Visitors 2022

Kjersti Solbakken (b. 1984, Valnesfjord) is a freelance curator, writer and an institutional leader based in Oslo, Norway. Solbakken has recently been assigned as the curator of Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) 2024. LIAF acknowledges the complexity of place and seeks to be an open, experimental and including meeting place for artists, audience and locals.

Between 2017 and 2022 she was appointed director of Kunstnerforbundet, one of Scandinavia's oldest artist-run exhibition spaces. During her time at the institution, Atelier Kunstnerforbundet was established - a studio collective, a network of art enthusiasts and a pioneer project in the field of public engagement in Kunstnerforbundet’s own premises in the center of Oslo. Between 2015-2016 she was appointed director of Galleri Format in Oslo and from 2014-2015 she was the director of Fotogalleriet in Oslo. In 2014 she curated the exhibition Biography by Elmgreen & Dragset at Astrup Fearnley Museet, together with Gunnar Kvaran. She has curated numerous exhibitions as a freelance curator for institutions such as Hordaland Kunstsenter, Vestlandsutstillingen (Kunsthall Stavanger, Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum, Kunsthuset Kabuso, Kunstmuseet Kube and Haugesund Kunstforening) Telemark Kunstsenter and F15.

In 2007 she co-founded the small press Feil forlag with Andreas Liebe Delsett where she in close collaboration with the artists has experimented with various formats and strategies of publishing. She has also been a co-organiser of Tekstallianse, a Nordic festival for imprints and small press publishers. From 2011-2013 she was the director of the non-profit project space Holodeck together with Lina Norell and Silja Leifsdottir. She has been a board member of UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund) and The Norwegian Association of Curators. Education includes an MA degree in curatorial studies at Bergen Academy of Art and Design and a BFA in Fine Arts at the Academy of Arts in Oslo, Norway.

Anawana Haloba (Livingstone, Zambia, 1978) lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. Her artistic practice is symbiotically linked to and through her preparatory exercise in drafting poetry in the forms of sketches from which, the artist abstracts to performative based artworks within moving image, installation, and sound, while creating situations where the material culture of any given place can be probed and reconsidered within the scheme of rapidly shifting contemporary subjectivities. Recently, her research investigates the epistemologically oppressed kowledges and technologies through methods of listening and other oral understanding to activate (re)pair and opacity.

Haloba’s work has been shown in institution such as Centre Pompidou, France; Oslo Kunstforening, Norway: GAMeC, Italy; SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway; National Museum of African Arts Smithsonian Institute, US; the Rauma Biennale, Finland; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany; Museum Berardo Collection, Portugal; la Biennale di Venezia, 2009; Sydney Biennale 2008; Manifesta 7; the Sharjah Biennial 8th, 11th and 14th editions, as well as the biennales in Sao Paulo, 2016; Shanghai, 2016; Lyon, 2017; the Bucharest Biennale, 2021, Fellbach triennial 2022.

She co-founded Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA) in 2014 as an artist-initiated non-profit library, research centre and collective/collaborative platform for reflections and an experimental think-tank, exploring histories (colonial histories, social and political histories and their legacies) and how they relate to language and contemporary art.