Knut Bry is a Norwegian photographer who has worked widely in the fields of art, advertising, and fashion. He has achieved great recognition for his pictures both in Norway and abroad. In recent years, he has volunteered at the Pikpa refugee camp on Lesvos and often visited the Moria camp to document and donate clothes. Between 2016 and 2020, he traveled to Greece seven times until he was arrested and had all his equipment confiscated by the Greek authorities.
Works: “Moria and Pikpa: The Escape’s Waiting Room”
Gazelle Pezeshkmehr is an award-winning visual artist specializing in staged and conceptual photography. She was educated at the Royal Academy of Arts in the Netherlands and the Einar Granum Art School in Norway. Drawing inspiration from themes of psychiatry, identity, and endurance, her work explores the intricate inner sphere of the human experience.
Works: “Your name” and “Women.Life:Freedom”.
Gelawesh Waledkani was born in 1982 in Kurdistan and currently lives and works in Oslo. She holds a master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. Throughout her artistic career, Gelawesh Waledkhani has focused on oppressed and suffering people who are victims of the brutality of war.
Work: “Rojava: The women’s revolution”.
Karina McKenzie is a psychologist, Buddhist, art therapist, and artist. She draws inspiration from Tibetan Buddhism while exploring sustainable approaches in the fields of psychology and art. She believes in the power and importance of compassion in today’s world. If we had more compassion, we would care more about ourselves, others, and the planet we inhabit, and our choices would be sustainable for the whole rather than just for ourselves.
Elin Mack’s visual expression hovers between the monumental and the very intimate. The installation work “Project Subject” consists of bodyprints from 40 women in full size, printed onto bedsheets. The women, in all shapes, sizes, colors and ages from 20 to 97 have found their way to my studio, got undressed, and let me cover them with acrylic paint, and then given their prints. This is a reaction to the MeToo campaign, and it is their way of telling their own stories. The installation takes form as an army of women.
Works: “Project subject”.
Amir Mirzai has brought with him a rich storytelling tradition from his upbringing in Iran and is today considered one of Norway’s leading storytellers. He narrates for both children and adults and has produced popular children’s shows since 2002. Amir Mirzai also works as an Iranian journalist and translator of Persian.
Performance: “Den persiske hanen fra Drammen”.
Hediyeh Azma is an Iranian dancer, choreographer, and dance scholar. Her productions engage in a creative-critical remapping of experience, questioning the current accepted socio-political patterns to envision an alternative understanding of the present. Her works are characterised by long term engagement in Iranian embodied cultures and movement vocabulary.
Performance: Dance from south Iran.
Nadina Helen Bakos is a photographer, film maker, writer and artist based in Oslo, Norway. Her works center around topics such as misogyny, sisterhood, trauma and discrimination. The series “The glass ceiling” is a series of 12 portraits that depict women in an idealized reality. The term ‘glass ceiling’ was first used by Kathrine Lawrence and Marianne Schreiber in 1979 to describe the obstacles women face when seeking career opportunities, leadership roles, and positions of trust in society. To change this, we must be willing to envision women fully occupying these spaces.
Works: “The glass ceiling”.
Zhanna Gladko is an artist from Belarus, living in Norway. Her works, through the strategy of constructing ambivalent images, are aimed at rethinking/deconstructing extensive concepts, such as the system of art and society, religion and culture, history and memory, gender policy, the analysis of the role of contemporary museum, the subject of identity crisis, etc.
Work: “Future”.
Hanne Ugelstad is a social pedagogue, educator, writer, artist and photographer, specialized in working with marginalized youth groups and urban subcultures. She works with art, education, activism, politics, environmental psychology, project development, curation and communication, as pedagogical leader in Street Art Oslo.
Works: Subvertising posters
