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 funding for International Support is provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

03–Funding is a support program initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for enhancing collaboration in the contemporary art field with professional artists in countries in the South. This programme is also administered by OCA. 
Click here for information on the application process. 

For any questions regarding the process, please contact Velaug Bollingmo at vb@oca.no.

In November/December 2007, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway offers a studio-apartment grant for a length of two months for Norwegian curators, critics, and artists in Berlin Mitte. The residency provides a fully equipped apartment located at Kunstwerke Institute for Contemporary Art in Mitte. OCA provides a travel grant up to NOK 4000 in addition to the residency. Curators and critics are especially encouraged to apply and their applications will be considered as a priority.

Application deadline 15 September 2007 for a residency period November/December 2007.

The applicants will be notified by 15 October.

Click here for information on the application process.

For any questions regarding the application process, please contact Velaug Bollingmo at vb@oca.no.

The curators Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio and Augustine Zenakos have invited Jan Freuchen, Narve Hovdenakk, Lotte Konow Lund, Torbjørn Rødland, Martin Skauen, and Bjarne Melgaard to participate in the 1^st Athens Biennial, entitled Destroy Athens. The professional preview is on 9 September, and the biennial will run from 10 September through 18 November 2007. For press passes, please visit www.athensbiennial.org/pages/main_en.php.

Bodil Furu and Beate Petersen have been invited by Hou Hanru to participate in the 10^th International Istanbul Biennale with their work Kabul Ping Pong. The video work will be exhibited in one of the main venues of the biennial; Santralistanbul. Ane Lan will participate in Nightcomers — one of the night programme projects of the biennial, with her work Europe. The biennial opens on 8 September, and runs through 4 November 2007. OCA funded this exhibition with 03–funding, specifically designated funds made available by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For information on the biennale, please visit www.iksv.org.

Frankfurter Kunstverein Director, Chus Martinez, curated the first major solo exhibition of Gardar Eide Einarsson entitled South of Heaven open through 16 September 2007. 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. According to Martinez, Einarsson's solo exhibition will serve as a "terrain to imagine this new territory and a place where different aesthetic premises co-exist". An accompanying catalogue published by Revolver Verlag (Frankfurt) and designed by Christoph Keller, will include texts by Katy-Garcia Anton, Ina Blom, Chus Martinez, Ingar Niermann, Dieter Roelstraete. The exhibition will continue to tour to the Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneve following the close in Frankfurt.

Lina Viste Grønli participates in Closed Session — a short term residency in NYC offered to individual artists at the invitation of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. The purpose of Closed Session is to provide invited artists with the opportunity to broader knowledge into other artist practices, to enlarge 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.

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.

Claire Fontaine
Paris, France

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Claire Fontaine will exhibit at The White Tube at Tøyen subway station in Oslo from 7 September 2007. The exhibition is curated by the Oslo-based curator Will Bradley. She is the first to exhibit in their autumn program with a work especially created for TWT using the qualities of the space's situation in a public place. For her exhibition in The White Tube Claire Fontaine presents a text based installation revolving around the problematic of being a foreigner. Basic questions about what distinguishes a foreigner from someone else, and where is "home" in a world entirely fabricated by capitalism, drive us to the problem of de-familiarisation of the evidences pursued by all the twentieth century avant-garde through theatrical performance devices, explorations of urban landscape, experimentation on language and sound. In her discreet intervention Claire presents some "imageless posters" where a sentence from Kafka's The Castle points to the fact that courage is the main distinctive point between strangers and natives of any place. Another quotation from Benjamin, written on the inside of the display cabinet, redraws the borders of our perception of familiarity and shows how belonging to a place means above all belonging to its tradition and being faithful to the status quo.

Pierre Bismuth
Born 1963, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Pierre Bismuth tackles the challenges of contemporary art by addressing the representation and the reception of a work of art; by playing on the modalities and power of language and image; and by reappropriating art history and modern cultural references, from fashion to cinema. In doing so, he incorporates all artistic mediums available, from origami and collage to screenwriting and art installations. Bismuth has exhibited his works extensively throughout Europe, and North America. He earned an Academy Award in 2005 for co-authoring the screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. One of Bismuth's works will be screened in a film programme curated by the Norwegian curator Hanne Mugaas entitled Extended Animation: Digital Effects, Corporate Logos and Style. This programme is one of three film programmes in the exhibition Animotion at Galleri F15, from 1 September to 11 November.

Dessislava Dimova
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Dimova work focuses on the possibility of the social existence and recognition of the artist, without offering any art production as such. Dessislava Dimova is a PhD fellow at the Institute of Art Studies in Sofia with a thesis on Bulgarian art after 1989. She has published numerous essays on contemporary art and culture, including The Cultural Learnings of Ivan Moudov, the catalogue of the Bulgarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial, 2007; Supernaturalism in Postcommunist Bulgaria, The Weird but True Book, 2005. She is currently curatingThe Spam Show, an email project that risks to be never seen, discarded by spam filters.

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway runs an International Visitor Program to support international curators and cultural producers in their research in Norway for upcoming exhibitions and projects.

Shamim M. Momin
Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, Branch Director and Curator, Whitney Museum at Altria New York, NY, USA

Shamim M. Momin was appointed Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004, and has been Branch Director and Curator of the Whitney Museum at Altria since October 2000. In addition to co-curating the 2004 Whitney Biennial, she has recently organized the solo exhibitions Mark Grotjahn (2006), Raymond Pettibon (2005–06), and Banks Violette: Untitled (2005), for which she also authored the catalogue. At the branch museum, Momin is responsible for organizing exhibitions and focusing on commissioning new work by emerging artists for both solo and thematic presentations, as well as writing essays for exhibition brochures, producing gallery talks, artists' talks, symposia, and panel discussions, and supervising the production of the annual Performance on 42nd Street series. Momin's exhibitions at Altria have included projects with artists such as Andrea Zittel, Rob Fischer, Sue de Beer, Luis Gispert, Katie Grinnan, Mark Bradford, Dario Robleto, Ellen Harvey, Do-Ho Suh, and E.V. Day.

Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann: Intervention Is Not A Closed Term

Date: Friday, 21 September, 2007
Time: 18:00
Location: The Munch Studio at Ekely
Jarlsborgvn. 14 / Gråbrødreveien 10, Oslo
Transport from Wergelandsveien 17 at 17:30.

In the last decade "intervention" has become a well known term in the art world. It is connected with a special artistic practice and space in which "interventions" happen mostly in the public space. But perhaps these characteristics are pushing the term with this political approach in some kind of well bordered cliché of political art. The presentation attempts to interpret the term in another way and will also do so by showing examples of some recent projects by Creischer and Siekmann, including the Opera at Documenta.

Please be so kind as to send your intent to attend to info@oca.no. It would be helpful to receive your final R.S.V.P. by 20 September.

Click here for more information about the event.

At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco: Bull.Miletic were invited by Renè de Guzman to participate in a group exhibition entitled Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible that opened in San Francisco on 28 July and will run through 11 November. Bull.Miletic participate with the installation Heaven Can Wait, a larger project that delves into "the obscure and often sinister, testing the limits of the imagination to offer a range of work including internet-eavesdropping installations, surveillance projects." Other artists participating include Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Sergio Prego, Walid Raad, Kambui Olujimi, Alison Sant, Richard Johnson, Richard Barnes, Alex Schweder and Charles Mason.

Also in San Francisco: Lars Laumann participates in the interactive exhibit of work sourced from and inspired by the Internet, There is always a machine between us, from 6 September to 17 November at SF Cameraworks galleries. Organized by curators Kate Fowle, Karla Milosevich, Chuck Mobley and Dan Orendorff, the project is designed to generate new material as it evolves.

At the non-profit space Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, Matias Faldbakken has a solo exhibition entitled I don't think so from 8 September through 27 October, 2007. The exhibition, curated byJohn Rasmussen, Director of Midway, notes that for his solo presentation "Faldbakken presents a recently completed body of new work. Prominent within the installation are two large-scale photographic works that are pasted like billboard advertisements to the gallery walls. Radically dialed back on content, the images are enlarged digital scans of the margins and ads of newspapers. Through this zeroing out, the reverse text from the back side of the originals gain (an albeit illegible) prominence amidst the overall pattern of visual static picked up via the scans."

Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén are having a solo exhibition from 19 September–25 November at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria by invitation of its director, Hemma Schmutz. The project entitled Stories for Empty Shopwindows originates from a series of stories from Scheibbs in Austria in exploring "how it is possible to construct evidence and to play on the questioned capacity of photography to act as a testimony of truth." An artists talk will be held on 20 September at 19:00.

Leander Djønne participates in Crosskick/Plattform #4 at the Kunstverein Hannover, 14 September–26 September 2007. Along with the yearly rotating Plattform series initiated in 2004, the Kunstverein Hannover turns the public attention to the relationship between artistic training, art teaching and art education, a relationship which is of eminent importance for the entire art world.

Djønne also contributed with The doghouse is a small house but its better than no house at all to the Documenta Magazine LTTR. LTTR is a feminist genderqueer artist collective with a flexible project oriented practice founded in 2001. The art journalLTTR is published annually.

Jan Freuchen will participate in the exhibition Objet Perdu in Pierogi, Leipzig, from 15 September–10 November 2007.

Gijs Frieling Director, of W139 in Amsterdam invites the artist group Kultivator(Kalle Runeson and Marlene Lindmark) featuring El Parche (Herman Mbamba, Olga Robayo, Marius Wang) and Floor Wesseling into a solo exhibition entitledSupermodel that opens on 12 October and runs through 11 November. The subject of Kultivator's work is agriculture and ecology, rural versus urban culture, food production and distribution, global trading and economy.

Trine Lise Nedreaas and Jannike Låker participate in Reality Crossings in Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg, Germany, as curated by Christoph Tannert, director of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The project which takes the form of a photography festival takes place from 21 September to 21 October 2007 to focus on current trends in the areas of photography and video, concentrating here on the documentary perspective.

Anne Katrine Senstad's exhibition entitled Light Writes Always in Plural will be open at Houston Center for Photography, Houston, Texas, USA, on 13 September. The project will run through 21 October 2007.

Stefan Schröder participates in Über Tage_07, which is a site specific project, reflecting urban landscape development and site specific interventions after several decades of coalmining activities in the former East-German region of Sachsen. The project opened 1 September, and will expand into the summer of 2008. The project is curated by Susanne Altmann.

Marit Følstad and Crispin Gurholt participate in On Air — From North to South, a project including various works based in video and film from 28 September at the Skandinavisk Forenings Kunstnerhus in Rome. The project has been curated byLorella Scacco and Mette Perregaard.

Torpedo bookstore is invited to the New York Art Book Fair in the end of September. The New York Art Book Fair is an annual fair of contemporary art books, art catalogues, artists' books, art periodicals, and 'zines offered for sale by over 120 international publishers, booksellers, and antiquarian dealers.

In Uruguay: Vibeke Tandberg participates in La Cuadratura del Cono / Border Jam, a project curated by Gerardo Mosqueraas part of the international project Regional Meeting of Art. Region: Frictions and Fictions. Art in transit — A dialogue with history (Mdv-Era07), which will take place in Montevideo, Uruguay. The event will last from 9 August through to 30 September, 2007. The project will be held in differents venues; the Blanes Museum, the National Museum of Visual Arts, the Spanish Cultural Centre of Montevideo, and in urban spaces as a site for the interventions of contemporary artists. Border Jam will respond from the standpoint of contemporary artistic practices the social and cultural environment of solidarities and exclusions, not necessarily inscribed by territorial limits. Other artists participating in the project — Monica Bonvicini, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Teresa Margolles, Fernando Sanchez Castillo and Santiago Sierra. Tandberg will participate with her work Sunflower from 2001.

Adriana Alves at Fuzuê Arte e Cultura in Rio de Janeiro: José Loyola has invited Adriana Alves to exhibit in the new art center Fuzuê in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to Alves' two floor-exhibition there will be a Norwegian contemporary video art programme and a seminar. The exhibiton will run from January 2008. Adriana Alves will exhibit two installations and three sculptures. Her project is entitled Tragedy of the Common Man.

Norwegian curator Hans Askheim together with Claire Davies, Tom Keogh andMiranda Pope, graduates of the 2007 MA Creative Curating from Goldsmiths University of London, are developing a curatorial research project entitled Overland: London to Beijing. The curators travel by train from London to Beijing, transporting a commissioned artwork. Along the route, the work of art will be exhibited at local venues. Through the physical transportation of the artworkOverland: London to Beijing, the curators strives to challenge the practical, geographic, historical and political connotations and value of the artwork.

urban interface is both an exhibition and a practical research project. The project deals with the changing notion of private and public space that occurs due to, particularly, the everyday use of communication technologies. The artworks in the context of urban interface convey the idea of public space as an accessible and contributive sphere and call attention to a more sensitive engagement with the private, physical and digital spheres.

LIAF will open on Saturday 14.06.08. The exhibtion will be on display until the second week in September. The festival for contemporary art is a small scale group exhibition, located on the Lofoten islands.

Rakett will host the archive Curating Degree Zero which is an exploration of critical and experimental approaches to curating contemporary art. Rakett are going to activate the archive through a series of events where invited international guests such as artists, curators, musicians, philosophers and architects, will be present and give lectures, participate in debates and concerts. They are also planning to commission two re-enactments of performative works from the archive. In the period of 20 September to 7 October, Rakett will have the archive as an extended plattform, and they wish to take part in a public discussion around the expanding field of art and curatorial collaborative practices. In co-operation with the architect Jon-Martin Kolsnes, they are developing and building a mobile unit from where the archive and the events will be present on several locations within the city of Bergen.

Films from Contemporary Iran: Screening of Iranian films 6–7 November at Soria Moria Cinema, presentation of the magazine Pages 7 November at Torpedo Bokhandel: Films from Contemporary Iran is an initiative from Display in Prague and Pages in Rotterdam, organised in Oslo by UKS, Soria Moria, and Torpedo Bokhandel and will take place from 6–7 November. Pages is a bilingual, Farsi and English, magazine with the aim to function as a platform for exchange, dialogues and projects, a place for collaboration between artists and writers from Iran and elsewhere. The programme consists of screening of three movies, and a presentatation of the magazine Pages.

MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, Vigo, Portugal
Organised by the Fundación MARCO, the purpose of this competition is to offer participants the chance to execute an exhibition project to occupy the first floor of the MARCO. Entries will focus on the field of contemporary artistic creation and contemplate the participation of two or more artists. The exhibition project will have a budget of a maximum sum of EUR 15 000.

For more information, please contact info@marcovigo.com.

As of 30 September, 2007, Ida Lykken Ghosh, will leave her position at The Office for Contemporary Art Norway as OCA's Head of Internal Relations in order to pursue personal interests. Jørn Mortensen started in the position of Associate Director 1 September. The position will expand upon Ida Lykken Ghosh's position and hold with it the responsibility for overseeing all aspects of administration and operational activities including development, public relations, education, public programmes and institutional planning in tandem with the Director's longer term strategy plan. Click here for contact details.

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