They will join the platform’s activities to present their work to international professionals and to network, amongst other opportunities that will be developed for them, including exhibitions, publishing opportunities, portfolio reviews, and more.
Discover more about them:
Chai Saeidi
As a visual artist, I explore themes such as queer desire, transformation, gender, and dysphoria and find inspiration in my circle of friends. My work is influenced by theorists, poets, and activists such as Zanele Muholi, Judith Butler, Diane Arbus, James Baldwin, and Kai-Isaiah Jamal. The common denominator for these is the discussion about exclusion at various levels.
Lesia Vasylchenko
Lesia Vasylchenko (b. 1990 Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway) is an artist and curator. Her work with installations, moving images and photography raises questions around temporality, history and memorialising. Vasylchenko is a co-curator of the artist-run gallery space Podium and a founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown among others at Louvre Museum, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Tenthaus Gallery, Oslo; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale.
Marin Håskjold
Marin Håskjold is an artist and filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway. She studied moving images at Nordland School of Art and Film in Kabelvåg on the Lofoten islands. Identity is a central theme in Håskjolds work, where she philosophically explores different notions of gender and sex in a queer and feminist perspective. Håskjolds work has been exhibited and screened at a number of art institutions and film festivals, such as Tate Modern, London, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal, Coast Contemporary, Oslo, Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Helsinki International Film Festival, the Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad, Trøndelag Center of Contemporary Art, and Vega Scene, Oslo, as a part of Fotogalleriet’s programme. Her short film «What is a Woman?» (2020) has also been awarded with a Norwegian Academy Award in 2021, the Amanda, for Best Short, and Best Script at Beirut International Women Film Festival.
Nicole Rafiki
Nicole Rafiki’s interdisciplinary artworks move between photography and beadwork, textiles and text, and the use of memorial objects old and new. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki (*1998, DR Congo) treats artmaking as a practice of remembrance, healing, and cultural analysis. Her images often employ artistic strategies that avert a western anthropological gaze. Incorporating symbolisms, fables, and tools of visual storytelling and oral history, she invokes themes of forced migration and war ghosts, racialized perceptions of Blackness and femininity, and fraught colonial traditions of spatial power and temporal erasure. As a child of the Kongolese diaspora with local connections in various countries in Africa and Europe, she taps into pre-colonial forms of global interconnectedness and knowledge transfer.
Nikhil Vettukattil
Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru, India) is an artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo.
He uses a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes related to lived experiences. He has previously exhibited at venues such as Kunsthall Oslo (2022), K-U-K, Trondheim (2021), CAPC, Bordeaux (2021), Art Hub Copenhagen (2021), K4 Galleri, Oslo (2021), Louise Dany, Oslo (2020), EKA Gallery, Tallinn (2020), Kristiansand Kunsthall (2020), and Le Bourgeois, London (2019). Forthcoming exhibitions include Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, and the National Museum of Norway, both taking place in June 2022. He is a member of Tenthaus and Carrie's art collectives and a part of Atelier Kunstnerforbundet (2021-2023).
