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.

Back in September

Frido Evers

Frido Evers (b. 1980) has a bachelor's degree from the Academy for Art and Design, ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL), and he received a master’s degree at Kustakademiet in Oslo. He lives and works in Bærum (NO).

Frido Evers explores layers in search of moments of stillness and presence. Layers of meaning and layers of material have been emerging as a mode of operating in the last decade of his practice. This is maybe most visible in his collages, where several pictures printed on acrylic glass and other materials are overlain, and all kinds of settlements to the composition are added to that. The same technique is found in his installations as well.Atmospheric scenes of decaying industrial and human dreams, strange science fiction-oriented universes, and architectural dystopia tend to be the direction of the results of this process.

He has been represented by Galleri Maria Veie (NO) and later by CINNNAMON in Rotterdam (NL). He has, among other places, shown works in Galleri Kösk (NO), Bærum Kunsthall (NO), Noplace (NO), Brenau University (US), Blomquist (NO), Zürcher Gallery (NY), Flipbook Gallery (AU), Örebro Kunsthal (SE), De Fabriek (NL), and Raid Projects (LA). He has been shown at several art fairs around the world, such as Art Basel Hong Kong (HK), Art Rotterdam (NL), Art Amsterdam (NL), and Pulse Art Fair (NY).

In the lazy embrace of the night sky, a subtle phenomenon known as "ashen light" has stirred curiosity for centuries. This ethereal glow, reported on the night side of the planet Venus, offers a charming contrast to its namesake, a celestial body named after a goddess of love and beauty. Yet, beneath the veneer of Venus' entrancing cloud cover lies a harsh world of searing temperatures and inhospitable conditions. Amidst this dissonance, a tantalizing suggestive gleam touches the slumbering side of the planet.

For generations, observers have been captivated by tales of ashen light, dating back to the 17th century. However, despite numerous accounts, this spectral radiance has eluded confirmation through rigorous scientific instruments or precise measurements. Frustratingly elusive, it resists clear observation and photography, shrouded in its faint and changeable nature. Recent glimpses captured by spacecraft, including the Parker Solar Probe, have hinted at features on Venus's dark side that could be linked to ashen light. Yet, these tantalizing hints remain inconclusive, preserving the enigma that challenges our comprehension of Venus and its turbulent atmosphere.

The concept of perceiving something while lacking evidence to establish its existence is a riddle that transcends far beyond the boundaries of this celestial phenomenon. It serves as an open invitation to delve into the intricacies of human perception, beckoning us to explore the metaphorical and symbolic dimensions of this elusive radiance—what we see but cannot perceive clearly.

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We are excited to announce the opening of Frido Ever's first solo exhibition at MELK on June 21st. We hope to see you at Hallings gate 5 from 18.00-21.00 this Friday for the final show before the summer break.

Ashen

 (b. 1977) lives and works in Kongsberg, Norway. She is educated at the National Academy of Arts in Oslo. In 2018 she was awarded county artist of the year in Buskerud, she’s held recent solo exhibitions at MELK (Oslo), RAKE (Trondheim), Nord-Trøndelag Art Museum, Tenthaus (Oslo), Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Buskerud Art Centre (Drammen), Bærum kunsthall and CHART Art fair (DK), and is exhibited at Les Rencontres d´Arles summer 2023. She is included in several private and public collections. Honerud is an associate professor of photography at the University of Southeastern Norway, where she is a research group leader and has published a number of articles on artistic research.

Hilde Honerud works in the tradition of documentary photography, but her motifs are far from classical. In a time where news of catastrophic events are part of everyday life, there is a need to question how to communicate these incidents through images. Honerud refers to John Berger’s essay: Uses of Photography (1978) when explaining her position on this subject: “For the photographer, this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial.”

Currently, she works on forms of photographic representation in a time when the future is no longer a given opportunity for the individual future, but a potential for loss and suffering. She argues that this creates a new relation between time, world and self that calls for new forms of representation. The artistic philosophy in these works is deliberated further in 

 and Journal for Artistic Research, issue 29.

Hilde Honerud

 (b. 1977), living in Kongsberg, Norway, is a visual artist and associate professor of photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her thematic content is close to journalistic, but the motifs are far from classic and often abstract. Through a formal approach, she investigates how precarious political and social conditions can be experienced through the everyday and recognizable.

Honerud has recently exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles, CHART Art Fair, MELK, Nord-Trøndelag Art Museum, QB Gallery, Nitja Center for Contemporary Art, Kristiansand Kunsthall, and more. She has been awarded the title of county artist in Buskerud and has participated several times in juried national exhibitions.

She studied at Napier University in Scotland and at the Academy of Fine Arts, (MA) in Oslo. Honerud has been actively involved in building up the Kongsberg Art Association's exhibition program and sits on the board of the voluntary organization Yoga and Sports with Refugees in Greece. She served on FFF's scholarship committee in 2022/23, as chair in 2022. She is on the National Jury for 2024/25 and leads the research group Research in Art and Design at the University of South-Eastern Norway.


What does it take to be prepared? How do one prepare for a future that looms large, seemingly consisting of a complex web of continuous and interconnected crises? What roles may photography take in this waning belief in the future? These questions are underlying in Hilde Honerud’s new body of work, 

, in which she has photographed practices of emergency preparedness.

Emergency preparedness refers to the measures and actions taken to ensure readiness to respond effectively to emergencies and disasters. It involves planning, organizing resources, and coordinating efforts to mitigate the impact of potential crises, involving proactive measures directed at future events. Traveling with her family to locations in Europe and Australia, as well as her home county of Buskerud, Honerud has captured motifs that span from small-scale individual “prepping” via nationally organized emergency services to globally scaled initiatives and corporations developing future food supplies, medicines and energy.

The twenty-two photographs on view can roughly be sorted in four categories: semi-close ups of hands that carefully hold an apple, adjusts a helmet, or handle a machine – minor actions directed at major threats, landscapes that have suffered environmental damage, emergency service exercises involving emblematic danger signals such as fire and smoke, and close-ups of models or sculptures of bodily parts. The risks and possibilities of the future are complex, contradictory, and difficult to keep in eyesight and to act on. Honerud’s photographs reflect an ambition to try.

, the project’s title, is an obvious reference to Susan Sontag’s seminal book-length essay 

 (2003). (This was Sontag’s last publication before her untimely death the year after.) Discussing a variety of historical examples, Sontag here reflects on the ethical and epistemological complexities involved in viewing photographs of human suffering and atrocities. Such photographs may on the one hand instigate (an unhelpful?) suffering by proxy, on the other they risk numbing the viewer.

Particularly relevant for Honerud’s project is Sontag’s pondering on the ambiguity of photographic “truth” and of whether staged or edited photographs may still convey any such thing. While Honerud’s practice is rooted in the long-standing tradition of socially engaged documentary, 

 continues her more recent experimaentation with image manipulation by using Photoshop against the grain. Interspersed across the gallery are a handful of photographs that tickle both our perception and cognition in that they do not seem to add up to one coherent image. In one work, a butterfly on a leaf, photographed in the botanical garden in Copenhagen, is cloned and stamped at a different size. Two versions of the same detail interlace to convey a jolted slide of scale that subtly evokes a slippage between self and world, micro- and macrolevel events (think of the butterfly effect), present and future.

Another key point Sontag discusses is the power that photography has in shaping collective memory and historical consciousness by highlighting and preserving significant events. Honerud’s photographs highlight key developments in the present but are also directed at the future. Her project thereby harbors an overarching question of whether we are witnessing an expansion in photography’s temporality. Through most of its history, photography has been seen as a witness or reservoir of the past, and as a medium that fixes and stores time. With digital photography’s algorithmic and networked conditions for capturing and immediate dissemination images and data, this has changed. Not only does photography point to and participate in a present; it is also increasingly involved in procedures for assessing and predicting future events, risks and outcomes. In this sense, photography is itself enmeshed in practices and systems of emergency preparedness.

– Hilde Honerud's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Regarding the Pain of the Future

 (b. 1987) is a photographer and print-maker living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Through montages of photographs of people, places, things and abstract pictures, his work revolves as much around mirroring his passage through life, as it does around the open interpretation of the meaning of images. That is, through new associations between them. After receiving his MFA from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, Gustafsson’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues such as Galleri Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm (2022), MELK Galleri, Oslo (2022), Lundgren Gallery, Palma (2022), Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2021) and at the Mariatorget subway station in Stockholm (2022). He has released three books; 

 (self-published, 2022) and most recently, A House of Clay (Loose Joints, 2024).

Swedish artist Erik Gustafsson works with analog photography and returns to the photograph's intrinsic elements such as representation, reproduction and the possibilities of experiencing time and space on a flat surface.

His work process often involves cycles of photographing, printing, failing, dodging rules, repeating and scanning. As traces of the process are layered on top of each other, the resulting pictures can be seen as metaphors for memories, or simply as demonstrations of the potential for change that lies in the act of reproduction.

The analog darkroom plays a central part in Gustafsson’s work as it both functions as an extension of the camera and of the mind. Within that space it's important for him to find the balance between doing as much as he can and at the same time knowing when to let go of control.

Alongside Gustafsson’s spontaneous daily-life snapshots, are abstract pictures made without the use of a camera. His ongoing series of Luminograms are original imprints created by rays of light, exposed directly onto light-sensitive paper in the darkroom. The Luminogram process is about as fundamental as photography gets; as such the works raise questions about the nature of the photograph and how it can be made through various techniques and processes.

Erik Gustafsson

Erik Gustafsson (b. 1987) is a photographer and print-maker living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Through montages of photographs of people, places, things and abstract pictures, his work revolves as much around mirroring his passage through life, as it does around the open interpretation of the meaning of images. That is, through new associations between them. After receiving his MFA from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, Gustafsson’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues such as Galleri Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm (2022), MELK Galleri, Oslo (2022), Lundgren Gallery, Palma (2022), Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2021). He has previously published two books; 

 (Heavy Books, 2020). Soon he will release his third book A House of Clay, published by Loose Joints (2024).

Gustafsson places his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise, a truism of photography: to elevate the everyday, to find meaning and take seriously the smallest of occurrences in ordinary life, and to invoke a sense of gratitude and wonder toward consciousness, sensing and feeling. Sometimes excessively normal, elsewhere tender and intimate, later dense and complex, Gustafsson’s warm slices of life are digested in the darkroom, where the technical processes of photography fall in on themselves, becoming embedded in the image: collapsing the space between process and final product.

Balancing consciousness and coincidence, Gustafsson’s moments of magical realism speak of a permanence, a perpetual present, where the continually unfinished image can always be, at a later stage, altered, manipulated and reshaped. Gustafsson’s work is a structure that is built to collapse and resurrect again and again in new ways.

– Lewis Chaplin, Loose Joints. A House of Clay is published by Loose Joints, February 2024, with two essays by Elisa Medde and Louis Nitze.

We are proud to present Erik Gustafsson’s third solo exhibition at MELK titled A House of Clay, where the birdsong of everyday life interacts with cycles of darkroom creation and destruction.

A House of Clay

Dev Dhunsi

 (b. 1996, Trondheim) is a Norwegian-Indian multidisciplinary artist with education from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. He has recently explored the distribution and attitudes towards photography and textile production creating a symbiotic relationship between the two mediums. While simultaneously looking at the world through a lens of queer theories and diasporic gaze. He has recently exhibited at Fotogalleriet (2023), Mint abf (2023, Stockholm), Melk Galleri (2022), Kunstnernes Hus (2022), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (Stockholm, 2022) and is a selected talent for the Futures Photography platform 2023.

Dev Dhunsi is a Norwegian artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. In recent years, his works have revolved around journeys to his father’s native country, India. His projects, developed in large installations, combine textiles, lens-based works, and experimental printing techniques into mixed media presentations. The images themselves speak to sociopolitical and anthropological questions that exist beyond the picture’s frame. Dhunsi’s works examine identity, origin, and encounters between cultures, exploring the cultural bridge between his ancestries and upbringing in the physical landscapes of Scandinavia and the techno- and mediascapes of Asia.

Dev Dhunsi’s images are usually surrounded by or immersed in water and sound. One can rarely grasp singular photographic images as he searches more complex narrations, filtering the camera’s impossibility to catch reality within the frame of the given device fully. One needs to look beyond, outside the picture, to come to terms with its realization. Therefore, the images are spinning, they split, they move, they are unreadable and part of larger installations, assuaging referential feelings.

In Encircling Stories, these images, taken in movement over seven years of returning from Punjab to Goa, cutting across several regions of India over several days of train rides, something else emerges, as the relation of peasants to their land differs every time, provoking further deferral. Such relation is indirect and unsearched, equally revealing the complexity of a region where agriculture has been under threat to monoculture and dispossession yet again in recent times. Dhunsi’s originating search addressed instead something more grand and exotic, the longest factory in the world, which was the primary purpose of the ride, with complex unconscious references in terms of desire and constructed dependency over centuries of culturally determined impositions from design history but also familiar relations from his paternal legacy and what he could bring with him from Asia to Scandinavia decades prior.

For this exhibition, Dhunsi’s images standing still are unusual. The machinic system he usually creates to make them unreadable has disappeared. Their freezing into a frame should make us feel more stable, but something remains floating without such a spinning view. Floating, free falling, is considered dangerous in our times. We are taught we need navigation to know where we are going. We need a function. We need to function within the machinic system we have been given.

Through this exhibition, Dhunsi explores how a site turns into sight, pointing to photography’s intrinsic historical function of land grabbing. He speaks about images not only capturing a landscape —as if abstract— momentarily but also serving domination power. The camera grabs the image of a territory, restricts its access, and defines its ownership. Although it seems we are given access through the field of vision to open landscape or the cultural landscape —even nature— we are recirculated as the viewer witnessing and therefore enabling knowledge of sight of the dispossessed. We are non-agential witnesses yet reproducing dispossession.

What may sound like a self-referential and philosophical perspectivization of an artistic practice —going from images that are moving to still images— in reality, is something more tangible. Dhunsi’s images from the carriages in motion over the Indian territory —a nation-state like many others determining rights over land, capital, possessions, and jurisdictions—returning to the same carriages and the same landscape periodically capture at a glance the continuous dispossession of peasants from their land through the ongoing capitalization of these grounds and the consequent displacement of its people. When land is taken away from people, they remain floating without a future.

Dhunsi would usually have left his images “laundering” and potentially be consumed by this free fall to the point of cancellation because of mechanical self-destruction.

Dhunsi’s core images of a textile factory producing bed sheets of which, on other occasions, we have heard sound, haunts us. Its sound, now turning into vision, haunts our dreams and our possibility to rest, another form of free-floating into yet another state of induced imbalance, sleeplessness. The unconscious, Modernity’s introjection of the world, is a dream state where humans think through their inner unknown, sitting on their inside instead of collectively forming cognizant forms of dwelling. Accordingly, the world implodes inside a body on a free fall, an internal chaos, the unconscious, which is also constituted by images. If we all float, though, we have the potential of losing the determinism of Western perspectivism, what continues to keep us in place. It means we have the possibility of entering a new world era, no matter how disruptive that may seem. Or we already have. We are driven by chaos, and we are part of a chaotic revolution.

There is a calming quality to this free fall of being on the verge because, instead of image production, we are losing control of visibility. Through Dhunsi’s work, there is no search for an original vision but for origination. We are embedded into a whole other interface of reality, identity, and representation, whose aim is yet to be enclosed in a single definition.

The project and exhibition is generous supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Fritt Ord Foundation, Norsk Fotografisk Fond and FKDS (Fond for Kunst & Design studenter).

, Dev Dhunsi’s first solo exhibition at MELK.

Encircling Stories

Kamilla Langeland's artistic practice is concerned with the nature of reality. Working with analog photography, sculpture, painting, and installation, her work draw inspiration from nature, meditation, science, art history, psychology, neuroscience, and quantum physics. Langeland often combine different materials and techniques such as cultivation of mushrooms, casting, welding, and alternative photographic processes. Ephemerality is a key factor in her creative process where elements of chance and mistakes are an integrated part of the result. Her installations can be viewed as fluctuating between different states of consciousness and awareness, where perception and perspectives change.

Kamilla Langeland (b. 1989, Norway) lives and works in Gjerstad, Norway. She holds a BFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and an MFA from The Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, Bergen. Her work has recently been exhibited at Agder Kunstsenter, Kristiansand (2022), Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (2021), Oslo Kunstforening (2020), and Entrée, Bergen (2019). Her works are in collections such as Sogn and Fjordane Art Museum and Preus Museum, Norway.

Kamilla Langeland

Kamilla Langeland (b. 1989, Kongsvinger, Norway) lives and works in Gjerstad, Norway. She holds a BFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and an MFA from The Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, Bergen. Her work has recently been exhibited at Agder Kunstsenter, Kristiansand (2022), Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (2021), Oslo Kunstforening (2020), and Entrée, Bergen (2019). Her works are in the public collections of Sogn og Fjordane Art Museum and Preus museum, Norway.

With the camera acting as an extension of the eye, and the eye as an extension of the mind, the title of the series 

 is a reference to the manual gesture of focusing the apparatus on a subject/object. The series is made by combining analogue photographic emulsion and paint on cotton canvas on wooden board. The photographs are captured on B&W negative film photographed at Kvenntjønnane nature reserve in Telemark, Norway, and at Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal.

 is a series of three square paintings sized 120 x 120 cm. The paintings have no image or figurative motifs, they are merely materials and color, empty in many ways yet specific and matter-based. They are what you see; pigments, oil, canvas, wax, glue and wood. The paintings can be viewed as gradually dissolving by revealing themselves, exposing the structure of its creation without hiding anything or trying to be something it is not.

At the end space of the gallery, a series of five paintings are presented with the title 

. Made by layering chalk and glue on cotton canvas on wooden board, the paintings look empty and unstarted by first impression, like clean slates ready for anything to appear.

 can simply be read as instructions for entering the works, an invitation to consciously experience anything that arises with a clear mind.

Some of Langeland’s influences are feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad with their writings on quantum physics, quantum field theory and the entanglement of matter and meaning. The paintings and writings by Agnes Martin have been a guidance throughout the process, referring to Martin with the square format paintings in the series Observation. Vipassana meditation taught by S. N. Goenka has become an integrated part of Langeland’s practice, a starting point to quiet the mind, access inspiration, unlearn and relearn. The title Tabula rasa is a reference to the musical composition by Arvo Pärt composed in 1977. As described by violinist Gidon Kremer, Tabula rasa is a declaration of silence, a manifesto of concentrating on important things.

Tabula Rasa, (Latin: “scraped tablet”—i.e., “clean slate”)

, Kamilla Langeland's third solo exhibition at MELK.

Tabula rasa; focus and observation

Anna Clawson

Aydan Murtezaoğlu

Kaare Ruud

Ignas Krunglevičius

Maria Antelman

Marina Weffort

Tris Vonna-Michell

 (b. Donaghadee, N.IRE) completed her Masters in Fine Art this spring at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She is an alumni of School of the Damned (2017), an autonomous free art school in the UK. She received her BA(Hons) in Fine Art from University College Falmouth, UK, in 2009. Since 2010 she has mostly been working as part of a collaborative duo with fellow artist Nicole Ward, under the moniker Clawson & Ward. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Atelier Nord opening in March 2024. Previous Clawson & Ward activities include exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; CCA Derry~Londonderry, NI; Tenderpixel, London, UK; Royal West Academy, Bristol, UK; Glasgow International, Scotland, UK; Ormston House, Limerick, IRE; Guest Projects, London, UK, Malonioji 6, Vilnius, LT; CRATE, Margate, UK. Previous residencies include RUPERT, Vilnius, LT; Studio Das Weisse Haus. 

 (b. Istanbul, Turkey) is a visual artist working mainly in photography and installation. She lives and works in Istanbul. Aydan Murtezaoğlu explores socio-political movements and its effects on contemporary Turkish society. From the early 1990s until today her works deal with traumatic results of state-run modernism, and through minimal interventions she addresses themes including gender history of past and future, cultural transitions and shifts from the social reality. Aydan Murtezaoğlu participated in the 4th, 6th and 11th (collaborative project with Bülent Şangar) International Istanbul Biennials, the 2nd Tirana, 1st Moscow, 3rd and 5th Cetinje Biennials. Other exhibitions include Continuity Error, SALT, Istanbul (2018), Second Exhibition, Arter, Istanbul (2010), U-Turn, Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2008), EindhovenIstanbul, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2006) and Normalization, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (2005). 

 (b. Kaunas, Lithuania) currently lives and works in Oslo. He has received his MA in music composition from Norwegian Academy of Music in 2010. His installations, videos, and sculpture often combine sound, and text, where he explores the intermix between the agency of power, economy, nature and existential realities generated by global technological development. Krunglevičius’ works have been exhibited at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, China; Kunsthall Oslo, Norway; Ultima, Oslo, Norway; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA; Transmediale, HKW, Berlin, Germany; La Biennale di Venezia, Nordic pavilion, Italy and The 19th Sydney Biennial, Australia, amongst others.

 (b. Gausdal, Norway) lives and works in Oslo and graduated with an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2020. Ruud’s artistic practice mainly focuses on sculptural interventions and sculptural work in a range of dif­fer­ent and non traditional materials. Ruud has had solo shows at Samlingen, Nesodden (2023), Heerz Tooya, Veliko Tarnovo (2022), SOL, Nexø (as Simpathy with Mikkel Carlsen, 2022) Hulias, Oslo (2022), Norsk Billedhoggerforening, Oslo (2020/2021) and Galleri Toll, Stockholm (2021) Ruud has also been included in group shows at CANTINA, Aarhus (2023), STANDARD, Oslo (2021) QB gallery, Oslo (2021/2022) Hulias, Oslo (2020), Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2020) Vestlandsutstillingen (2020) and The Annual Autumn Exhibition at Kunst­nernes Hus (2017). Forthcoming he will present works at Stormen kunst/dájdda, Bodø (2023) and conclude a residency stay at Cite des Arts Paris in 2023/24

 (b. Athens, Greece) is a visual artist working with 35mm photography, sound, sculpture and installation. She lives and works in New York and in Athens. Antelman approaches technological progress from a feminine perspective, reevaluating our connection to mother-nature, our historical past, technology and the Self. Recent exhibitions include: The Tower Stair & I Miss The Future at Foreland, Catskill, NY (2023); Self Circuit (solo) at MFP, Portland OR (2021); Soft Interface (solo) at Bemis Center, Omaha NB (2020); Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Mechanisms of Affection (solo) at the VAC, UT Austin (2019); Disassembler (solo) at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2018). She has been an artist in residence at Silverarts at the World Trade Center, at Pioneer Works and the International Studio & Curatorial Program, all in New York City. Antelman holds an MFA in New Genres from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from the Complutense University in Madrid. 

 (b. São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in São Paulo. Her mostly sculptural practice often deals with concepts of tension, weight, lightness, and the passage of time. Since the end of the 90’s Weffort has developed textile pieces, part of Tecidos series, by removing threads in an inverse weaving process and forming a tightened structure accurate in shape and presentation. Graduated in Drawing and Sculpture at FAAP-SP (2000), she presented solo shows at Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2017); “10/40”, Kubik Gallery, Porto, Portugal, :14th International Biennial of Curitiba, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil (2019)
Marina Weffort is part of Brazilian and international public collections, among the following: MAR – Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; KORO Project, Public Art Norway with permanent works at the Norwegian Embassy in Brasilia, Centro Cultural São Paulo and Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, Michigan, in the United States.

 (b. Southend-on-Sea, UK) works in various media and is based in Oslo and Stockholm. He is currently a professor of contemporary art at the Art Academy, KHiO, Oslo. Vonna-Michell has exhibited widely in museums, biennales and galleries, such as Serralves Museum, Porto, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Tate Modern, London, and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and most recently at Jan Mot in Brussels. Vonna-Michell’s work utilises a plethora of technical devices, modes of presentation and installational approaches, encompassing performance, audio recordings, slide projections, poetry, sound poetry, printed matter, photography and film.

Dizzy Spell is a group exhibition inspired by a state of nausea, imbalance and re-calibration due to a sudden diagnosis of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). This occurrence and unsettling feeling made me think about the metaphorical, political and cultural power of vertigo and dissonance. The show gathers works that somehow manifest this to me, and are made by a group of artists I greatly admire. Presenting a range of media from photography, 16mm film and video through fragile threads of textile and cobwebs, sound vibrating in metal to the voice and storytelling, Dizzy Spell tries to embody the physical, singular experience of being out of kilter and in a process of re-orientation. Through the exhibition runs a vertiginous pull from delicate nerve-endings and trapped introspection into the larger world and its dizzying reflection.

, a group show curated by Thora Dolven Balke with works from Anna Clawson, Aydan Murtezaoğlu, Ignas Krunglevičius, Kaare Ruud, Maria Antelman, Marina Weffort and Tris Vonna-Michell.

Dizzy Spell

(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

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 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.

Pillars of skin and bone stand stretching toward a glowing sun. I have the feeling of a landscape, a desolate landscape, there are no leaves, no wind. Only the creak of the limbs. The pillars that sink into the dusty orange earth also lift up the sky. They spin on their own axis, draped with folds of skin. Several of the limbs have been here for a long time, the bones are withered and the skin slides down to the ground like melted wax.

I take a few steps in between the limbs. They breathe against m

e, exhale through the pores of the skin, they are alive. Sweat oozes from the bark of the skin, bubbling trunks. The smell of sweat is cool, like a crisp breeze from a salty sea. The skin forms a small cave.

A fold of skin, and a crevice, the undulating skin, a hollow against the bone, they are all receptive to touch, and move and quiver slightly when I press my thumb into the fat, soft layers. The body’s largest organ is the skin, the wild patterns of cells, created and recreated in front of me.

The skin slips, melts, regenerates. The glaciers of the skin.

There is someone who comes here and looks after the limbs, they are the skin workers. They wear gloves, beige suits in a papery fabric that creaks when they move. They sweep the ground around the limbs, singing while they work, the dust swirl in front of them like the veils of bee keepers. The skin folds and unfolds, shape itself to their song. When the workers withdraw, the skin bleeds small drops of orange, resinous liquid.

The skin is a crawling child, clinging to the bones.

I stand between the pillars and after a few days a warmth slides up through my body from the soles of my feet. My own skin is starting to crumble. My feet glow with a lava-like heat, slowly they sink into the dry earth. I take root, grow between the other pillars. I bow forward. As I dig my nails into the limbs to make contact, a low moan emits. Oh, I have to be careful, if I touch them with too much force, they pull back with a soft swish, like a tendon that’s been stretched too far, shyly.

I stand in the sunset, licking skin salt from one of the limbs.

I know if I stand here long enough I’ll begin to take shape after them.

We are excited to present Ingrid Eggen’s third solo exhibition at MELK.

Skinvelop

 (b. 1984) lives and works in Bergen. She is educated at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. She has exhibited at venues such as Market Art Fair, Stockholm (2023), KODE art museum, Bergen (2019, 2022), Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2020), Stavanger Kunsthall, Stavanger (2019), Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen (2018), Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016), Futura, Prague (2016), NADA, New York (2015), Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2012) and Gallery 1857, Oslo (2011) among others. Solo exhibitions include MELK, Oslo (2020, 2023), Kunstgarasjen, Bergen (2022), Tag Team Studio, Bergen (2017), Syntax project, Lisboa (2017), Kunsthall Oslo (2015) and Entrée, Bergen (2013). Her works are in several private and public collections such as Preus museum, KODE art museum, Equinor, KORO (Art in public places) and Karolinska University Hospital in Solna (Stockholm). In 2020 she received the Springbrett Prize in Bergen, and in 2017 the monograph Azar Alsharif was published by Kunsthall Oslo and Torpedo publishers. She also works as a teacher and art critic.

For many years, the exploration of collage and the working methods connected to it have played a major role in Alsharif’s work. In recent years, painting has become a larger part of it. Through this, she attempts to move deeper into the fiber of the clippings in her studio. Her practice has always been based around found images and text, and the search for some form of textual logic in images; abstract signs, words and lines. Finding that images act like text, and text like images. Alsharif extracts, manipulates and abstracts images from magazines, newspapers and old comics, placing them in electric, fervorous painted landscapes. She employs the language of visual culture – often inspired by formative aesthetics from her childhood. Her projects often involve looking closer at what it takes for images to change their character and tempo. Her work takes on an archival quality: an elastic archive of desire, of chance, of symbols that appear and repeat.

Azar Alsharif

Azar Alsharif (b. 1984, Iran) lives and works in Bergen, Norway. She was educated at Bergen Academy of Arts and Design (2011). Solo exhibitions include; Kunstagarasjen (2022); ENTERPRISE REMIX, MELK galleri (2020); The Conclusion, Tag Team Studio, Bergen (2017); Grains Natural Habitat Remix,Of Golden Sand, Kunsthall Oslo (2015); False Is More Than Real, Trykkeriet, Bergen (15); All these shimmering things. They fade so quick, Galerie SPZ, Prague (2013); The distant things seem close (…) the close remote (…), ENTRÉE, Bergen (2013); Before You Can See You Gotta Learn How To read, Galleri Fisk, Bergen (2011); Knowledge Is Faithful, Rom 8, Bergen (2012) and 7 Sonnets On Grace, Hovefestivalen, Arendal (2012). 
Her works have also been shown in group exhibitions at Kunsthall Stavanger (2014, 2019), The 11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016), Gallery Futura, Prague (2016), Syntax, Lisbon (2017), Hordaland Kunstsenter (2018), Bergen and KODE, Bergen (2019).

In the shadow of a thing lies the idea of the thing. This is often an imagination of what could be, something that stretches beyond the thing, beyond the idea even, into spectacle, promise, possibility. This speaks to a condition of projection based on our own subjectivity, whereby behind a thing is a vibrant landscape teeming with potential.

This promise of something more touches upon a deeply human tendency to desire, which bleeds through the collages of Azar Alsharif’s solo exhibition at MELK Galleri. Alsharif extracts, manipulates and abstracts images from magazines, newspapers and old comics, placing them in electric, fervorous painted landscapes of longing.

In humorously employing the language of visual culture - specifically formative aesthetics from her childhood - Alsharif’s work builds from a “textual logic”, with coatings of paint forming a backdrop, spilling over the edges, and symbols composed onto the surface like quotations. Images act like text, and text like images. With the ephemeral nature of newspapers and magazines glossily preserved on top of thick lashings of paint, a loose catalogue of symbols emerges, like strange images from dreams. Her approach is intuitive and playful, light and honest.

It is about more than just the objects themselves, but rather their carefully constructed scenographies of desire in which they sit. Expanding beyond their physical form or surface-level representation, these objects cultivate memories, emotions, a philosophy, a way of being - the idea that they could make everything make sense. In SPEEDY WINDOWS, these images land in new, painted landscapes that reconfigure, obscure and question their intended purpose or context. Things are given new relationships and no clear meanings.

Like the meandering pathway that strolls through Old Story, these works change our course of perception and our pace of reading images. Through repetition, these images teeter on the edge of meaninglessness while brimming with meaning, like a riddle with no answer. Everything is a cipher. They lie latent ready for our subjective desires to choreograph them. They poke, nudge and prod into the fibres of whatever happens to surround us, revealing our simple wish to relate and to locate meaning.

Alsharif’s work takes on an archival quality, but without recording details of context, references or data. Instead we encounter an elastic archive of desire, of chance, of symbols that appear and repeat, sparking a choir of questions to every new pair of eyes.

Text by Ruby Eleftheriotis

For Market Art Fair 2023 MELK is presenting a solo exhibition with Bergen-based artist Azar Alsharif.

Represented artists

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