The Office for Contemporary Art Norway provides financial support on a quarterly basis for international projects including Norwegian artists and/or cultural producers. This includes extending support to group or single artist exhibitions initiated by international institutions and international curators. International artists who have permanent residence in Norway may also apply for support. The objective is to foster innovative artistic production, expression and the creative process by encouraging and supporting projects that support, exhibit and interpret a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practices.

The final grant period for 2006 will be decided upon by mid December with final announcement to be made 20 December.

The recipients will be listed here.

Next Grant Application deadline is 15 February

The 2nd Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art was awarded to Alice Creischer 14 November. The award was presented by Her Majesty the Queen of Norway, in the University Aula in Oslo. The ceremony included a presentation by the artist entitled L'atelier de la Peintrice, where she explored how painting serves as a "political form". Thetalk centered on a work —L'atelier de la peintrice, produced by the artist in 2000 for Government, an exhibition curated by Documenta curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack. Creischer's work drew its inspiration from Gustave Courbet who painted the original L'atelier de la Peintrice, in 1855 and which served, in his words, as "a real allegory" of painting. In this particular work, Courbet painted himself as the central figure in his studio, working on landscape that led to the reading of the studio as a place of production and a social arena. The scene depicted includes Baudelaire and also Minister de Persigny, who started a coup d'etat against Nepoleon III that brought the Republic to an end and reinstated the monarchy. Bakunin has been painted into the painting's background. Alice Creischer revisits Courbet's approach treating her painting as a "real allegory" and as a basis for mapping out the power structure endemic to political systems.

The International Studio Programme Oslo is available for international artists and curators by invitation for a stay from two weeks up to six months, independently or in connection with research in Norway. The programme comprises four studios located in the city centre of Oslo.

Sean Snyder
Artist
Born 1972, Virginia Beach, USA
Lives and works in Berlin, Kyiv and Tokyo

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Rosalind Nashashibi
Artist
Born in Croydon, England
Lives and works in London, England

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Marko Lulic
Artist
Born 1972 in Vienna, Austria

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In 2007/2008 Office for Contemporary Art Norway offers two different studio grants for a Norwegian artist and a Norwegian curator at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City. The artist/curator will be selected by the host institution, ISCP NYC, in collaboration with Office for Contemporary Art Norway Jury.

Application deadline 15 February 2007

In 2007/2008 Office for Contemporary Art Norway offers a studio grant for a Norwegian artist at the International Studio Program Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. The artist will be selected by the host institution, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, in collaboration with Office for Contemporary Art Norway Jury 2007.

Application deadline 15 February 2007

Sven Påhlsson participates in the project entitled Animated Stories, an exhibition that opened at La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain in June, and is followed by its next venue and recent opening at Sala Rekalde in Bilbao (30 October–7 January, 2007). The exhibition, curated by Marta Gili, the newly appointed director of Jeu de Paume in Paris, explores drawing and digital animation in relation to their artistic potential for imagining and producing stories to critically reflect on the world around us.

Jan Christensen's project BAR-code is exhibited through 7 January, 2007 at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium. The project that incorporates murals containing figurative and abstract elements, computer graphics and graffiti writing, is a result of "high and low culture that take on the architecture of the space itself".

Øystein Aasan will participate in the exhibition Klartext Berlin, at the Kunstraum Niederosterreich in Vienna. Curated byRaimar Stange and Christiane Krejs, the project will open on 6 October and will include additional works by Candice Breitz, Michel Majerus, Jonathan Monk, Olaf Nicolai, among others. Aasan will present his work entitled Bootleg Piece — a series of bootleg recordings of concerts distributed freely on CD's, with the aim to create a different distribution system and collection of sound works.

Fredrik Raddum presents an expansive installation within X-rummet at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. The exhibition which opened on 28 October and will run through 7 January, 2007 will explore notions of home endemic to the ideas of Gaston Bachelard.

Mikkel Wettre will participate in an exhibition entitled The Square Root of Drawing at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studiosin Dublin, Ireland. The exhibition, curated by Noel Kelly, will be open from 24 October–2 December, offers a critical survey of international contemporary drawing from three curatorial perspectives: firstly, observing drawing as a primary practice, secondly investigating its elemental place within artists' wider practice and lastly exploring drawing as a method of achieving final works in other media such as painting and sculpture.

Witte de With Director Nicolaus Schafhausen and WdW curator Renske Janssen include the works by Gardar Eide Einarsson and Marius Engh in the exhibition Street: Behind the Cliché scheduled through 19 November, 2006. The exhibition approaches what — and who — fills the sociocultural space of our day to day surroundings. It investigates the public spaces of supermodernity — as defined by Marc Auge — by presenting 28 international artists whose works embody alternatives to the anonymity of the globalized world and render visible the underlying structures and mechanisms of public space.

Leif Magne Tangen will participate in a book launch at the Project Art Space in Dublin, Ireland from 2 November–14 January, 2007. The book project as a collaborative project with Heman Chong is intended as a science fiction novel using a grid of structures collaborating with other invited curators, artists, writers, to be printed by Dexter/Sinister. The book project intended to be shown as a part of Manifesta 6 will be shown in Dublin as one of the alternative sites for the originally planned Manifesta as led by Mai Abu El Dahab.

Anne Szefer Karlsen has been invited by the organization Vector in Iasi, Romania, to present Individual Communities — a presentation of video works from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The programme will be screened at Vector from November 22–27th of November.

Curator Will Bradley has invited Andreas Dalen to participate in the exhibition How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, California. The project revolves around the contrasting visions of future put forward in California in the mid 1970s. It takes is title from an essay by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, in which he compares the speculative world building of artists and writers to the scenarios imagined and constructed by governments, corporations and the mass media.

The exhibition opens28 November, 2006 and runs through 24 February, 2007. Other artists participating in the exhibition: Can Altay, NateBoyce, Rick Guidice, Shaun O'Dell, Toby Paterson, Eileen Quinlan, Eva Rothschild, Katya Sander, William Scott, SolmazShabazi, Bonnie Sherk, and Gitte Villesen.

Geir Tore Holm will participate in the exhibition project Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts, curated by Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen for NIFCA. The exhibition constitutes the last major exhibition production before the institution closes in 2007. Geir Tore Holm have participated in Rethinking Nordic Colonialismwith two works — Mun rahkistan — in mun ge, a music video from 2005 and Vara addit!, a promotion stand for blood donation from 2006. The music video will be launched as part of a DVD Box Set in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, andStockholm on 25 November.

Else Marie Hagen has been invited by the curator Petra Bungert to participate in a group exhibition, Double Exposure due to open at the Center for Non-Objective Art in Brussels on 1 December through 14 December.

Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin has invited Ane Lan to participate with her video Elegi in the exhibitionSexwork — Kunst Mythos Realität. The exhibition is scheduled to open on 16 December and to be shown at NGBK through 25 February, 2007. The exhibition will explore the phenomenon of prostitution, from various perspectives and will investigate the myths and limited perceptions that have arisen around prostitution.

Hungarian curator Livia Paldi selected works by Vibeke Tandberg and Torbjørn Rødlandto be included in the exhibition Dreamlands Burn, scheduled to open at the Mucsarnok in Budapest on 7 December, 2006. The exhibition which is scheduled to run through 24 February, 2007 proposes a crossover of the contemporary art scenes in the Nordic countries, with an investigation of identity through the very personal. Other artists included in the project are Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Johanna Billing, Tommi Grönland and Petteri Nisunen, Felix Gmelin, Alexander Gutke, Jesper Just, Joachim Koester, Gitte Villesen among others.

Yokoland (founded by Aslak Gurholt Rønsen and Espen Friberg) has been invited byRobert Blackson, the curator at the Reg Vardy Gallery at the University of Sunderland to exhibit their print based work from 23 January–23 February 2007.

Tom Sandberg will have a major exhibition curated by Bob Nickas at P.S.1 MoMA in New York City. The exhibition, scheduled to open in February, 2007, will include more than thirty photographs taken over the past ten years, this will be the photographer's first major exhibition in the United States. Nickas writes:"Sandberg has produced a remarkable body of work that is consistent in its vision, imbued with a sense of mystery and great depth of feeling ... Sandberg's work is about photography, about the act of seeing, and ultimately about being in the world."

Curator Mami Kataoka has invited Trine Lise Nedreaas to participate in All About Laughter at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan from 27 January–6 May, 2007. Nedreaas has been invited to participate with video and photographic work Forget Me Not 1, 2, 3 in an exhibition which explores the role of "humour in depicting worlds that are not possible in real life". The exhibition which is divided into three sections — 1) avant-garde and laughter, 2) laughter in everyday life and 3) laughter across different cultures — includes among others works by George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Erwin Wurm, Peter Land, Gabriel Orozco, Damian Ortega, Mark Bradford, Carlos Amorales, Alora and Calzadilla among others.

Katja Høst has been invited to a present a project Blind Spots at the artist run space Articule in Montreal Canada. The project approaches "ones visibility in public space and the impossibility of escaping ones own subject and become "the other"." The project will be exhibited from 2 February through 18 March, 2007.

Martin Skauen has been invited into a group exhibition entitled Whenever It Starts It Is The Right Time, by Chus Martinez, Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The exhibition scheduled to open at the Kunstverein in March 2007, explores a world run by states and corporations, in activating our immediate reality. Martinez has asked that Skauen participate with The Polarbear Split.

OCA supported Norwegian curator Leif Magne Tangen in curating a project entitled I will never make it at Kunstraum D21in Leipzig, Germany. The exhibition, writes Tangen, is born out of the necessity of failing. Built upon an original work by Jan Christensen from 2000, the project includes artists Mikkel McAlinden, Mark Hamilton, Paolo Chiasera, and Reto Pulfer. The show will open in March 2007.

Frankfurter Kunstverein Director, Chus Martinez, will curate a major solo exhibition with the works of Gardar Eide Einarsson in September 2007 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Martinez notes that Einarsson's work refers to the notion of utopia understood as "the impossibility of a place". On the other hand, the artist also addresses the notion of the "future" — or better, "the near future" — as the social ground we are already sharing and constructing for our collective tomorrow in the sense that we live in a permanent negotiation of different cultural and social backgrounds. Therefore, the solo presentation of Gardar Eide Einarsson should serve as a terrain to imagine this new territory. A place where different aesthetic premises co-exist.

Dr. Barbara Steiner, Curator and Director of the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische KunstLeipzig, Germany, invited the artist Stefan Schröder to participate in a public project entitled Plagwitzer Sand in Summer 2007 in Leipzig.

The new OCA Semesterplan Will be announced in January 2007.

Art of Welfare
Editors: Marta Kuzma, Peter Osborne
Managing Editor: Paul Brewer

The book reflects the seminar, Art of Welfare, which, organized by OCA, took place at the Goethe Institute in London in January 2006. The seminar was held in conjunction with Elmgreen and Dragset's exhibition, The Welfare Show, — initially produced by Bergen Kunsthall — which opened at the Serpentine at the same time. The seminar addressed aspects of the welfare society as implemented in the Scandinavian model of a democratic society. Introduction by Marta Kuzma and essays by Peter Osborne, Jeremy Till, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Claire Bishop and Victor Norman.

Art as a Participant in the public Arena
Editor: Tone Hansen

The anthology has been edited by artist and Research Rellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts Tone Hansen. This is Torpedo Press' first publication. The book discusses the political, analytical and critical potensial and possibilities of the art field. It has been made on the basis of the solo show Come and Take It with Gardar Eide Einarsson at the Young Artists Society (UKS) in 2003, the seminar similaly entitled, and the conference What Does Public Mean? Art as a Participant in the Public Arena arranged for the National Museum. Contributors are Marianne Heier (Oslo), Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas (Vilnius), Stian Grøgaard (Oslo), Peio Aguirre and Leire Vergara (San Sebastian/Bilbao), Tone Hansen (Oslo), Cornelia Sollfrank (Hamburg), Gardar Eide Einarsson (New York) and Ina Blom (Oslo).

Lene Berg

Encounter: Gentlemen & Arseholes (publication) and The Man in the Background (video) are two independent parts of a project dealing with western cultural politics and propaganda during the Cold War, in particular with the role of artists and intellectuals working for the organisation the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950–1967), also called the Liberal Conspiracy.

Application is open to all professional visual artists (no students) from all countries. 
Application deadline: 15 January, 2007. Click here for details.

Master of Science in Visual Studies (SMVisS)
Visual Arts Program
Application deadline: 15 December, 2006
Click here for details.

Claudia S. Sandor leaves her position as Newsletter Editor, translator, web editor and proofreader for OCA. We wish Claudia the best of luck with her future endeavours!

Siri Koren Furre, Informations officer at OCA, will be managing and coordinating the newsletter. Please be so kind as to send all pertinent material relating to exhibitions and events directly to siri@oca.no

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