Studio-program artists 2020-2021

Working with mixed media installations, writing, photography, collage, film and animation, Mathiasen collects, investigates and mediates material and stories from the past to create new narratives and fictions around it through different forms of montage. She works with questions such as: how to reactivate material and how to reanimate it? Mathiasen has previously exhibited at Guttormgaards Arkiv, RAM Galleri and Sol (DK).

By activating myths, science fiction and horror tropes, the works of Camilla Edström Ödemark reveal subconscious boundaries between (her own) identity and that which is ascribed alien. A looming instability reflects itself as a rupture and a displacement of the self. As a consequence, her practice, including text, video, installation and sculpture, exists in a place where the terms of identity oscillate between definition and total resolution.

Damla Kilickiran is a visual artist living in Oslo. Influenced by cosmologies and narratives drawn from spiritual traditions, her work meditates on themes related to changing states of mind, as a method of approaching the body's own image production and source of knowledge. Most often, the mind is guided by automatism as a manifestation of an ignorant, a prominent state that transcends language.

Emilie de Rohan Birkeland (b. 1991, Oslo) works with installation, performance and video in an associative manner, piecing together concrete experiences, references and objects often related to the domestic. She holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2020). One of four organising the artist-run space Destiny’s in Oslo, she is also a member of Rose Hammer, an artist persona and agitprop theatre group.

Fanny (FfFFtffFffaaNNNnEeey IiiiiIiIIiiSss PArrrååånanncuueddd ”FUNNYyy” Inn ennGlissjjjj) Fermelin (b.1994) is an artist who works with whoopee cushions, (comic)strip(tease) and The Great Death of the Soul, while always on the border between resistance and surrender. Fermelin is, together with Lasse Berlok, the leading figure of the arte banale-movement.

Kaare Ruud work interdisciplinary with sculpture, installation, performance and text. He is particularly interested in illuminating perceptions of objects and environments in collision or in meeting with the body. He is interested in semi-banal concepts such as time, nostalgia and language (accessibility). He works with these notions through recontexualising found objects that have a strong connection to the past, yet the objects keep coming back into the spotlight as «trendy», such as the Norwegian-made Respatex-serie. The intention for this object was for it to look like designer furniture, whilst being affordable for the working class. He uses the Respatex-serie as an example of consumer design with tendencies to structural discrimination, and with that he intends to question what appropriation of class identity means. He works with questions such as this through abstracting found objects that have a nostalgic or personal value. In his artistic practice he wishes to give a tongue to objects which have no body. To work autobiographically opens a portal in which he uses to depict different sociopolitical structures through poetry and visual tools.

Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b.1988, Hamburg) works within a broad spectrum of medias like performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. Driven by curiosity and a desire for learning new skills through tacit knowledge, he finds his tools and expression in a space created by an overlapping of life, play and art. These skills range from using pre-industrial and labour intensive techniques for processing fibre for textiles, foraging medicinal wild growing plants and extracting scent and dyes from natural sources. Wenzel looks at how technological development, science and spiritual impulses take part in shaping our perceptions of nature, norms and identity. He enters characters and roles and de-fragments materials, narratives and experiences to piece them together in a new context. By accessing often forgotten techniques and ancient traditions, as well as giving space for playfulness in his work, Wenzel aims to challenge personal, environmental and normative structures in a western urban society.

Viktor Pedersen works interdisciplinary with performance, text, video, sound and music. In his artistic practice, he tries to approach non-human intelligence to investigate how humans relate to nature. His work often tells narratives where Pedersen apply an animistic worldview in order to personify other organisms, or take on roles as hybrid beings. These perspectives can be an alien that comes from another dimension, a mushroom that uses him as a medium, or the diversity of bacteria in the body. By trying to approach these perspectives, Pedersen want to play with the West's human-centric picture of reality, whilst attempting to understand nature's intrinsic value.