Studio artists 2021-2022

Eirik Melstrøm (b. 1987) works with sound, music, installation and text. He focused on the death of the inner voice, the relationship between artworks and "lifeworks", and the constant juggling of language, function and materiality present in day-­to­‐day artistic workings. Melstrøm's work include transmitting radio signals into deep space, articulating language through sound, extensive research into the formation and materialization of mental images, as well as a focus on genetic coding as text and ways in which it can be archived. He is the founder of The B-­Flat Society, an initiative dedicated to the encouragement, promotion and distribution of the note B-­Flat, including the scales B-­Flat Major and B­‐Flat Minor. Among a variety of activities, the society publishes sound works by Melstrøm and other artists and runs a local FM‐radio station from the artist's studio.

Melstrøm is also composer and guitarist in the Oslo‐based hardcore ensemble The Good The Bad and The Zugly.

Read more on eirikmelstrom.comand bflatsociety.com.

Elina Waage Mikalsen is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Romssa/Tromsø, currently living in Oslo. She works with performance, textiles, installation and text, very often connected to sound and sound-practice. Mikalsen completed her BA in visual arts at the Academy in Tromsø/Nordland School of Art and Film in 2017. In the spring of 2021 she took her MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. In 2015, Mikalsen was named "Young Artist of the Year" at the international indigenous festival Riddu Riđđu, and has since participated in a number of group exhibitions and performance programs.

Elina Waage Mikalsen's artistic work is often based on the fact that she is of both Norwegian and Sami descent. The meeting between Norwegian and Sami conventions in her own family becomes a picture of the power relations that haunt our society as a whole. In her work, this intimate view of society becomes a platform to explore themes related to identity and exclusion.

In her sound work, Mikalsen often combines her voice with field recordings, electronics and self-built instruments to create sound spaces that exist somewhere between reality and fantasy. It is the emotional and narrative properties of sound that interest her, and how sound can function as a time machine that causes time to collapse and sets both future and past in motion.

Find out more on soundcloud.com/elina-waage-mikalsen.

Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo (b. 1994, Taipei, Taiwan) is a visual artist working across photography, text, sound, and site-specific installation/cleaning. Memory is the source of his knowledge, the vehicle in which he approaches the correlation between body, family, pictorial experience, object, and space. Drawing from these memories, the perpetually categorised and designated narratives become identities in progress, the transformation of individual personhood in relation to collective more established entities.

He reconfigures the unseen, the spaces that are difficult to clean, exploring scenarios where the paradoxes of intimacy, identity insecurity, estrangement, and the latent violence of patriarchal structure are absurdly captured, exposed, and cleaned.

Read more on jaanyuankuo.com.

Working in a variety of physical mediums, Kier Cooke Sandvik’s practice centers around sexuality, the bod(il)y, memory, and the numerous ways the mind has of dealing with trauma. He is particularly interested in the mental mechanism of reimagining and recasting experiences of helplessness and pain in order to gain a sense of power over them. All of the work is ultimately a form of self-portraiture, but it is designed to be activated by each viewer's imagination, personal experience and references; for their mind to fill in the gaps.

Read more on kiercs.com.

Mari Eriksen (b. 1995) works with installation and performance - the complex meeting of space, time and the things that surround us. The works address socio-political issues in an imaginary and non-literal way. She attempts to "frame" situations or conditions in and between people, and intents to contribute to collective and individual experiences of wonder and reflection; to confront reality with something fundamentally human. Eriksen wants to form, shape, tell and convey with a set of materials, with an insisting attitude towards something being at stake. Fear, despair, hope and play are investigated whilst she searches, gathers, plunders, connects and presents.

There is a rather subjective hierarchy connected to the materials she uses or stores and collects in her studio. A small piece of plastic, a pipe, a grass straw or a tired iron tool - everything (and everyone) is regarded as being vital to her life as it is now, and can contribute to realizing ideas of what reality is. Eriksen sticks to an imprecise and improvised approach.

The works with sculptural objects, location and possibly soundscape is an independent and relatively introvert process - but when the work is established, Eriksen consciously changes her focus towards the collectiveness that might arise when the audience meets in and around the work. In which way can one move around the space - together or alone - what does one experience individually and what do we experience together?

Read more on marieriksen.com or follow her on Instagram: @_mari_eriksen_.

Montserrat Llampallas finds herself in a constant approach and dialog with movement related practices and practitioners. Working with the blurry lines that separate the (body) from (space) she has found in movement a way and a language to play, unfold and merge these words. Using her body as a major site of reference and research she has been keen on questions surrounding position (ing) and location (ing) that have led to the arrangement of what she likes to call -antigravitational practices-. Her work finds its way mostly in writing/publications, readings, series of individual actions, of which, some can be performed collectively, and a series of drawings/installations in various sizes and materials that lately find their place closer to the floor, where the audience is actively invited in different ways.

Read more on montserratllampallas.net.

Ole Petter Ribe (b. 1995, Bærum) works with sculpture, stage installation and text. From the establishment of the micropublisher Lille Vesle Forlag with a focus on concise and gothic children's poetry, to being part of the action- and myth-inspired theatre group Vadmelsbanden, his works range from staged church fires, hate letters in book form to home-built splatter adaptations of lesser-known cult novels.

Yu Shuk Pui Bobby 余淑培 is a Hong Kong visual artist who now based in Oslo. Her practice is focused on body culture in different contexts through the filter of her own experience. In recent years she has been examining the topic of human genetic engineering, looking at how this technology shapes our cognition and understanding of the body. Through the media of performance, text, installation, sculpture , and video, she aims to create scenarios that engage, and eventually, the audience become participants in her work.

Bobby received a BA from Hong Kong Baptist University and MFA at Oslo National Academy of Fine Art. She has exhibited her works at Parasite,100ft. Gallery, starprojects, 1a Space, Tomorrow Maybe Gallery, EC Gallery (Hong Kong); Galleri BOA, K4 Gallery(Oslo); A Place Gallery & Studios (Florida); Youkobo Art Space Gallery (Tokyo); Swatch Art Peach Hotel (Shanghai); Listhus Gallery (Iceland). Bobby has completed residencies at PRAKSIS, USF Bergen(Norway), 3331 Art Chiyoda (Tokyo), 435 Art Studio (Taiwan), Listhus Space (Iceland), and Athena Standard Residency (Athens).

Read more on yushukpui.com or follow her on Instagram: @bobby_999.