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.

 (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.

Market Art Fair

We are happy to invite you to the opening of Azar Alsharif's second solo show at MELK titled SPEEDY WINDOWS.

SPEEDY WINDOWS

Emil Finnerud

Emil Finnerud (b. 1983, Oslo) lives and works in Oslo. He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the London Metropolitan University. Recent exhibitions include Kunstsamlerne, 250 års dialog mellom Peder Anker og Rolf Hoffs samlinger, Galleri Østfløyen, Bogstad Gård (2023), The Norwegian Pavilion at London Craft Week by PYTON gallery (2022), BianalSur at the National Museum of Decorative Art, Buenos Aires (2021). Recent solo exhibitions are Allure (KÖSK, 2022), Forbidden Paradise (K4 2021), Normal (Arendal Kunstforening, 2020), Death Drive (Noplace 2019). Finnerud also works as the editor for the publication Gateavisa.

Decomposing dead bodies smell sweet, he told me. The most humane way to kill someone is to boil them, he continued. Then he had a pause, drank some soda, ate some chocolate biscuit, then quoted a contemporary philosopher. The kind you find at the kiosk at the airport; anemic and helpless self-help platitudes. When they executed people at the guillotine, the head would keep living for a split second, able to watch the cheering crowds as your head detaches from your body, watch your torso in vertigo as your head is spinning into a straw bucket with that characteristic frown, he told me. I started to think of the grimaces of the faces attached to fences in The Levant. Fifty faces on fifty pillars. My eyes didn’t gaze, they peeped, at these half a century of faces frozen. A split of a second enough, to see the grimaces on these faces detached from their torso, so similar to the grotesques found in the capital of Liguria. He asked me if I had ever seen the videos of those guys burned to death trapped in car tires. It is called necklacing, he continued. Must be a bitter-sweet smell, he muttered. Living human flesh dipped in decomposed dinosaurs set on fire. Doesn’t get any sweeter, any bitterer, I thought. When will humanity move on from attrition and embrace admonition before facing annihilation, I thought as I cursed my arthritis. There is no air in here. Stuffy crypt in a sordid scenario called a life. Information has no value, I kept pondering, only how you process it. I am skinless.

I left him in that humid cellar. This temple of piteous temptations, pine panels plastered on the mortar, to isolate sound, to isolate dread. Stagnatae lusus naturae. Fungus growing in the corners of the concrete ceiling. Green fading into black on white. Him turning his faux leathered wheeled chair back to face the screen. The surround speakers just underneath the dimorphic growth of the fungus, the transmitters transmuted into the fermenter, making mildew. The different partitions of the soundscape emancipated into their right place in conjunction with the scenario unfolding on the liquid tableau of the monitor. Creating an illusion that the sound was always behind you. That the monsters in the game were following you. Stalking. But I imagine, when sound is muted, the lurid soundscape shall still be stalking. Still hunt him. He keeps on going and going in scene manufactured, through corridors and caves, facing virtual monster after a computerized beast, flamethrower in virtual hands, eupnea tingling his neck. Sonic waves mingled with a vacuous mind. When the sounds die, the monster, which is his life, a confrontation procrastinated, eternally seemingly, or as eternal as one life can be, will swim slowly into his mental hemisphere, his Cthulhu tangling with his trauma, tentacles of mental torture. I am short of breath.

I walked out into his neighborhood searching for the metro through artificial fog made out of particles of poison. Low winter sun beaming orange rays through the violet vista. All buildings are made to last a lifetime only. No thought of coming kin. A society of me, me, me. My abdomen hurts, my shoulder is numb, my head is about to burst, my fingers screaming, and my left eye is almost blind, fogged down, and damaged by sight, but I don’t complain, just like everything, I am grinding down. Worn in a decade. Torn in a century. Pearls. Of cold sweat. On your feverish forehead. As you stroll down the avenue. No wonder one is appealed to by metaverses when captured by these prospects. Your fate determined by syndicates, dynasties, dystopian delusions. Determinism is appalling when based on worried sleep, sordid work, vapid leisure, and wrecked community. Grinding down in a grid. The sun sets with a sob. The stars in the sky are not visible here, only one’s distorted silhouette in crystalline surfaces, as one moves from one intolerable architectural entanglement to the next, as a lab rat stuck in an oversized circuit board. Yearning for war. Worn to the core. We live in dark times, they say, like time is the issue, not how we manage material motion. What constitutes our so-called reality? If the world is insane are you thus insane if you are normal? And what do you mind? Don’t you see that all which I can explain with tongue and scribble down I could craft with strained hands, sacrifice sweat, but I don’t, I won’t bother? I keep my sweat and let it land as tears softly in the palms of my hands.

I wait at the metro station in a site too desolate to earn the title place. A small group is gathered around me, a pregnant woman shooting smack on the bank, her baby blue veins popping out of her ghastly ivory arms through the skin, like her tiny tummy with her crash test dummy fetus, bulging out of her torn shorts, two old men rolling a joint filled with tobacco and white powder, talking in a dialect only they could ever comprehend, spitting their sentences like curses, their faces like gargoyles, this beautiful woman, this angel of a grown girl with cinnamon skin, sliding slowly down the wall, clutching an urchin wrapped in a pink blanket, her eyes going white in their sockets, her cornea sliding into the skull, disappearing simultaneously with her sensory cortex, she loses the grip on the crack pipe, but not the child, the infant in deep sleep on her neck as she collapses on the concrete pavement, stays on her shoulder. All their calamity. Except for the man with a fresh crew cut and all-weather jacket, standing with his headset, whistling a tune from the late 90s, chewing gum, with eyes as bland as eyes can be, fresh from the gym shower, ready for quinoa and chicken with half a handful of grated parmesan, served on his vintage Formica dining table, in his newly renovated flat, then a sip of gin before nodding off on the divan. I step up behind him and close my eyes. The palms of my hands a millimeter from his shoulder blades. Then I push with my mind as the train enters the station and his ghost is torn to shreds by the ghost train in the ghost world. He turns and glares at my palms, at my closed eyes wide open, and I smile.

Thousands of miles away a woman walks towards that park dedicated to the great poet, a shortcut to her office. She is not supposed to work today. Her husband pleaded with her to stay at home. She will give birth within a month. We are under attack, he reminds her. Nowhere is safe, he insists. Stay at home please, he pleads. She dreams of a blissful future among the ruins. Then the projectile strikes her and her unborn. She bleeds to death on the pavement. All in pieces around her. Another hole in the ground. Another hole in my heart. I wish I wasn’t affected. Are all these horrid daydreams a method to suppress, to replace, the hideous verisimilitude of the works, I ponder, I wonder. I step onto the train carriage. The fluorescent light bites with its flicker, forcing me to find another mind inside mine. As I sit down on the stenched benches and meditate on the silence of Sobibor, the site where no birds are singing, weary of the burned corpses laying around, underground, feeding the soil for vapid trees growing stems towards heaven. The train moves along. Choo-choo. As I sigh my sight swirls towards a teen with a telephone, watching a video vapidly, of a group of men castrating a young man, a lone soldier with a wolfsangel insignia on his jacket, the perpetrators with grinning human skulls on theirs, the camouflaged group of men laughing acidic laugh acapella, knife in hand, to send a message, video through the wires of the lands to the hand of this kid, watching with jaded eyes. All freezes within me. I cry that silent cry which has no voice, no outlet, no consequence, and no direction. This is reality condensed. A reality without sense. I am ashamed of being human.

Moving out of the carriage like blood leaving a freshly cut wound, with the untrue crowd, flowing through the terminal, the hallways, the passages, the entries, revolving doors, defunct escalators, collapsed elevators, hallways once beautifully tiled now eroding, desecrated down, stained by puke, feces, blood. graffiti. Fuck your fucking loneliness a tag says. It speaks to me. Humans move with me, move past me, move through me until I am all alone in this ghastly rotunda. Ghouls leaving me be. We are not the same species. A Homo Sacer among Homo Echoes. The scar of Cain is branded on my temple. Flies inside my mind, moving about, in circles. Whirlmind. My brain is a turd attracting bugs. I belong here, in the underground, with the pests, the scarred, the pained, the scared, the pathetic, the sacred, and the discarded. As I move to the exit, I notice a metal side door vaguely ajar. I grab the doorknob firmly, and my hands start trembling when the squeak appears as I enter, and the smell which hits me, is a seismic wave of fumes. I walk the charcoal corridor to its dead end in the dark. My steps echo hollowly as I pass through the luscious aisle. I lit a match. Then he appears. Sitting on the floor at the end of the foyer. His skin is like ash, his expression as dull as his pulse, dead to the core. In a line from his left eye, I see the trace of a tear, dried up, creating a variation in his dehydrated chin. His stare is so vacant, though sorrow remains. He is clutching a half-empty plastic bottle of pink rubber alcohol, labeled with a skull and crossbones, the hazard symbol. The last warning, the one he did not abide by. His last rebellion. Then I hear something behind me. The door. It closes behind me. I am alone. Only me, the ash man, and the darkness, the liquid dripping onto the uneven concrete in ponds soon to be a pool. As I light a new match I see. It is me. It is me sitting there, sedentary, dead at the dead end of the artery. I moonwalk slowly towards the door, the hand of the ashed out me moving barely, small twitches of the finger, though it might be an illusion from the flicker of the fire. As I leave I hear the ash man whisper; who are you? Why don’t you come with me?

As I step into my apartment I hit a wall of echoes so compressed they summarize what is and should not be an outside, transcribed into here inside and now, at this site which I call home, and I vomit. The saliva mixed with crushed cookies finds a home beneath the floorboards. Food for the vermin. I leave the lights off. Then I take a vinyl record from the shelf; Politische Ouvertüre by Wagner, and stab it several times with a switchblade; a shape reminiscent of a quirky smiling face with its nose torn off, put it on the turntable and set it in reverse. The needle jumps around on the vinyl like a drunk ballerina on some bombed-out opera stage. The light through the cracks in the roof, the crater that is the ceiling, hits her vinyl dress, sparkling in little twinkles as the ballerina goes into the first position, Vaganova style. She forms a heart with her arms above her head and lifts her face upon the chasm in the ceiling, twinkle, twinkle little star, with or without a sound. She closes her eyes as the second missile hits the theater, the crater she stands on, on her toes. is a pile of carbonated children lumped together in the basement of the theater, now a crater, the needle, the ballerina, only a vague memory from some chimerical future. The theater is a crater, like a crater is a theater, a spectacle of nothingness in an oversaturated world, secretly longing for obliteration. I light a candle and then lie down on the floor. Rambling resentment reverbs rapidly, repeats, roams, ravages, thoughts twinge torridly, totally, tired tenacious pondering pollutes painfully, pathetically, pointlessly. Possibly poignantly. Through these tactile thoughts rhythm rises reverence ravenously, numbs noon, negates night, and mourns mornings. And then the momentum fades. All is gray. All is dull dusk. All are dead dawn. Oh, in the sweet afternoon, mischievous memories, gargantuan gangrene, malicious migraine, world stay away, words leave me be. Forlorn in my whimper. No eyes in my sockets. Heads heads heads. Rolling. Rolling. Rolling. Down the ramps, ramps, ramps. Like ellipses after a sentence…

Then the mental collapse. Suddenly somber sorrow signifies solace. I pick up twelve matchsticks from the box, order them in an ornament of a jigsaw blade with small gaps, matchstick head touching matchstick head, WWW, then I tilt the third W counterclockwise, WW3, put it alight with the thirteenth match, the heads catch fire, the sulfur sheds a septic stench, a hint of blue in the cold pyre, a tinder relay burns into the teak table, I wait until the corpses of the sticks turn temperate, then brush the ashes and coal onto the linoleum floor, scarred onto the surface I see a future without fate, without faith, and I realize that war has no chronology, that there has been a perpetual war of the world since the advent of man. I place a worn vade mecum over the burn mark, then the window ablaze with wondrous illumine. I stand up to watch as a mammoth mushroom cloud forms outside, inside the frame of my window, encapsulates everything, swallows all shadows with enchanted light until I am enveloped within the square beam of particles, the blaze of inverted darkness from outside the window or inside my mind.

We are excited to present Emil Finnerud’s first solo show at MELK. Attrition is a total installation of the gallery space consisting of site-specific works, sculptures and sound. Sound for the installation made by Vomir (Fr). 

ATTRITION

Elin Brissman

Rune Elgaard

Christopher Rådlund

Marianne Wiig Storaas

Linda Soh Trengereid

 (b. 1982, Sweden) lives and works in Bergen. She graduated with a Master of fine art at Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2011. Elin Brissman has exhibited at Galleri Langegården, Bergen (2013, 2016, 2020), Trafo Kunsthall, Asker (2017) and Galleri LNM (2019) amongst others, participated in group shows such as Høstutstillingen (2012, 2017, 2020) and 1968 – 2018, 50 år med LNM (2018) and been purchased by KORO, Bergen Kommune, Hordaland Fylkeskommune, and others.

 (b. 1980, Denmark) lives and works in Oslo. He holds a MA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He has exhibited at KB Contemporary, Oslo (2022), White Noise Gallery in Rome (2021), Labor, Cologne (2018) and LNM, Oslo (2018) among others. Elgaard is represented by White Noise Gallery and KB Contemporary. His works are in several private and public collections such as REV Ocean, KLP, Norway and Nykredit Foundation, Denmark.

 (b. 1984, South Korea) lives and works in Bergen. She graduated with a master’s in fine art at Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2011. In recent years, she has had solo exhibitions at Visningsrommet USF in Bergen (2021), Voss kulturhus (2018), Kunstgarasjen in Bergen (2017) and Galleri LNM in Oslo (2016). Her works have been purchased by Haukeland University Hospital, the University of Bergen and Fana Kulturhus and other private collections.

 (b.1972, Norway) lives and work in Oslo. She graduated with a master from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2002. Wiig Storaas is represented by KB Contemporary. She has been exhibited at Galleri QB (2019) LNM (2015), Trafo Kunsthall (2012), Bomuldsfabriken in Arendal (2010), Haugar kunstmuseum (2008), Kunstnerforbundet (2006), Stensersenmuseet (2004), Den Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen (2000) and Høstutstillingen (several times). Her works are in several private and public collections such as Norwegian Parliament, The Norwegian Bank, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and she has been acquired by the National Museum of Arts, Architecture and Design with several works.

 (b. Sweden 1970) lives and works in Oslo. He is educated at the Konstindustriskolan (HDK) in Gothenburg in 1988–1991 and 1994–1995, the Konstögskolan in Umeå in 1992–1995 and Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 1995–1998. He has had a number of solo exhibitions including Galleri Semmingsen 2022, Galleri Ismene 2021, Galleri Langegården 2019, Galleri EKG 2017, Forsvarsmuseet 2014, Kunsthub/Rod Bianco 2012 among others. has also been a frequent guest in group exhibitions. Among these are the Autumn Exhibition on several occasions, Gothenburg Art Gallery, Røros Museum, Liljevalch Art Gallery, Stenersen Museum, Henie Onstad Art Center, Kristiansand Art Gallery, Värmlands konstmuseum, Festspillene in Northern Norway and more.

Technology and art have been connected for centuries in ways that has developed progressive artistic concepts and changed the way art is created and shared, enabling artists to gain access to expand their mediums beyond conventional boundaries.

In the group exhibition titled TRANSFORMATIONS we have gathered five artists working with drawings and paintings that utilize photography as the first part of their process. A technique dating back to the renaissance period when artists like Vermeer (among many others) started to use a camera obscura, where the painters would project the subjects onto a wall in a dark room and draw over it. Hence why camera obscura translated from Latin to English literally means ‘dark room’.

Inspired by this process we have invited Elin Brissman, Rune Elgaard, Christopher Rådlund, Marianne Wiig Storaas, and Linda Soh Trengereid who all use photography in different ways in their artistic practice and will show new paintings for this exhibition.

Elin Brissman works with time-consuming, photorealistic oil paintings with simple, flat and formalistic compositions. Starting with photographs of everyday post-war architecture, she paints specific buildings, choosing those that do not stand out. In a society where so much is calling for our attention, she is interested in the low-key qualities of post-war modernism. Safe, simple shapes and small variations. Functional, practical and down-to-earth. Her paintings become an archive of the background noise of cities. Human lives are interpreted through the traces they leave behind.

Rune Elgaard’s artistic practice addresses poetic statements that are characterized by the incomplete and the ambiguous. Combining both figurative and non-figurative elements, his work is executed with a masterly sense of precision and detail. With strategies related to Dada and Surrealism, Elgaard samples seemingly unrelated elements and meanings to surprising new compositions and narratives. He finds, selects, and saves imagery and text material from magazines, books and films, often with historical and/or art historical references. The works are generated through intuitive juxtapositions of archive material.

From early in his career, Christopher Rådlund worked in parallel with darkroom photography and charcoal drawing with ascetic landscape motifs. A method developed where the charcoal drawing took the form of a development process. The form of work was transported into the painting simulating shapes, tones, and light that are exposed on the canvas. Rådlunds paintings represent simplicity, silence, soothing, darkness and longing.

In Marianne Wiig Storaas paintings she is concerned with the intrinsic value of her craft. The actual time it takes to paint a picture is visible. This is a formal contrast to the immediacy of photography, and a prerequisite for processing photographic material in a medium which, after the photograph, is always seen by eyes that are oriented towards the photographic optics. She is keen to show off the photographic presentation. The use of photography and the instability of its approach is present in the paintings, she uses photography’s “mistakes, such as light onto the film or double exposures, to create distance to subjects that are personal, painful and nostalgic.

Linda Soh Trengereid’s paintings balance between the actual and the fictional, a kind of magical realism where the subjects are detached from a specific time and place. The works give associations to hand-colored photographs and graphics, but with clear painterly and drawn qualities. Trengereid works serially, in varying sizes, from the small and intimate to large formats that fill the entire field of vision. The starting point for her motifs comes from places she has visited and stayed, both ordinary and more exotic locations. The motifs are snapshots from random situations she has come across.

TRANSFORMATIONS is a MELK curated group show with works from Elin Brissman, Rune Elgaard, Christopher Rådlund, Marianne Wiig Storaas and Linda Soh Trengereid.

Represented artists

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