Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996) is a Norwegian–Indian artist living and working between Oslo and Punjab. He holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2024) and a BFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Unmistakably You at Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art, Lillestrøm (2026), presented in conjunction with the release of his publication Mixed (SPBH Editions / Mack Books); as well as Encircling Stories at the Centre for Photography, Stockholm (2024), following its initial presentation at MELK, Oslo. His work has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb during Organ Vida 13th Festival and FUTURES Photography. Dhunsi is a recipient of the Nordic Photobook Award 2024 and was selected as Ones to watch by British Journal of Photography in 2026.

Dev Dhunsi makes large installations, combines 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, exp loring the cultural bridge between his ancestries and upbringing in the physical landscapes of Scandinavia and the techno- and mediascapes of Asia. Dhunsi explores how a site turns into sight, pointing to photography’s intrinsic historical function of land grabbing, and how photographic representations have been used to serve the interests of dominant power structures.

Working with cameras he focuses on what is outside the picture frame or on other-than-human beings, such as minerals, spirits, textiles, and ancestors. Creating site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to images that morph, decay, and evolve, his ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistence among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Dev Dhunsi

(b. 1996) is a Norwegian–Indian artist living and working between Oslo and Punjab. He holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2024) and a BFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Unmistakably You at Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art, Lillestrøm (2026), presented in conjunction with the release of his publication Mixed (SPBH Editions / Mack Books); as well as Encircling Stories at the Centre for Photography, Stockholm (2024), following its initial presentation at MELK, Oslo. His work has also been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb during Organ Vida 13th Festival and FUTURES Photography. Dhunsi is a recipient of the Nordic Photobook Award 2024 and was selected as Ones to watch by British Journal of Photography in 2026.

Working across photography, textile and installation, Dhunsi examines how personal, diasporic and colonial histories are carried, obscured and reconfigured through images and materials. His practice moves between documentary observation, mythology and constructed narratives, questioning how images shape our understanding of ourselves and others.

Unmistakably You developed alongside Mixed (SPBH Editions / MACK, 2026), a photobook that begins with a linguistic absence: Norwegian has no widely used equivalent to the English term “mixed” for people of multiple geographical or cultural backgrounds. This absence raises questions about how experiences are recognised, represented and understood when the language to describe them remains inadequate.

For Paris Photo, Dhunsi brings these questions into the material construction of the photographic image. Translated into jacquard weaving, photographs are reconstructed through interlacing threads, colours and textures. Rather than reproducing an image on fabric, the weaving process makes the image inseparable from its material structure. What appears coherent from a distance reveals itself, up close, as an accumulation of individual threads.

Here, mixing becomes both subject and method. Different elements are brought together without necessarily dissolving into a unified whole. The woven photographs resist the idea of identity as something fixed or singular, proposing instead a condition of coexistence, contradiction and continuous transformation.

Through this material translation, Dhunsi approaches photography not simply as a means of representation, but as a space in which established ways of seeing, naming and categorising can be reconsidered.

For the 29th edition of Paris Photo, MELK presents Dev Dhunsi’s Unmistakably You, a selection of six jacquard-woven photographic works emerging from his ongoing exploration of language, identity and belonging.

Paris Photo

Morten Andenæs

Johanne Hestvold

Øyvind Bast

Cecilia Jiménez Ojeda

Max Barel

Erlend Rødsten

 (b. Oslo, Norway, 1979) lives and works in Oslo. He has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His works investigate the role of images in how we view the world and ourselves, and his dense photographs of people, animals, landscapes, and objects hint at our fantasies, longings, and desires. Andenæs has exhibited at Henie Onstad Art Centre (NO), Galleri Riis (NO/SE), Kunstnernes Hus (NO), Fotografisk Center (DK), BO (NO), and Fotogalleriet (NO), amongst others. Andenæs is represented in the collections of the National Museum of Norway, Henie Onstad Art Centre, Kunstsilo/Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, the City of Oslo Art Collection, and Kistefos/Christen Sveaas Art Foundation.



(b. Bergen, Norway, 1988) lives and works in Oslo. She has degrees from Malmö Art Academy and Bergen Academy of Art and Design. She often takes existing objects, forms, and systems as her point of departure. Through processes of transformation, the conditions under which they operate are altered, allowing new connections to emerge while others remain active. Hestvold has exhibited at Norsk Billedhoggerforening (NO), Galleri Golsa (NO), Kunstnerforbundet (NO), Ekebergparken (NO), Bergen Kunsthall (NO), the National Museum (NO), and the Astrup Fearnley Museum (NO), amongst others. Hestvold is represented in the collections of Kunstsilo, the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Drammen Museum, and KORO.



(b. Oslo, Norway, 1989) lives and works in Oslo. He has an MA in Architecture from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He approaches sculpture through questions of structure, construction, and form, while allowing materials and objects to take on unexpected associations. His works often move between the recognizable and the unfamiliar, combining references to nature, the body, architecture, and everyday objects. He is the co-founder of the artist-run exhibition space Hulias (NO) and Hulias Cantina (IT), and the newly established art fair Barbara (NO). Bast has exhibited at Henriette Wegner Pavilion (NO), ISCA (NO), Salgshallen (NO), Vest-Telemark Museum (NO), Galleri Memphis (NO), and PALASS (NO), amongst others.



(b. Borås, Sweden, 1982) lives and works in Oslo. She has a degree from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her drawings are often situated within larger scenographic and narrative constructions based on experiences and environments from her own life. These fragments can evoke memories of snapshot photography, inviting the viewer to draw connections to their own lives and experiences. Ojeda has exhibited at Standard (NO), Kunstnernes Hus (NO), QB Gallery (NO), Galleri F 15 (NO), and Kunstnerforbundet (NO), amongst others. Ojeda is represented in the collections of the National Museum of Norway, KORO, and the City of Oslo Art Collection.



(b. Oslo, Norway, 1996) lives and works in Flatdal. He has a degree from Oslo School of Photography and HDK-Valand in Gothenburg. His work explores the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar, inviting us to question our perception of both the ordinary and the peculiar in our surroundings. He has exhibited at Oslo Negativ with BRUU STUDIOS (NO), KB Contemporary (NO), Bastille Design Center (FR), Röda Sten Konsthall (SE), Kösk (NO), Kommunale Galerie (DE), Göteborgs Konstmuseum (SE), and A60 Contemporary Art Space (IT), amongst others. Barel is represented in the collection of the Bank of Norway.



(b. Rygge, Norway, 1996) lives and works in Malmö. He holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy. Rødsten's practice is sculptural and object-oriented, with particular attention to material properties, exploring the relationship between material, space, and perception. He has exhibited at Moderna Museet Malmö (SE), Ystad Konstmuseum (SE), LIA Leipzig (DE), and Celsius Projects (SE), amongst others. His work is represented in the collection of Malmö Konstmuseum, and he has received grants from the Edstrandska Foundation and Swedbank's Ägarstiftelse Skåne.



(b. Tønsberg, Norway, 1994) is an art historian and curator who lives and works in Oslo. Her research and curatorial interests focus on phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory. She has a master's degree in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Institute in Rome, as well as degrees in Arts Management and Leadership, and Journalism from Oslo Metropolitan University. She has previously been a guest researcher and academic fellow at the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and an assistant researcher within photography and visual communication at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

Tostrups gate 29.
That was the address.

One day in April, while walking to work at MELK gallery, I noticed two yellow iSEKK bags left by the side of the street. Curiosity got the better of me. I slowed down as I passed them, pretending to look at my phone while waiting for the people nearby to leave. I remember wondering why it felt so uncomfortable to look inside the bags while others were around. What would they think of me? That I was snooping? I never considered myself a snoop. I have simply always been curious.

Inside the yellow bags, I found parts of an old cast-iron stove. One of the pieces was decorated with a flower-like seal. I remember thinking how sad it was to throw away something so beautiful; something so old that had probably belonged to a home for decades, until new residents decided that this fragment of history no longer fit into the making of their own. I felt I had to save it. I did not know what I would do with it; I only knew that it felt wrong to leave it behind.

I went into the gallery to find a plastic bag to wrap around the stove, then carried it inside. Tiny traces of charcoal fell from it, leaving a trail behind me. I thought about the wood that had once burned in the stove. When was the last time it had been used? I began imagining the final scene in which it had provided warmth: an old man sitting beside the fire in a poorly insulated apartment in Frogner. Without electric heating, the stove was perhaps the only thing keeping him warm through winter. I pictured thick woolen socks, the kind your grandmother gives you every Christmas, the kind you only begin to appreciate as you grow older. Maybe he wore a knitted sweater his wife had made for him before she passed away. The story kept unfolding in my mind as I slowly constructed a fictional life around a fictional character.

When I came home that evening, I searched for sold apartments in 

 on Finn.no and quickly found a listing from a couple of months earlier. It showed the complete stove from which my fragment had come. I clicked through the photographs. The apartment dated back to 1897 and still had its original stucco and ceiling moldings. The listing described it as «large and stately», with four bedrooms and classical details. The walls had been stripped of wallpaper, revealing the bare Norwegian pine. It looked as though very little had changed since the 1970s. The stove stood in the corner of the living room. I took a screenshot and did an image search using Google Images. It turned out to have been produced at Bærums Verk in the late 1890s, most likely around the same time the apartment itself was built.

I continued clicking through the photographs in the listing. In one of the bedrooms, old posters had been stapled onto the pine walls; The Swan Lake with the Norwegian National Ballet, dating from 1979; an exhibition poster from Bente Sætrang’s solo exhibition at Galleri F15 from 1986; The Nutcracker with the Norwegian National Ballet (which I was unable to source using Google Images). Another poster simply read KYLIÁN! in large black sans-serif letters above a bare pointed foot and the shadow of a body against a terracotta-colored background. Google Images suggested it was a poster for the Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián. As I copied screenshot after screenshot into Google Images, it dawned on me that the apartment contained traces of things that must once have mattered greatly to someone. A physical life was no longer present, yet fragments of it remained, stapled to the pine walls like a map of existence.

The room that appeared to be the master bedroom was decorated with Oriental tapestries, nude motifs from classical art, and black-and-white photographs of pin-up girls. Above the oak headboard of the bed hung a small reproduction of Paul Gauguin’s D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (1897-1898). The bed was covered with a richly patterned blanket, and a large bookshelf stretched across nearly half of the opposite wall. I lingered over the bookshelf. I wanted to know what kind of books they were. What had the old man underlined? Which pages had he folded? Which books had been read until they fell apart, and which had been bought with every intention of being read one day, only to gather dust? I imagined the old man as one of those quiet, slightly grumpy regulars who sits alone in the corner of a café, smoking a cigarette while reading Klassekampen or a worn copy of Sartre’s L'Être et le Néant (1943), watching everyone around him over the rim of his sunglasses.

For several days, I kept returning to the apartment listing. Every room seemed to offer another fragment from which another story could begin.

The posters still hung on the wall.
Gauguin still watched over the bed.
Sartre still waited on the bookshelf.

The stove still carried traces of charcoal.



– Excerpt from the publication 'A Point of Entry' by Christine Bruu

We are excited to announce the opening of the group exhibition A Point of Entry with Morten Andenæs, Johanne Hestvold, Øyvind Bast, Cecilia Jiménez Ojeda, Max Barel and Erlend Rødsten at MELK on October 15th. The exhibition is curated by Christine Bruu.

A Point of Entry

Unmistakably You begins with an absence: Norwegian has no widely used equivalent of “mixed” for a person formed through more than one racial, cultural or geographic lineage. When an experience cannot be named, it is easily simplified or made invisible.

Developed through collaborations with around forty individuals across Scandinavia, the project shares control of portraiture with its participants rather than asking them to perform a stable identity. The resulting visual language moves between intimacy, performance, opacity and directness. Portraits coexist with Icelandic landscapes, still lifes, family archives and material from the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala (1922–1959). Mixed (SPBH Editions/MACK, 2026) therefore names not only cultural inheritance, but the photographic method itself: different genres, authorships and histories remain together without being resolved into a single aesthetic system.

The exhibition does not answer this linguistic absence by inventing another category. Instead, mixedness becomes a method for moving between photography, textile, architecture, myth, family history and archival evidence without granting any one of them final authority.

Photography is the starting point, not the conclusion. Images are woven as jacquard textiles, sublimation-printed onto linen, fragmented and suspended within a labyrinthine installation. Mounted on spinners, they turn with air currents and the movement of visitors. Their white reverses are made from the same material as the wall-to-wall carpet below, allowing any photograph to disappear into the room.

Installing a pristine white carpet in Scandinavia in March was partly a joke: wet shoes, dirt and winter would inevitably enter with the audience. That failure is built into the work. The carpet records every intrusion into cleanliness while exposing the labour required to preserve it. It also erases the familiar horizon between floor and wall, making the architecture lose its edges. Whiteness operates here as surface, atmosphere and demand. It presents itself as neutral by receding into the background, while the photographs appear and vanish against it. Visibility becomes conditional on position, timing and the presence of other bodies.

This instability matters because photography has never been innocent in producing human difference. The images from the Uppsala institute—where photography served the measurement and classification of bodies—are the only ones outside the labyrinth. Embedded directly in the walls and exposed through roughly broken openings, they appear as a concealed history forced through the institutional surface. The wall must be breached before the images can be seen.

At each end of the space, photographs of Iceland’s Kárahnjúkar hydropower development show pale mineral dust spreading across the altered landscape. What first resembles mist, snow or cloud is pollution masquerading as something pristine. Cut into vertical slats, these landscapes also resist a stable view, connecting environmental contamination to the exhibition’s concern with whiteness, purity and deceptive appearances.

My own body enters the work as both an entry point and a misdirection. The project begins in lived experience—Norwegian and Indian inheritance, queerness, family and the recurring question of belonging—but refuses the expectation that a racialized artist must provide a coherent, representative identity. Hindu deities, ghosts, family objects and archival traces coexist because myth and fabulation can hold contradictions that documentary language often flattens. They also expose the fantasies through which reality is organized: purity, national innocence, biological difference and coherent origins.

The labyrinth is not a metaphor for confusion, but a practical refusal of the straight line: the family line, the racial category, the documentary sequence and the clean historical narrative. Images spin, the horizon disappears, the carpet becomes marked and history breaks through the walls. Unmistakably You asks whether photography can do more than identify: whether an image can withhold, transform or disappear, and whether a person can remain unmistakable without becoming fully legible to the systems that seek to classify them.

For the 6th edition of Oslo Negativ, MELK proudly presents Dev Dhunsi.

Unmistakably You at Oslo Negativ

 (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 

, Entrée, Bergen (2025) and CAMA, São Paulo (2024); 

, Hannah Ryggen Triennalen, Trondheim Kunsthall (2025); 

A line through Dolven Balke’s work could be how humans act in precarious situations, and how those actions are inscribed on their surroundings. She works in the studio next to a more documentary approach with sound, film and photography - with materials made to support or augment the body directly via technology, or metaphorically as sculptural counterparts or aids to the photographs, films and sound works. Dolven Balke draws on language we use to describe experiences that seem impossible, although they are perhaps the most real of all: events related to time, our own vulnerability and attachments, as persons and as part of a society. Her work catalogues the surfaces and objects that accommodate, carry, give support, nurture and soften the body in intimate as well as institutional settings. She uses found materials in photographic collages and video sculptures; like anti-slip mats, water repellent paper, silicone and latex sheets, exam table bench paper, towels and memory foam. Dolven Balke often references water and flow, as an image of the absurd attempts to tidy, dry up, and control the massive leakage that accompanies life.

Thora Dolven Balke

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 surrealistically 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.

With generous support from Kulturdirektoratet and Norsk Fotografisk Fond (NOFOFO).

, 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-coloured by the artist with dyes, and silicone objects that combine plumbing items into floral-shaped wall sculptures.

A Stubborn Stain

(b. 1977, NO) holds degrees from Napier University in Edinburgh and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Honerud works within the tradition of documentary photography, although her subjects are far from conventional.

Her work has previously been shown at venues including Perspektivet Museum (NO), Høyersten Contemporary (NO), Preus Museum (NO), MELK (NO), Les Rencontres d’Arles (FR), QB Gallery (NO), CHART (DK), and Nitja (NO).

Honerud is Associate Professor of Photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where she leads the research group Research in Art and Design. She serves on the board of the non-profit organisation Yoga and Sports with Refugees in Greece, and was Deputy Chair of the National Jury for the 2024/2025 Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen). She lives and works in Kongsberg and is represented by MELK.

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

As I write this, wildfires have a chokehold on parts of Southern Europe, and there’s pushback against migration 

 They are just one of many crises unfolding simultaneously. In times like these, I often think back to something a friend said in the wake of a widely publicized tragedy several years ago. I had been criticizing what I saw as the West's selective empathy when she reminded me that no one can be expected to care about everything, all at once. People have always had their biases, and they always will. What matters, she argued, is that people don't lose their ability to care, and that has stuck with me ever since.

As a member of the queer community and a person of color, the rise of far-right movements and transphobia is daunting. Climate change presents a different but equally constant source of anxiety. The Swedish term 

, coined a few years ago, meaning the guilt associated with air travel, may not weigh heavily on me personally, but as a young parent, it's easy to understand why someone might think twice before boarding a plane.

Anxieties about the future, the world her children will grow up in, form the point of departure for Hilde Honerud’s evolving project 

, first presented at MELK in 2024, today encompassing more than 70 images. Unlike the late Susan Sontag, to whose work the project title nods, Honerud is less concerned with scrutinizing photography than with its capacity to engage with real and pressing questions. This approach is familiar from 

, my first encounter with Honerud’s compelling work, which turned the lens towards the young refugees of Moria Camp on the island of Lesvos in Greece.

Accompanied by her husband and children, Honerud has traveled to places, both near and far, including remote and highly inaccessible sites. Having the children in tow is fundamental to the work, their gaze and curiosity challenging and nuancing Honerud’s own. I even once encountered the family during my own travels on the beaches of San Sebastián, a moment that brought to mind how small the world really is.

Family is not only present behind the lens but also implicitly appears in this new iteration of the work, for instance in the image of a dark silhouette of a figure wearing a cap, juxtaposed with what appears to be a production site of sorts. This kind of manipulation is not merely a formal device but a crucial element of the work, encouraging the viewer to observe and, in Honerud’s own words, remain vigilant. The editing stage is equally important as the many field trips, allowing for reflection on the experiences gathered along the way, each image holding stories well beyond what can be seen at face value.

The exhibition, after much deliberation, is titled 

, meaning "truth" in Ancient Greek. The images are diverse, varying in nature, scale, and motif. Among them are industrial sites and plants, endangered species, and even forests on fire. A body of work that at first glance can evoke different feelings and appear puzzling eventually starts to make sense to me the more time is spent with it. I gather it’s not about isolating singular occurrences but rather showing the complexity and entanglement of things, underlining that many truths can coexist at once.

Honerud draws on writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit’s rejection of the binary between optimism and pessimism regarding the future. Progress is not linear, and the effects of collective effort can be difficult to recognize in real time, often becoming visible only with hindsight. That uncertainty, however, leaves room for hope, an idea reflected in 

 through gestures of care and labour, recalling the importance of putting in the work for substantial change.

Text by Koshik Zaman

Aletheia is supported by: Kulturdirektoratet Visuell Kunst, Bergesenstiftelsen,, NOFOFO, Norsk Fagfotografers fond, Fritt Ord, Regionale prosjektmidler, Fond for Lyd og bilde, Vederlagsfondet

, Hilde Honerud's third solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition opens on Thursday, August 20, with a reception at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00.