Ola Sendtad: Birch culture

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Design

Ola Sendstad will present his starting point, work and thoughts so far in his PhD project, examples from some of his earlier work and ideas and questions on the way forward. His artistic research builds, explores and expresses aesthetics from the development of birch material, from the forest, forestry and sawmill. How can the managed forest as a place, ecosystem, material supplier, cultural heritage and work environment connect closer to our material use? This is a question of both storytelling and being in the value chain in addition to physical design. Fundamentally in this, is sensitivity to the fact that our use shapes two places – where the materials are being used and where they are extracted.

Ola Sendstad is an architect, curator and organic farmer. Through installations, interventions, publications, exhibitions, and events he works with questions around our physical environment’s usefulness, inherent qualities and collective and individual values, often with a starting point in cultural heritage. In 2022 he started as Design Research Fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Espen Johansen: In search of the immaterial monument

UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Academy of Arts

With the notion of the monument as a conceptual point of departure, I wish to analyze the public sphere as a field of political, public, and commercial interests through research, curatorial projects and social platforms. Against the backdrop of historical monuments and public art, I will investigate the potency of contemporary art as communication in todays mediatized society, and question if and how art can serve as a catalyst for nuanced debate in the public sphere.

In recent years political scientists have been stunned by the shortcomings of their own predictions, as surprise election-results happened in several countries. The forum for debate is no longer in town squares or city halls, not even on television or in the newspapers, but increasingly online through unedited, easily manipulated, social medias. What does the public sphere even mean in our time and which role does public art have to play in civil society?

Espen Johansen (b. 1985 in Bergen, Norway) is an art historian, curator and writer based in Tromsø. He is currently doing a PhD in Artistic Research as a curator at Tromsø Academy of Art, and holds an MA in Art History from the University of Bergen (2011), a degree in Creative Curating from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2014), and a post-master in ‘Negotiating Artistic Value: Art and Architecture in the Public Sphere’ from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2020). His curatorial practice stems from investigations into the potency of art as an alternative communicative device in our mediatized society, particularly focusing on art in public space and the power structures of the public sphere; who gets to say what and how?