Visitors 2017

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a curator, writer and educator. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, an online and onsite platform for community driven dialogue and discourse about craft. Wiggers served as the Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art), Portland, OR, from 2004–14, where she explored craft as a noun and a verb, and curated more than 65 exhibitions focused on contemporary and historical craft. Selected exhibitions include: 'Touching Warms the Art'; 'Object Focus: The Bowl'; and 'The Academy is Full of Craft'. Recent projects include 'Everything Has Been Material for Scissors to Shape' (2016–17), and 'Across the Table, Across the Land' (2016, with Michael Strand). Selected publications include essays and chapters in: Craft on Demand: The New Politics of the Handmade, Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture; Shows and Tales: On Jewelry Exhibition-Making; On + Off: Jewelry in the Wider Cultural Field; Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective; and Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft. Wiggers is the author of Generations: Betty Feves; Ken Shores: Clay Has the Last Word, Unpacking the Collection: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and editor of Garth Clark's How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts. She is the editor of the forthcoming Companion on Contemporary Craft, (Wiley Blackwell), and What is Contemporary About Craft?, Critical Craft Forum’s first print publication. She is an adjunct professor and graduate student mentor in the MFA in Applied Craft + Design, Oregon College of Art + Craft/Pacific Northwest College of Art and at Portland State University. In 2017, Wiggers received an award for Regional Excellence from NCECA with Nicole Nathan for their work on ceramics field at MoCC. Wiggers serves on the Board of Directors of The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She is the Exhibition Review Editor for The Journal of Modern Craft.

During her residence at Ekely as part of OCA's International Syudio Programme, Wiggers worked with Norwegian Crafts as a curator in residence, acting as consultant to both Norwegian Crafts and Galleri Format Oslo on forthcoming programmes and strategies.
Wiggers spent acquainted herself with the Norwegian contemporary craft scene by conducting studio visits to Norwegian crafts artists in Oslo, Tromsø and Trondheim, hosting professional workshops with curators and critics, and by moderating and hosting the international seminar 'Crafting Utopia and Dystopia: Future of Crafts in Museums' in Trondheim.

From August to November 2017, Gitanjali Dang will join the OCA ISP residency of Ekely, Oslo, and extend it through the OCA ISP+ to the Lofoten archipelago, which will include, among others, an OCA collaboration with Røst AiR. Røst AiR is an artist-in-residence run by a working group consisting of Elin Már Øyen Vister, Jason Rosenberg and Marie Kaada Hovden working on alternative ways of navigating, creating and being in this world. OCA would like to thank the Nordland County Council, Bodø; and The Hamsun Centre, Hamarøy for their kind support and collaboration.

Gitanjali Dang is a curator, writer and shape-shifter. In 2012, she founded Khanabadosh, an itinerant arts lab. Khanabadosh lives off latitude, magic and agnosticism, and is interested in everything. It is particularly interested in constantly rethinking what it—and everything around it—is about. In 2015, Khanabadosh, in collaboration with Institute for Contemporary Art Research, Zurich University of the Arts, co-founded Draft, which explores contemporary art that produces, contributes to or provokes public debate.

khanabadosh.info
draftprojects.info
aarandaar.net

Alice Creischer is an artist, curator, writer and theorist. Her artistic practice and theoretical work focuses on issues of economic and institutional critique, globalisation and the history of capitalism. Rather than concentrating on the production of individual works, Creischer centers on the process of inquiry to illuminate particular political histories of given contexts. Adopting prop-like devices and meticulously crafted and sewn objects, Creischer choreographs a space within a system of coordinates that deconstruct yet another set of given historical relations. Extending beyond artistic production, Creischer has also been prolific in her critical writings and curatorial projects.

Anders Sunna is an artist who grew up in a reindeer herding family in Kieksiäisvaara. His artistic work engages with the history of the Sami people and with his family's 47 year conflict with Sweden’s northernmost administrative herding delegation.