Artist
Duy Nguyen
I'm a Norwegian-Vietnamese designer and artist based between Oslo and Berlin. Born in the Bidong refugee camp in Malaysia and raised on Norway's west coast, my background drives my research into migration, diaspora stories, and multicultural identity.
Much of Vietnamese refugee history remains clouded in post-war trauma and politically charged narratives. My work seeks to make sense of our position as displaced individuals in the Western world and examines diasporic existence beyond simply digesting the past. I wish to envision what our identity looks like in the future.
Through field and archival research interpreted with a poetic lens, I create what I call poetic essays: exhibitions and projects that seamlessly intertwine poetry, photography, sound, video, and installation. My asymmetrical approach allows elements to inspire each other non-hierarchically. The work explores contradictions between perception and reality, truth and staging, filling historical and memory voids by creating plausible simulacra.
Minimal Prayer
The selection was conducted through a structured committee process, bringing together both external expertise and internal perspective. Fotogalleriet appointed curator, film and media Researcher and co-founder of Films from the South festival Hilde Herming, and GT Nergaard, photographer, educator and principal at the Norwegian School of Photography. They were joined by Fotogalleriet's own Mikhela Greiner, photographer and project manager, and Dev Dhunsi, communications coordinator, photographer and FUTURES Alum.
Each member independently nominated a shortlist of artists, after which the panel convened to evaluate candidates and reached a unanimous final selection. The four nominated artists represent a breadth of approaches to photography and expanded image-making, united by a shared commitment to rigorous research, community engagement, and the interrogation of identity, memory, materiality and form.
Duy Nguyen's practice moves fluidly between photography, sculpture, installation, and writing, grounded in thorough field and archival research. His work explores the intersections of identity, migration, culture, and materiality, bringing three-dimensional and textual elements into conversation with the photographic image to create layered, cross-disciplinary bodies of work.
Minh Ngoc Nguyen works primarily with staged still-life photography, approaching the medium as both a visual practice and a cultural system. Their work examines how images produce, circulate, and stabilise meaning around identity, desire, and representation, interrogating the conventions and ideological underpinnings of photographic imagery itself.
Ikram Abdulkadir's practice is rooted in the documentary tradition, focusing on family and individuals within familiar urban and domestic settings. Through poetic portraiture and delicate observation, her work explores themes of care, community, and belonging with sensitivity and quiet precision.
Signe Luksengard works across photography, installation, and writing, drawing on a background in both documentary photography and material-based art. Her work examines how emotional experience, labour, and inherited expectations shape the body and leave physical and sensory traces over time, investigating how history, care, and responsibility are carried, both individually and across generations, creating spaces for reflection where presence, vulnerability, and memory can coexist.
The nominated artists were distinguished by the technical and conceptual rigour of their practices, and each reflect Fotogalleriet's commitment to supporting artists who engage deeply with their communities and whose work contributes meaningfully the expanding possibilities of photography as a medium. Fotogalleriet looks forward to supporting their participation in FUTURES 2026 and to the contribution each will make to the network.
Members of the jury:
Hilde Herming - Researcher and curator with a background in film and media studies.
GT Nergaard - Artist born and living in Norway with 30 years of experience as a professional photographer.
Dev Dhunsi - Norwegian–Indian artist. Dev is the Communications Coordinator at Fotogalleriet, as well as a FUTURES alum.
Mikhela Greiner - Norwegian-Canadian visual artist and cultural worker. Mikhela is the project manager and exhibition producer at Fotogalleriet.
