Closed Session is a short term residency in NYC offered to individual artists, curators and critics at the invitation of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. The purpose of Closed Session is to provide invited artists with the opportunity to gain a broader knowledge of other artist practices, to extend one's network of associations, and to enter into a dialogue with other curators, artists and professionals within a one week period. During the artist's stay, meetings and critiques are coordinated by [OCA, NYC]. Closed Session is a one week residency held at minimum once per semester.
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. As part of the 'one hour free programme', the collective perforemed a DJ session on Friday, 26 June.
Jonas Ekeberg (b.1967) is a curator and critic living in Oslo. 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.
Arve Rød (b. 1967) is an artist and critic based in Oslo, Norway. Although inspired by the works of conceptual artists, Arve Rød does not describe his work as conceptual. The artist chooses the words "institutional evaluation" or "negotiation". He has exhibited at Galleri F15, Moss, Norway (2006), UKS Biennial, Oslo, Norway (2004) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2004). In 2004, he was the Co-editor of the Norwegian Art Yearbook. As a freelance critic, he was written for Kunstkritikk.no, Billedkunst, Morgenbladet, Flash Art International, Klassekampen and currently writes art reviews for the newspaper Dagens Næringsliv.
Halvor Haugen (b. 1972) is a writer, translator and editor for UKS – Forum for Contemporary Art, a journal for contemporary art and theory, published in Oslo, Norway. He has written texts and criticism for Billedkunst, Kunstkritikk.no, and Umelec International. He lives and works in Oslo, Norway.
Nina Schjønsby's research is based around an investigation into the first ten years in the history of video art in an effort to make apparent the less documented and visible works within the discourse of video art and which according to Schjønsby, are closely linked to women's significant contribution to history of video art. Schjønsby's research will include meetings with seminal figures such as Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, Dee Dee Halleck (Former member of Tee Pee Video Space Troupe and Founder of Paper Tiger TV/professor), Nancy Cain (Former member of Videofreex), Joan Braderman, Kate Horsfield (Co-founder of Video Data Bank), Phyllis Gershuny (Former member of Raindance). Nina Schjønsby (b. 1972 in Vadsø, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. She is a writer and translator, writing for magazines like SITE and Billedkunst, and diverse art related publications, and translating art theoretical texts. She is a member of the editorial board in Billedkunst.
Karolin Tampere (b. 1978) is a recent graduate of De Appel in Amsterdam, with a BA in Visual Arts from Bergen National Academy of Arts (2005). Together with the artist Åse Løvgren, Tampere initiated the ongoing collaboration Rakett in 2003 as a mobile platform for various activities ranging from curatorial practice to initiating own collaborative artistic projects. Rakett projects function as temporary platforms for collaborative, often interdisciplinary, production; where the role of the initiator/curator is not only to create a framework and a stage but also to bring together different cultural producers, to create a moment of potentiality. Implicitly and explicitly, the projects touch on a range of questions around (co)authorship, (im)material production, the role of artist and curator, and the potential of mobile and changeable platforms in the institutional infrastructure for art.
Lina Viste Grønli (b. 1976) lives and works in Oslo where she graduated from The National Academy of Fine Art in 2003. Viste Grønli is preoccupied with formal and performative aspects of sculpture. Many of her works are concerned with the materialisation of linguistic terms, words and expressions. She explores collective references in language and the strategies involved in the construction of concepts. By giving material form to words and letters, she probes not just language and the semantic meaning of words, but also our understanding of them. Formal strategies and issues relating to situation and site-specificity are important aspects of her production. Venues where Lina Viste Grønli has exhibited include UKS, the Norwegian Sculpture Biennial in Oslo and, more recently, at Karma International in Z¨rich. She curated the show ROBERT SMITHSON at Fotogalleriet in Oslo, together with Anders Smebye, and designed The New Administration of Aesthetics, Torpedo Press.