tomšič

Neja Tomšič (1982) is a visual artist, poet, and writer whose interdisciplinary practice merges drawing, photography, poetry, and performance. By uncovering overlooked and often hidden stories from history, she aims to rethink dominant historical narratives, research into particularities, and create situations where new understandings of the present can be formed. She approaches histories as maps of starting points and links. Performative elements in her projects explore possible projections of history into the subjective present of individual visitors.

Her project Tea for Five: Opium Clippers, a performative essay in the form of a Chinese tea ceremony, has toured 11 countries and was performed more than 55 times. Her artist book Opium Clippers was awarded as best Slovenian artist book in 2017/2018 and the best book design in the category Book as Object at the Slovenian Book Fair. She is a member a Nonument Group, an art collective that maps, archives and intervenes in forgotten, abandoned or demolished 20th century monuments, public spaces and buildings, that have undergone a change in meaning.

Neja also works as a curator and producer and is a co-founder of MoTA (Museum of Transitory Art), a Ljubljana-based research and production platform devoted to transitory art. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Image 1: Tea for Five: Opium Clippers, Glej Theatre, September 2018, photo: Jaka Babnik

Image 2: Tea for Five: Opium Clippers, Azores Fringe Festival, Pico Island, July 2018, photo: Neja Tomšič

Image 3: Opium Clippers artist book, photo: Jaka Babnik

Image 4: Nonument Group: From Nowhere to Noplace, The Pioneer Railway, May 2019, photo DK

Michele Tocca

Rooted in a lineage of painters of phenomena and things, itinerant sketchers and landscapists, Michele Tocca’s depictions elicit questions on the direct relationship between painting and the physical world with all the paradoxes implied in sur-le-vif perceptive, ruminative and imaginative dynamics.

Born in 1983 (Subiaco, Rome), Tocca is based in Rome, Italy. He holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and independent spaces, among which: 1/9unosunove gallery, Rome (2018); Villa Vertua Masolo, Nova Milanese (2018); Francesco Pantaleone Gallery, Palermo (2015); Musei di Villa Torlonia, Rome (2015); Fuoricampo Gallery, Siena-Bruxelles (2015-2014); FLAG ART Foundation, New York (2014); Studiolo Project, Milan (2014); Museo del Paesaggio, Verbania Pallanza, (2013); MARCA, Catanzaro (2011); CIAC, Genazzano, Rome (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Moscow (2010); the Prague Biennale, Prague (2009); Otto Zoo Gallery Milan (2008).

Image 1: In Lorenzetti's (the turret under storm), 2014, oil on canvas, 40x35 cm

Image 2: De Valenciennes's Pollen, 2017, oil on canvas, 100x85 cm.Photo: Sebastiano Luciano

Image 3: Early dripping (Pastificio Cerere), 2018, oil on canvas, 71x65 cm. Photo: Sebastiano Luciano

Image 4: Belvedere (Lojacono through sunglasses), 2018, oil on canvas, 45x20 cm. Photo: Sebastiano Luciano

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)