Visitors 2013

Hilde Methi is an independent curator. Her work investigates the relationship of her own locale to a larger geopolitical setting. Based on her interest in local history, politics and economy, she builds up ongoing projects and art collectives infusing artistic ideas into the local context. After leaving her position at Pikene på broen in 2008 she conceived the Sámi Art Festival in various places in the Barents Region and Sápmi (initiated by the Sami Artists Union, 2008–11); co-curated 'russianmarket.info', Taking Inventory, Uqbar (2011); 'Extreme Crafts', Freies Museum, Berlin (2012); and Nørrekærbiennalen (2014). She is also involved in the art collectives Mobile Kultur Byrå (2006–), which looks at the trading climate in particular contexts; LUJA (2005–) which connects contemporary art, design and indigenous crafts; and the Rural Reading Room (2012–), which highlights the materiality of the landscape using a tabletop as its format. She has just concluded the first series of 'Dark Ecology' with Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), which took place over three years, focusing on border zone of Norway / Russia, and included installations, films, sound works on a bus, and on a frozen lake. Part of those commissions is now visible at SALT in Oslo. Her exhibition 'Indigenous Peoples of the North' in 1995 was held at the Norwegian-Russian Art Centre in Kirkenes, and consisted of art by women artists from Northern Sweden, Finland, Norway and from Naryan Mar in Russia (where the Nenets people are living).

Thora Dolven Balke has exhibited extensively in Norway and internationally in the past years, involving both an exploration of image-making through her own artistic practice, and an involvement in the organisation of artistic and curatorial platforms that contribute to the development of other artists’ work as well as their connection with other cultural forms, such as music and performance. Her photographs, in the form of polaroids and photographic albums as well as films, suggest a diaristic, subjective approach to image-making that refuses to come clear about the level of fiction they contain. In 2008 she was part of ‘Lights On – norsk samtidskunst’, which took place at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. Her work was later part of ‘The Collectors’, an exhibition curated by Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset as the official representation in the 2009 Venice Biennale.