Recipients 2009

Aslak Gurholt Rønsen and Espen Friberg co-founded design studio/art collective Yokoland sometime between 2001 and 2006. They are also co-founders, together with a group of musicians, of the independent music label Metronomicon Audio. The group has shown in a number of national and international exhibitions, and in 2006 had a monograph about their work published by Die Gestalten Verlag, titled Yokoland - As we go up we go down. In 2007 Espen Friberg emigrated to the US, where he has worked as an artist, illustrator and designer since. Aslak Gurholt Rønsen has continued running Yokoland in Oslo. During the residency in New York, Yokoland participated withing the 'NO SOUL FOR SALE, A Festival of Independents', organised by, at X Initiative, New York. 'NO SOUL FOR SALE' brings together non-profit centres, alternative institutions, artists' collectives and independent enterprises from around the world with the aim of providing an occasion to foster creative exchange and connect with international organisations. Within 'NO SOUL FOR SALE', Yokoland exhibited a number of projects, including Why Have You Not Taken Me There, a series of big screenprints inspired by fictional places by Espen Friberg, and Aslak Gurholt Rønsen's visual research based on similar photographs collected during the past five years and a series of small collages exploring a technique inspired by old landscape paintings.

Jonas Ekeberg was trained as an artist. He is currently the director of Preus Museum, Norway's national museum for photography. Ekeberg has been a critic for NRK, Dagbladet and the Norwegian Business Daily and has been the editor of Hyperfoto, Siksi and Billedkunst. He was the chief curator of Momentum in 2000, founding director of Oslo Kunsthall the same year and a curator at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway from 2002-04. His exhibitions for Preus museum include 'Photography's Expanded Field', 'Skate Culture', 'Technology & Aesthetics and 80 million pictures - Norwegian vernacular photography 1855-2005'. In August 2009 he will take up the position as the editor of the online journal kunstkritikk.no.