Thora Dolven Balke (b. 1982) lives and works between Oslo, Lofoten and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her practice is strongly mediated through photography and moving images, heightened by their sculptural installation, often alongside sound and objects made of materials such as silicone and resin. Dolven Balke’s work is socially engaged and at times collaborative and curatorial. She initiated the Agder Art Academy (2021-2023), a collective work of public art produced by KORO (Public Art Norway) in the form of a three-year education programme developed and run by artists for inmates in the maximum-security prison at Agder Prison. Recent exhibitions include Bunnløs, NOUA, Bodø (2026); Modo Host, Entrée, Bergen (2025) and CAMA, São Paulo (2024); Passing Motherhood, Hannah Ryggen Triennalen, Trondheim Kunsthall (2025); Human Scale, MELK, Oslo (2024); Moon in Your Mouth, UKS (2023) and False Spring, Lydgalleriet, Bergen (2020).
MELK is pleased to present A Stubborn Stain, a solo exhibition by Thora Dolven Balke, opening Thursday September 17th. The show consists of new works made during 2026, including a series of eight black-and-white photographs that were hand-stained by the artist with dyes, and silicone objects that combine plumbing objects into floral-shaped wall sculptures.
The exhibition is interwoven with leaks and overflows, both literal or implied. As in Dolven Balke’s previous works, photographs are juxtaposed with another gesture and material. This time, analogue prints are treated with washes of colour over intimate scenes from in and around everyday places like bathrooms, balconies and boat cabins as well as roadsides and parks, all taken between Norway and Brazil. Together they describe a kind of threshold between elements, between surface and depth: a slouching inflatable pool is filled to the brim; a pond with water lilies, their roots disappearing into the murky lake; figures in their own thoughts, half present and on their way into some other place - disappearing into the dark water of a bathtub, or sitting on the wood steps of a porch but also belonging to a faraway horizon.
Darkroom photography is a liquid process, where paper is exposed to light and carefully massaged through a series of chemical baths. The eight large prints in the exhibition were later soaked and dried and washed again through several rounds in the process of adding colour, dyes added to the wetness. Not to faithfully reproduce reality but as a spill, an unruly stain.
The photos are accompanied by silicone sculptures assembled from plumbing parts like drain covers, shower heads, sink plugs, pipes and soap holders, as if sprouting and blossoming into flowers. Like a series of still lifes, made from the same inanimate objects that separate dirt and physical residues from the fluids we use to keep things clean, and guard the massive flow that separates our homes from the natural world. The largest piece in the exhibition, a greyish sagging creature cast from a life-size hydromassage tub, hangs from the wall like a bloated ocean mammal lifted onto land out of its depth.
Water is at once pressure and a buoyant medium; a place to be enveloped and protected, a memory of our origins - but also threatening to overwhelm and move out of place. Dolven Balke keeps returning to this subject as a means to describe a state between private and public, between being fully attentive and letting go - the care of being held up and that sinking feeling.
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