MELK is an artist-run space in Oslo since 2009, and the leading initiative for new Scandinavian photography. Our aim is to raise awareness of the scene of contemporary photographers in the region and the position of the medium today.

Viktor Fordell

 (b. Stockholm, Sweden, 1990) lives and works in Stockholm. He holds a BFA from Konstfack University in Stockholm.
Solo and duo exhibitions include Placeholders (duo with Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw), Towards gallery, Toronto (2025); Basel Social Club, with Beau Travail, Basel (2025); More Diary at ISSUES (2023); The Garden with Nomad as part of GIBCA Extended, Gothenburg (2023); Seven days of flicker at MEGA Foundation, Stockholm (2023); Lineage at Simo Bacar Gallery, Lisbon (2023). Group exhibitions include Downtown Issues III at ISSUES, Stockholm (2025); Skulpturprojekte at Beau Travail, Stockholm (2024); Spectacle St. Bernard, Shellspace, Brussels (2024); DRAKEN II - Amaryllis in Vase with Coyote, Stockholm (2020); It’s A Long Way to Heaven at Tegel, Stockholm (2018); Solna Centrum at The Loon, Toronto (2018); Memory at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2016).

presents new bodies of works in photography and sculpture and, I would argue, is Viktor Fordell’s most personal exhibition to date. You might not see it at first glance, or even on the second or third, but that doesn’t mean it is not there. On the contrary, the apparent generalness of everyday life is precisely why it can also become personal. Fordell captured these droplets in Stockholm, where buildings, places, objects and people in his surroundings are reflected within them. Each droplet contains a myriad of information and layers, and depending on how he adjusts the focus, it either goes right through or just stays on the surface. The photographs are made under certain set conditions, a method of repetition and an arrangement where the droplets act as a lens but that does not equate with a fixed outcome as it is impossible to capture the same image again, even if you try. In that attentiveness, the droplet appears as its own a kind of sphere: it can open up and take on new forms or evade to capture anything at all.

, by Michael Heizer (1969) has been a continued companion of mine. There is a kindredness to Viktor’s works that I see. His new series of sculptures, ‘Untitled’, elicits a similar balance and tension within the space of what is not there; the layered gesture in the gap marks a density that can be felt more heavily. And it is absorbing to be on the perceiving end, to meet the repetitive sequence of the round shape, which continues back into the photography, as it is not only the object itself but the reflecting movement back that gets highlighted. It becomes a circular relationship — a double negative, if you will — between the body and the work, a feeling that exists in passing.

These multiplicities of seeing give Fordell’s works a pendular motion between abstraction and figuration at the same time. On a more poetic level, his body of work highlights humanity’s innate rumblings before the impermanence of life itself. Life is both as vast and small as the microcosm of the tiny droplet we see before us. After all, Viktor Fordell’s photography is deeply romantic in its layer of universalism. The beauty in the abstract depiction of his motifs is the cumulative effect of him finding his own visual language.

, Viktor Fordell’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition opens on Friday, May 15, with a reception at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00.

I'm finally over the moon

Marius Engh

Thyra Dragseth

 (b. 1974) lives and works in Oslo. His works have been exhibited at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz, Tenerife; Preus Museum, Horten; Drammens Museum, Drammen; Power Station of Art, Shanghai, and to be found in collections like: The National Museum of Art, Oslo; Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo; KORO - Public Art Norway, Oslo; KODE Museums, Bergen; Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger; Telenor Corporate Collection, Oslo; The City of Oslo Art Collection; JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Deka Bank, Frankfurt am Main; Fondazione Mora Grecco, Naples.
Recent and ongoing exhibitions are “The Sign of Four” at Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo (2025); “War is Peace?”, The Nobel Peace Center, Oslo (2025-2026); The National Museum of Art, permanent exhibition, Oslo and the public art commission “Hermopolis”, KORO / Tolldirektoratet, Oslo (2020), and upcoming exhibition “Sock & Buskin” where his project space Hermetiske Skygger is visiting Jane at K.O.S A - Krutthuset Oslo in September 2026.



 (b. 1993) is a Norwegian visual artist. She lives and works between Lisbon and Oslo and holds an MFA from the National Academy of Art in Oslo. Dragseth works multidisciplinarily with photography, film, sound, text, and installation. Her works often arise from her own lived experiences and perception, becoming pieces of translated reality. Dragseth co-initiated the discursive curatorial project Lars Lisboa (2021-2023), hosting events and exhibitions. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: SWAB Art Fair Barcelona (2025); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2025); K4, Oslo (2025); Pachinko, Oslo (2024); OSTRA Practice, Lisbon (2024); Sol Nexø, Bornholm (2023); and MELK Gallery, Oslo (2021). Dragseth is nominated for the Sparebanken Norge Kunstnerpris 2026 (Agder), in collaboration with Kunstsiloen, Kristiansand, where she will exhibit new works in September 2026.

Bringing together the sculptural investigations of Marius Engh and the photographic excavations of Thyra Dragseth, these two exhibitions unfold as a dialogue between material memory and lived experience, between what is unearthed and what is remembered. Across distinct practices, both artists engage in acts of retrieval of histories, images, and traces approaching the past not as something fixed, but as something continuously reconfigured through movement, manipulation, and reflection.

Engh’s sculptural works emerge from journeys through landscapes marked by cultural residue, where fragments of art history and archaeology are reassembled into speculative constellations. Dragseth, by contrast, turns inward, mining the intimate archive of her own family to expose the instability of personal narratives. Yet in both, the gesture is similar: a probing of the human condition as it is embedded in objects, images, and the spaces between them.

Together, their works form a passage of searching across geographies and generations where meaning is neither given nor resolved but suspended. What surfaces is a shared sensibility attuned to the fragile boundary between visibility and obscurity, where the act of looking becomes both an inquiry and a form of reconstruction.


Marius Engh is a visual artist working with sculpture in its extended field. He is interested in art history and in how its semiotics can be studied through rereading and speculation. He composes his work with materials drawn from hands-on experiences of places, which serve as significant components of his research into the human spirit and condition embedded in artefacts. Recently, for this exhibition, he has been traveling highways and hiking mountain tops in search of antiquities in Greece, Italy and France. The exhibition is also an intermezzo and meditation on an upcoming wandering from Prague to Paris, which is partly a conclusion and revisit to his «Bohemia» project, which started in the historical mining town Jáchymov, Czech Republic, in 2018.

Is your mother still your mother after you fall asleep?


There is what we see, and then there is what we can’t see in Thyra Dragseth’s new exhibition.

Dragseth has stuck her hand into a wasp’s nest: her own family history. From a small tin can, she has exposed negatives from her grandmother’s and her parents’ personal archive, developing them into large prints and tiny series mounted with tape in rough aluminium frames. Rather than showing history as a linear, or even subjective narrative, Dragseth’s photographic collages of both inherited and self-experienced material let us look at the past as a series of fragmented clashes.

In her works, the documenting properties of photography are both enhanced and repressed. What we see is the result of a transparent, manipulative process: negatives cut, taped, scratched, exposed and enlarged. Moments and subjects from distant times and point of views, forced together in a twisted narrative, balance on the edge between confession and concealment. Several of the found images reveal scenes from a ship where Dragseth's grandfather worked as a ship's mechanic, and where his wife (Dragseth’s grandmother) went along two times. They left their two little boys at home for several years, to earn money and experience the world, each other, and life at sea. As a retold story it is difficult to grasp. As developed pictures, however, it is possible to approach some sort of understanding, if not outright identification.

We find ourselves in this room of possibilities and impossibilities, with an intimate distance that lets us identify with both child and adult at the same time. To moralise is not in her interest. Rather, her work allows us – and herself – to face our own humanity; our drives and ambitions, our life force, our vulnerability. Dragseth walks with us to the limit, to the edge that simultaneously connects and separates the sublime and the catastrophic, to show us the aesthetics of transgression.

The exhibition is supported by Kulturrådet, Fond for Lyd og Bilde, Norsk Fotografisk Fond, and Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.

MELK is excited to present two new exhibitions by Marius Engh and Thyra Dragseth titled 

Is your mother still your mother after you fall asleep?.

 Stilbon and Is your mother still your mother after you fall asleep?

Anne Katrine Senstad

Victor Olafsson

 (b. 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist based between Oslo and New York. She was educated at Parsons School of Design and the New School for Social Research in New York, 1994, 1999. Her practice encompasses moving image and photo-based art, and spatial installation art encompassing large-scale neon sculpture environments and multi projections that transform the built environment. 

She has exhibited widely internationally since the 1990's in museums, galleries, institutions, and festivals. Biennales include 55th and 56th Venice Biennale (respectively 2013 and 2015), Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale, and Prospect, New Orleans Biennial.

Her work is represented in private, corporate, and institutional collections. She is a member of The Film-makers Cooperative New York, ARS New York, Norske Billedkunstnere, Oslo. In 2025 she founded Temporal Spaces, an artist organized nomadic gallery and curatorial collective in New York.

 (b. 1992, Oslo) is a Norwegian artist working across visual and spatial practices. His work examines the unseen structures that shape how we move, act, and perceive the world in everyday life. Drawing from architecture, sound, and ordinary environments, he considers how systems are formed, followed, and occasionally disrupted and how these systems influence personal experience.

He has recently exhibited at Vasli Souza (NO), Tommy Simoens Gallery (BE), SECONDroom (BE), Melk x Høyersten (NO) among others. Alongside his artistic practice, Olafsson continues to develop Pteron Studio (founded in 2022), an open platform working across art, design, and fashion. The studio extends his interest in staging and experimentation, allowing ideas tested in the studio to move into spatial and constructed environments.

, Senstad presents a new body of photo-collage works that revisit the spatial and poetic ideas of Mexican writer Octavio Paz and his experimental book of poems, 

. Drawing from stills extracted from her video trilogy 

 (2025) and the large-scale light sculpture series 

 (2018–), Senstad distills fragments of image and space into layered compositions where line, form, and trace converge. Through collage and reconstruction, photography becomes both material and method, translating ideas of spatial poetry, time, and perception into visual form.


, Olafsson presents new works spanning silver gelatin prints, giclée prints, and digitally printed textiles. The works emerge through processes where chance and control meet: some images appear through film glitches, while others develop through physical manipulation in the darkroom. Moving between abstraction and figuration, the exhibition reflects on moments of decision and deviation—suggesting how the systems and expectations that structure everyday life can shift when a different path is taken.

Together, the exhibitions bring forward two practices that engage with the instability of images and systems; one through poetic spatial translation, the other through material experimentation and the unpredictable behavior of photographic processes.

MELK is excited to present two solo exhibitions by Anne Katrine Senstad and Victor Olafsson, marking the first time both artists exhibit with the gallery. Through distinct visual languages, the exhibitions explore processes of transformation, ambiguity, and the relationship between image, space, and perception.

TOPOEMAS and ABSOLUTE FAILURE

Klara Sofie Ludvigsen

 (b. 1983) lives and works in Bergen. She has a bachelor's degree from Kent Institute of Art and Design and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Ludvigsen works with analogue processes and explores how improvisation can take a large part in the photographic practice. She has exhibited at Tag Team Studio (NO), Harbinger Projectspace (IS), Galleri Espolin (NO), among others, and has participated in juried group shows such as Høstutstillingen, Vårutstillingen and Vestlandsutstillingen.

“The present can be so intense, blinking in your face so brightly, that it dazzles you and it becomes hard to see.”

An encounter with death can sharpen perception and at the same time reveal the impossibility of ever being fully aware. 

 by Klara Sofie Ludvigsen emerged from the artist’s own confrontation with personal loss and the frustration of never being able to fully perceive the whole picture. Rather than resignation, Ludvigsen translates absence, fragility, and fleeting presence into a visual and sensory experience. The work presented here refuses narrative, instead inviting viewers into a vivid, although fragmented, state of presence. 

The exhibition is anchored in analogue large-format photography. Ludvigsen’s process is both precise and experimental: while she embraces traditional photographic techniques, she approaches the darkroom as a site of improvisation, play, and controlled disturbance. Working intuitively, she layers motifs, collages negatives, and allows the chemical, optical, and procedural properties of photography to intervene. In doing so, she intentionally disrupts neatness, breaking from photography’s traditional control and making space for surprise.

This approach extends into the physical exhibition space. Photographic prints are combined with glass elements, resting atop images to refract, obscure, and add color. These installations challenge the viewer’s usual mode of looking. Images are no longer immediate or easily consumable; rather, they demand time, attention, and bodily engagement. The work slows perception, cultivating a sensory encounter that mirrors the artist’s own process.

The exhibition also foregrounds the physicality of photography. Collaged negatives and experimental enlargements remind the viewer of the materiality of the medium. Photography involves light, paper, and chemical processes, and has the capacity to engage the body as much as the eye. The works here invite bodily presence as well as intellectual reflection.

 ultimately challenges comfort and closure. It disturbs photography, perception, and the ease with which viewers approach images. Yet within this disturbance lies an invitation to linger in the feeling of not knowing, and to encounter the world, and one’s own life, in ways that are subtle, sensory, and profoundly human. 

We are excited to start our spring season with a solo presentation of new works by Klara Sofie Ludvigsen. Her first solo exhibition at MELK.

We hope to see you at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00 on Friday, February 20.

NEON NOTID

Tom Sandberg

Gunnar Smoliansky

 (1933-2019) is considered one of the most influential Swedish photographers. He was born in Visby, on the island of Gotland, and devoted himself to photography since the early 1950s. Smoliansky was an independent artist from the 1970s, working almost exclusively with the photographic image. His oeuvre is unique, although conscious of its place in the history of photography. He became acknowledged for his photography through his early independent work and a career that led him to work as a photographer’s assistant and attend night school under Christer Strömholm.

Smoliansky worked exclusively in black and white and always developed his photographs himself. Throughout his career, he transformed his photographed motifs into completed photos in the darkroom. Stockholm is the main focus of Smoliansky’s photographic world, particularly the areas of Södermalm and Saltsjö-Boo, the two parts of the city he lived and worked in for most of his life. From a geographic point of view, the photographs of Gunnar Smoliansky are quite restricted in range. This has not, however, kept him from being regarded as one of the world’s great photographers.

While imbued with a Swedish melancholy, Smoliansky’s work is also part of a broader European photo-documentary tradition. As with the work of André Kertész, his eye distills its subject. Form and line are used economically, while unorthodox camera angles and aerial views render the subject abstract.

Smoliansky’s work is in collections such as Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Hasselbladstiftelsen, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.

(1953-2014) is considered a pioneer within the field of photographic art. He was born in Narvik, Norway, and worked and lived in Oslo.

Working in a signature modulating grayscale, Sandberg spent decades rendering the world according to an exacting vision, training his eye on the shapes and forms of the everyday – dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, the hard edges of an automobile, an ominously curved tunnel, an anonymous figure casting a shadow – to plumb the nature of photographic seeing. His pictures are subtle yet transformative, studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints, at times printed on aluminum and canvas, project a powerful physical presence.

In the early 1970s, Sandberg studied photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, England, where Thomas Joshua Cooper, Paul Hill, and Minor White were among his teachers. His early work was one of the first acquisitions of photography by The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, and he paved the way for photography within the art world in Norway.

Sandberg’s international recognition peaked with the solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2007. His work is found in a number of museums as well as public and private collections, such as the Moderna Museet, The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

This exhibition brings together a rare selection of works from two of the Nordic countries' most significant photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Both Gunnar Smoliansky and Tom Sandberg consistently worked in black and white and developed a distinctive form of photographic sensibility.

Smoliansky's intimate studies of everyday life, landscape, and people in Sweden create a poetic and precise narrative about light and silence. Sandberg's work, on the other hand, is characterized by a monumental presence and a distinctive ability to lift the trivial into something universal and existential.

By placing their works side by side, the goal is to create a dialogue between two artists who, in different contexts but with a similar vision, have contributed to shaping the understanding of photography as an artistic expression in the Nordics, but who have never been exhibited together before.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with The Estate of Gunnar Smoliansky, Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Tom Sandberg Foundation, and Henie Onstad Art Center.

MELK proudly presents Smoliansky / Sandberg. Join us for the opening Friday November 7 from 18.00–20.00.

Smoliansky / Sandberg

Farhad Khalantary

Ulla Schildt

 (b. Tabriz, Iran, 1962) lives and works in Nesodden. He works in a non-narrative context, combining the intuitive approach with an investigation of formal and historical aspects of his media. His film and video works are concerned with the poetics of everyday life as they explore the potentiality of the moving image and the relationship of sound and image. His topic of previous research works includes the history of film and video art in Norway, and the ways in which different places influence our perception of the world.

Kalantary’s works have been shown widely around the country and abroad and they are part of the collections of Moderna museum in Stockholm, Art Council Norway and the art collections of Oslo, Lørenskog and Arendal Municipalities. Kalantary was the co-founder and artistic leader of Atopia: film-video kunst (2003-17) in Oslo. He has also been working as a Board or Jury member with various art organizations in the country including Fond for lyd og bilde (2020-23), Nordic Art Center, Dale (2023-25), KUNSTKANTEN 2024, Bodø, Bærum kunsthall (2025), Lorck Schive kunstpris (2023- ) and Tenthaus, Oslo (2025- ).

––

 (b. 1971, Finland) lives and works in Oslo. Ulla Schildt works with photography, combining analogue and digital techniques with archival materials and found objects. Her practice explores humanity’s urge to collect, categorize, and thus master the world.

Schildt has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Fotografiens hus (2025), Gyldenpris Kunsthall, Bergen (2023); Bærum Kunsthall (2020); Gallery Hippolyte, Helsinki, Finland (2019); Heimdal Kunstforening, Trøndelag (2017); Oslo Prosjektrom (2017); Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, Scotland (2016); and Akershus Kunstsenter, Lillestrøm (2015). Schildt has also participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including at Preus Museum, Horten (2023); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum (2021); Sagene Kunstsmie, Oslo (2023); The 35th Anniversary Exhibition, Northern Photographic Centre, Oulu (2022); The Annual Spring Exhibition, Vårutstillingen, Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2022); Frozen Horizon, Tenthaus, Oslo (2022); Høstutstillingen, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2018, 2024, and others); Photovisa, International Festival of Photography, Krasnodar (2017); New Nordic Photography, COMMON GROUND, Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden (Shortlisted for the Victor Award) (2008), to name a few.

Schildt's work is included in several collections, including the University of Oslo's Art Collection, the Ministry of Local Government and Modernization, OsloMet Art Collection, The Curtin O’Donoghue Art Collection, Preus Museum, and the Møller Collection.

Farhad Kalantary’s exhibition Cows Are Better consists of ten new works in photography, video, and mixed media. The works in the exhibition convert the gallery space into a barn and bring the air of a rural location into an urban space. The project was initially intended to explore the emotional conditions of cows captured in a barn. A cowshed is a distinct location excluded from the urban space. It is a place that unites the entire humanity against nature. Entering a cowshed is like arriving at past times for any urban person. As we come into a barn we step into the fragrant space of our ancestors.
However, the theme of the exhibition acts as a pretext to experiment with the interdependency of moving image and photography, and their coalition in making new visual experiences.

Ulla Schildt’s exhibition explores how collective consciousness takes shape through repetition and shared experience. With time, scientific paradigms shift, cultural values evolve, technologies collapse and are reborn. The image, once solid, may become ambiguous and acquire new meanings when viewed from different perspectives.

The exhibition Foreign Landscapes reflects this ambiguity, presenting a constellation of photographic fragments that both complement one another and create a sense of unease. Between photographs of unfamiliar objects, snow-covered forests, and microscopic structures, a quiet narrative unfolds—one that reflects the fragile balance between knowledge and the unknown. What, if anything, remains solid and familiar when everything seems to be in flux?

The full exhibition text Foreign Landscapes written by Monica Holmen will be available at the exhibition.

This exhibition is supported by Arts Council Norway and The Norwegian Photographic Fund.

MELK is supported by Arts Council Norway

MELK proudly presents our third duo exhibition this year featuring Farhad Kalantary and Ulla Schildt, two artists who explore the relationship between perception, materiality, and science through two different yet connected approaches to photography and moving image.

We hope to see you at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–21.00 on Friday, October 17.

Cows Are Better / Foreign Landscapes

Kaja Leijon

Linn Pedersen

 The exhibition will be open on Saturday, October 11, from 12.00–16.00.

MELK is happy to invite you to the launch of two new monographs by Kaja Leijon and Linn Pedersen, published by Heavy Books.

 are both extensive projects spanning more than a decade, tracing distinct yet parallel approaches to image.

The launch will be accompanied by a one-night-only exhibition featuring works from the books.
At 18.30 there will be a short concert by Harald Lassen.

Friday, October 10, from 18.00–20.00 at MELK.

Double book launch and exhibition

Terje Abusdal

Linda Hofvander

 (b. 1978) lives and works on Ekerö, Sweden. She holds an MFA from The School of Photography, Gothenburg University and a BFA in Photography from London College of Communication, University of The Arts London.

Hofvander has exhibited at venues such as Moderna Museet, Thielska galleriet, Artipelag, Hasselblad Center and Kunstnerernas Hus. She has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Cecilia Hillström Gallery (Stockholm), Galleri Hammarén (Gothenburg), Format (Malmö), MELK and Konstepidemin (Gothenburg). She is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, Public Art Agency Sweden, Gothenburg City Council, Uppsala County Council, Region Skåne and in private collections.

(b. 1978) is a visual artist with a background from the KMD Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen and the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus.

Abusdal’s work has received the Leica Oscar Barnack Award, and Fotogalleriet’s Nordic Dummy Award and Norway’s Most Beautiful Book. He has published three books with Journal (SWE) and one book with Kehrer Verlag (DE).

His work has been exhibited at Bergen Kunsthall, Preus Museum, Buskerud Kunstsenter, Noplace, Musée des Beaux-Arts (Rouen), and Mattatoio di Roma.


Linda Hofvander, working with photography, video, and installation, focuses on the mechanisms of perception. Through subtle shifts in light, space, and perspective, she exposes the thresholds where the familiar turns strange, and where private observation becomes a shared mode of seeing.

Shadow Imprints is divided in two parts. Part one is the sculptural series Gerd. A collection of clothes of personal importance has been cast, and the filled insides shaped to bodies. The work presented are photographic fixations of these bodies mounted on metal sheets. They have the shapes of concave and convex mirrors. Part two is the photograph on the wall called Shadow Imprints – a documentation of the sculptural work Gerd as a negative image and an attempt to develop the bodies in a photographic process.




Abusdal’s photography moves between documentary, storytelling, and myth. His images question the reliability of memory and blur the boundary between fact and fiction, showing how narratives of self and community are shaped through acts of remembrance and imagination.

ITAKA is inspired by the journeys of Abusdal’s grandfather, Tomas Mølland, who set out to discover the world after losing his wife in 1977. Created over seven years and informed by travels across Europe and the Balkans – culminating on the sunlit shores of the Greek islands – this photographic series offers an open-ended meditation on the Nordic dream of escape: of sun, sea, and adventure.

We are excited to continue our series of duo shows with two solo presentations by Terje Abusdal and Linda Hofvander titled 

Shadow Imprints and ITAKA

(b. 1979, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. She holds a BA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Institute for color) and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She undertook an independent project in artistic research for 6 months at the Akademin Valand, School of Photography in Gothenburg.
Eggen has exhibited at venues such as Henie Onstad Art Center, Haugar Vestfold Artmuseum, Lillehammer Art Museum, Kunstnerforbundet, gallery 1857, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City and Ulterior Gallery, New York.
Recent solo exhibitions include the FUTURE FAIR 2022 at Chelsea Industrial, New York, TRUST - f/stop - 9. Festival fur Fotografie Leipzig (2021), galleri MELK (2021), Oslo Negativ (2021), Galleri Noplace, Oslo (2020), Fotografihuset, Sukkerbiten (2020) and Sandefjord kunstforening (2020). Her work is in several private and public collections such as The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, The National Museum in Oslo, The Henie Onstad art collection, Equinor Art Programme and Oslo kommunes art collection.
In 2017 she was nominated for the Sparebankstiftelsen DNB's art grant.

Eggen works with analog color photography, video and sculpture. Her work explores the body as a site for involuntary everyday actions, the ones we deem irrational, in reflexes and instincts and in the unspoken messages they convey.
She examines nonverbal communication and body symbolism, often dismantling and distorting body language.
With the help of performative methods, she searches for new opportunities in bodily movement and tries to capture the ones not already deeply enculturated and rooted in our bodies. With this, she attempts to take part in the production of a new physical language, one that can reach beyond the optimizing and orderly organization of the body.

Ingrid Eggen

 (b. 1979, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. She holds a BA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Institute for color) and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She undertook an independent project in artistic research for 6 months at the Akademin Valand, School of Photography in Gothenburg.

Eggen’s work focuses on non-verbal communication and bodily symbolism, with a particular interest in the involuntary and instinctive aspects of the body – those often seen as irrational, as reflexes and spontaneous reactions. Through performative methods, Eggen explores movements that are not yet deeply shaped by cultural norms, and seeks to contribute to the creation of new physical languages and expressions that move beyond the optimized and regulated body. By consistently distorting and shifting the boundaries of the body, her practice aims to raise psychological and existential questions, while generating new bodily states in response to societal structures and transformations.

Eggen has exhibited at venues such as Henie Onstad Art Center, Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Haugar Vestfold Artmuseum, Lillehammer Art Museum, Kunstnerforbundet, gallery 1857, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City and Ulterior Gallery, New York.

Recent exhibitions include “Bebo” Wergelandshaugen, Eidsvoll (2024), “skinvelop” Melk, Oslo (2023), FUTURE FAIR 2022 atChelsea Industrial, New York, TRUST - f/ stop - 9. Festival fur Fotografie Leipzig (2021), “grapple grasp” galleri MELK (2021), Oslo Negativ (2021), Galleri Noplace, Oslo (2020), Fotografihuset, Sukkerbiten (2020), Sandefjord kunstforening (2020), and New Visions - the Henie Onstad Triennale for Photography and New Media, The Henie Onstad Art Center (2020). Her work are in several private and public collections such as The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, The National Museum in Oslo, The Henie Onstad art collection, Equinor Art Programme, Møllersamlingen and Oslo kommunes art collection.

The exhibition “join joints” features two new photographic series, “limbits" and “pedknots”.
Inspired by the principles of biomimetics, Eggen examines how organisms and ecosystems have developed clever, innovative solutions to problems through evolution and adaptation, and how the human body might be transformed in response to future changes. The bionic, in this context, is understood as a potential vocabulary for the body’s affective intelligence: a language of forms, growths, connections and adjustments that arise in response to these changes; a body that acquires traits from other organisms and systems—grasping, sensory-expanding, orienting.

Through manipulated silhouettes, fragmented forms, and a lighting strategy that seeks to draw out and expand the body's contours, Eggen explores anatomy as a fluid, rather than fixed, structure—one shaped by movement and response.

Anatomical boundaries are dismantled and reassembled, not in order to return to the body as we know it, but to evoke a different kind of corporeality—a new bodily state shaped by the lived experience of the affective body.

These works are part of a long-term process aimed at creating an alternative, bodily and cultural-historical atlas, based on the experiential body’s capacity for knowledge, expression, and development. Here, movement, tension, response and affect are not merely expressions, but the structure itself.

The exhibition is accompanied by a literary text written by Ruby Paloma. A full version of the text is available at the bottom of this page.

s strange, because I only use my feet for walking, yet they look more like hands, as if they

re stuck in an earlier stage of evolution …

… M moves her arms behind her, letting her fingertips sink into the sand, just beyond the collar of the jacket she’s sitting on. Her shoulder muscles shift underneath her T-shirt—two lean, elongated shapes that fold together at her upper back. When I see M like this, fragmented, as separate regions detached from the rest of her body, entirely new shapes begin to emerge. Those two shapes on her back, rising under the fabric, look like rocks at the water’s edge, like contours on a map. She lifts her right hand in front of her. It trembles slightly. Sand clings to the hollows between her fingers—valleys dusted in grains. She brings her left hand to meet the right and rubs them together, the way she often does when she speaks. …

… I believe she rubs her hands together while saying all these things to feel her edges—because all the words pouring out of her erase the very edges she’s trying to find— and now she’s doing it, without speaking.

, Ingrid Eggen's fourth solo exhibition at MELK.

Represented artists

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