MELK is an artist-run space in Oslo since 2009, and the leading initiative for new Scandinavian photography. Our aim is to raise awareness of the scene of contemporary photographers in the region and the position of the medium today.

(b. 1979, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. She holds a BA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Institute for color) and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She undertook an independent project in artistic research for 6 months at the Akademin Valand, School of Photography in Gothenburg.
Eggen has exhibited at venues such as Henie Onstad Art Center, Haugar Vestfold Artmuseum, Lillehammer Art Museum, Kunstnerforbundet, gallery 1857, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City and Ulterior Gallery, New York.
Recent solo exhibitions include the FUTURE FAIR 2022 at Chelsea Industrial, New York, TRUST - f/stop - 9. Festival fur Fotografie Leipzig (2021), galleri MELK (2021), Oslo Negativ (2021), Galleri Noplace, Oslo (2020), Fotografihuset, Sukkerbiten (2020) and Sandefjord kunstforening (2020). Her work is in several private and public collections such as The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, The National Museum in Oslo, The Henie Onstad art collection, Equinor Art Programme and Oslo kommunes art collection.
In 2017 she was nominated for the Sparebankstiftelsen DNB's art grant.

Eggen works with analog color photography, video and sculpture. Her work explores the body as a site for involuntary everyday actions, the ones we deem irrational, in reflexes and instincts and in the unspoken messages they convey.
She examines nonverbal communication and body symbolism, often dismantling and distorting body language.
With the help of performative methods, she searches for new opportunities in bodily movement and tries to capture the ones not already deeply enculturated and rooted in our bodies. With this, she attempts to take part in the production of a new physical language, one that can reach beyond the optimizing and orderly organization of the body.

Ingrid Eggen

 (b. 1979, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. She holds a BA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Institute for color) and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She undertook an independent project in artistic research for 6 months at the Akademin Valand, School of Photography in Gothenburg.

Eggen’s work focuses on non-verbal communication and bodily symbolism, with a particular interest in the involuntary and instinctive aspects of the body – those often seen as irrational, as reflexes and spontaneous reactions. Through performative methods, Eggen explores movements that are not yet deeply shaped by cultural norms, and seeks to contribute to the creation of new physical languages and expressions that move beyond the optimized and regulated body. By consistently distorting and shifting the boundaries of the body, her practice aims to raise psychological and existential questions, while generating new bodily states in response to societal structures and transformations.

Eggen has exhibited at venues such as Henie Onstad Art Center, Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Haugar Vestfold Artmuseum, Lillehammer Art Museum, Kunstnerforbundet, gallery 1857, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City and Ulterior Gallery, New York.

Recent exhibitions include “Bebo” Wergelandshaugen, Eidsvoll (2024), “skinvelop” Melk, Oslo (2023), FUTURE FAIR 2022 atChelsea Industrial, New York, TRUST - f/ stop - 9. Festival fur Fotografie Leipzig (2021), “grapple grasp” galleri MELK (2021), Oslo Negativ (2021), Galleri Noplace, Oslo (2020), Fotografihuset, Sukkerbiten (2020), Sandefjord kunstforening (2020), and New Visions - the Henie Onstad Triennale for Photography and New Media, The Henie Onstad Art Center (2020). Her work are in several private and public collections such as The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, The National Museum in Oslo, The Henie Onstad art collection, Equinor Art Programme, Møllersamlingen and Oslo kommunes art collection.

The exhibition “join joints” features two new photographic series, “limbits" and “pedknots”.
Inspired by the principles of biomimetics, Eggen examines how organisms and ecosystems have developed clever, innovative solutions to problems through evolution and adaptation, and how the human body might be transformed in response to future changes. The bionic, in this context, is understood as a potential vocabulary for the body’s affective intelligence: a language of forms, growths, connections and adjustments that arise in response to these changes; a body that acquires traits from other organisms and systems—grasping, sensory-expanding, orienting.

Through manipulated silhouettes, fragmented forms, and a lighting strategy that seeks to draw out and expand the body's contours, Eggen explores anatomy as a fluid, rather than fixed, structure—one shaped by movement and response.

Anatomical boundaries are dismantled and reassembled, not in order to return to the body as we know it, but to evoke a different kind of corporeality—a new bodily state shaped by the lived experience of the affective body.

These works are part of a long-term process aimed at creating an alternative, bodily and cultural-historical atlas, based on the experiential body’s capacity for knowledge, expression, and development. Here, movement, tension, response and affect are not merely expressions, but the structure itself.

The exhibition is accompanied by a literary text written by Ruby Paloma. A full version of the text is available at the bottom of this page.

s strange, because I only use my feet for walking, yet they look more like hands, as if they

re stuck in an earlier stage of evolution …

… M moves her arms behind her, letting her fingertips sink into the sand, just beyond the collar of the jacket she’s sitting on. Her shoulder muscles shift underneath her T-shirt—two lean, elongated shapes that fold together at her upper back. When I see M like this, fragmented, as separate regions detached from the rest of her body, entirely new shapes begin to emerge. Those two shapes on her back, rising under the fabric, look like rocks at the water’s edge, like contours on a map. She lifts her right hand in front of her. It trembles slightly. Sand clings to the hollows between her fingers—valleys dusted in grains. She brings her left hand to meet the right and rubs them together, the way she often does when she speaks. …

… I believe she rubs her hands together while saying all these things to feel her edges—because all the words pouring out of her erase the very edges she’s trying to find— and now she’s doing it, without speaking.

, Ingrid Eggen's fourth solo exhibition at MELK. We hope to see you at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–21.00 on Thursday, August 14.

join joints

Christine Clemmesen

Minh Ngọc Nguyễn

(b. 1979) graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art in London with an MFA in Sculpture and from Glasgow School of Art with a BA in Photography. 
Recent exhibitions include Møstingshus, Tørreloft, Arden Asbæk, Alice Folker Gallery, Rønnebæksholm Kunsthalle, Vandrehallen, Gæsteværelset/Tone Bonnén, and Center for Photography. She is the recipient of a number of grants and awards and was nominated in 2022 for the FOAM Paul Huf Award for her photographic work.



(b. 1992) holds an MFA in Photography from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and a BA in Visual Communication from the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Copenhagen.
He has exhibited at Galleri Andréhn-Schiptjenko, CHART Art Fair, NEVVEN, Oblong, Fotografisk Center, and Röda Sten Konsthall, among others. His work is represented in the collections of KIASMA Helsinki, Danish Arts Foundation, Region Västra Götaland, Göteborg Stad, Nacka Kommun and Jönköpings kommun.

Christine Clemmesen works with photography in an approach that challenges traditional representation. Her images consist of layers of narrative and experience in poetic and abstract forms. A primary focus is on the materiality of the prints, which are often on unconventional materials such as stained glass, silk, color filters and marble. The handmade artist frames function as a kind of press, where material is clamped between the image and the glass front and held as a pressed form – a sculptural translation of what a camera does.

Her focus is not on technical perfection, but on awareness of the medium. Clemmesen works anti-dogmatically with photography – regardless of whether it is analog or digital, sharp, or blurry, large or small. What is crucial is how the medium shapes the expression. The temporal dimension of photography is particularly poetic and a central part of her practice. It contains the ability to both abstract and precisely recognize the world, which makes it ideal for her investigations. This ability creates depth, where time and perception overlap and shift in a narrative that balances between documentary and fiction, and between action and composition.


Minh Ngọc Nguyễn merges pop imagery and stereotypes with a savvy, witty visual language that’s both personal and universal. Drawing on his background in commercial photography, he creates striking, humorous, and relevant images, often in the still-life realm. By remixing Southeast Asian vernacular through a distinctly European lens, informed by post-internet tropes and contemporary image culture, he builds a visual language that reflects both glossy pop culture and layered identity. 

Nguyễns artistic practice is rooted in photography – not only as a medium but also as a subject in itself. He primarily works with still life imagery, driven by a desire to explore photography’s potential to both inform and manipulate our collective understandings of culture and identity.

Drawing from his Vietnamese heritage, he investigates Eurocentric representations of his culture and the ways in which visual pop culture distills and portrays Southeast Asia at large. He examines what is considered and labeled as “Asian,” and how these portrayals have influenced his perception of cultural identity.

MELK is excited to present MILKSHAKE #4, a duo exhibition with Copenhagen-based artists Christine Clemmesen and Minh Ngọc Nguyễn. Two artists who explore materiality and image culture through distinct photographic approaches, yet both engage in contextualizing and questioning the boundaries of the still life genre.

MILKSHAKE #4

Torbjørn Rødland

Eline Mugaas

Vibeke Tandberg

Morten Andenæs

Bjarne Bare

 (b. 1979) lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

 (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.

 (b. 1969) lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

 (b. 1970) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.

 (b. 1967) lives and works in Oslo, Norway.

A horse neighing and baring its teeth; the shadow of a tree; cherries; candy trail; a cowboy with a mask; a hand touching someone known; a parrot; a deformed spiritual lion's head; wrinkled sheet of paper unfolded like a Rorschach test; a curtain.

Some light turbulence may occur is grounded in conversations with five artists, who we believe represent some of the most interesting interactions with the photographic medium today. Upon seeing what they all presented, it was immediately clear that this was going to be an exhibition about presence in the most turbulent of times.

By recollecting the bits of what is lost and what is to be found in their surroundings, the artists, in their own curious way, transform the exhibition space into a place of transcendence through presence.

Philosophically, presence has been explored through phenomenology, particularly in the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who considered human experience to be deeply intertwined with perception and embodiment. In an era where digital distractions fragment our attention, presence is no longer a given but an intentional practice. Contemporary art constantly explores this tension between presence and absence by examining how the physical and virtual realms intersect.

Photography is a medium of paradoxes: it documents and distorts, reveals, and conceals, immortalizes, and estranges. In this exhibition, all five artists engage with these contradictions, offering distinct yet interwoven approaches to contemporary photographic practice. One could say their works challenge the authority of the camera, questioning notions of truth, identity, memory, and materiality.

Morten Andenæs’ work revolves around the act of looking itself. Through familiar tropes like portraits, still lifes and landscapes he explores intimacy and detachment, aggression and vulnerability, by exposing the complexities of human relationships and the politics of representation. Andenæs constructs visual narratives that unsettle assumptions about power and coherence, investigating how images not only describe the world we live in, but in fact construct it.

Bjarne Bare approaches photography with a conceptual rigor that interrogates its material and institutional frameworks. His work frequently deconstructs the photographic image, exposing its physical properties and the mechanisms of its display. Through abstraction, layering, and unexpected juxtapositions, Bare underscores photography’s inherent instability and its shifting role in contemporary visual culture—ultimately questioning its essence.

Eline Mugaas explores the spatial and emotional dimensions of everyday life. With a sensitivity to form, texture, and light, her images often focus on architectural structures, domestic settings, and overlooked details of the built environment. Her work operates in dialogue with art history and feminist discourse, reconsidering how images shape our perception of space and gendered experience. There is a forthrightness and immediacy in the depictions, and the style of execution is sensual.

Torbjørn Rødland’s images exist in an uncanny space between the sensual and the surreal. His meticulously composed photographs – often featuring ambiguous human interactions, symbolic objects, and visceral textures – evoke a deep psychological charge. Rødland’s work resists easy interpretation, revitalizing inherited forms and emotional dissonance to create scenes that feel both familiar and unsettling.

Vibeke Tandberg's images in the exhibition explore the possibilities of an old man's latex mask, a prop she has used in her artworks for over two decades. Through the mask, she focuses on the mutability of the self through digitally manipulated and staged -photography. Her work invites viewers to consider the fluidity of identity and the impact of time on the human body. During the last decade, Tandberg has included a wider range of media and techniques to continue her exploration of these themes and further challenge traditional notions of self and representation. 

We have the pleasure of inviting you to the inauguration of our new gallery space, which opens on May 2 in Frogner, Oslo. Located at Elisenbergveien 7, the gallery’s new chapter begins with a curated group exhibition with Morten Andenæs, Bjarne Bare, Eline Mugaas, Torbjørn Rødland, and Vibeke Tandberg. 

Some light turbulence may occur

Andreas Meinich

 (b. 1985, Stavanger) lives and works in Oslo. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2011). His work has been exhibited at Standard (Oslo), Saksumdal Tempel, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Kunstnernes Hus, Nevven Göteborg, Hulias, Kalmar Konstmuseum among others.

As something is photographed it goes from being an object, a place, a person, and becomes an extended version of itself, a motif. As Andreas Meinich’s photographs are digitally woven using a jacquard technique, the motifs become further removed from their origin, and this translation from photograph to tapestry in a sense reverses the act of documentation that occurred at the click of the camera, and makes the imagery less reliable, more fantastical, more up to belief.

Walking into a room filled with Meinich’s tapestries seemingly floating in midair, creates a feeling of entering a dream world, the room itself the bed as we get under the covers and experience other realms of possibility, a place of childlike innocence and wonder.

This feeling is strengthened by the fact that the objects and formations we stumble upon within Meinich’s photographs have, almost without exception, an element of folklore to it. In this constellation of tapestries, we can feel the comfort of a story told to us, as we meet tiny creatures and miniature towns, secret places only accessed by a magic carpet, a portal in a closet, or in Meinich’s case - a bike.

We meet The Old Man from Nip (Nipgubben), a legend in the Swedish mountains, a tiny old man tasked with protecting the mountains from human harm. Physically his statue stands stock still, but legend has it he patrols the mountains far and wide looking for wrongdoers to punish. His statue stands at Nip Mountain as a reminder for visitors to tread with caution and compassion, or else… The threats might be vague, but insistent indeed. What man needs to behave is another, tinier, man telling him what to do, so it seems.

Lore transcends both time and place, and The Old Man from Nip reaches further then his small eyes or Nip Mountain would indicate. About three hundred and fifty kilometers below him, stands the miniature village of Little Istanbul (Lilla Istanbul), made and protected by another old man and folk artist, Jan-Erik Svennberg, or as one could call him, The Old Man of Little Istanbul.

Svennberg built his little kingdom with his own hands, and has since been its keeper. Several wooden mosques stand not far from Svennberg’s home, surrounded by trees, their bar needles both poking and protecting the minaret, the dome, encapsulating the fairy tale like quality of these pieces of Turkish culture in Dalarna, Sweden.

I would like to believe these two men are kindred spirits, one keeper watching over the other. The Two Old Men, Nipgubben and Svennberg, and his Little Istanbul, are at the least woven together by this composition of tapestries, honored as keepers of nature and culture respectively, both protecting the corporeal world and the fantastical.

, Andreas Meinich’s second solo exhibition at MELK.

Lille Istanbul

Geir Moseid

Geir Moseid (b. 1978, Tønsberg, NO) is a Norwegian photographer living and working in Oslo, Norway. Since graduating from London College of Communication in 2008, Moseid has been working on multiple photographic series, operating at the point where documentary practice and staged photography meet.

By working with a 4x5 inch camera Moseid aims to challenge how one can talk about and discuss social, anthropological and economical issues in contemporary photography.

Communication and a humanistic approach has always been the base of the practice, while the narrative elements within the work often remain open and ambiguous. A focus on colour, texture, ambiguity and human relationships of various kinds forms the base of his practice.

, Moseid confronts the familiar, and examines our closest relationships. Through dramatic narratives, he explores the home as an arena for the dichotomies of human behaviour.

Moseid’s motifs offer a glimpse into undefined and often disturbing vignettes that can be read in a multitude of ways.

In the intersection of staged photography and documentary traditions his work walks the line between fact and fiction, honesty and deceit?

For further insights, please click on the link to the essay written by Lara Konrad below.

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, Geir Moseid’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

move closer

Thyra Dragseth

 (f. 1993) er oppvokst i Kristiansand. Hun bor og arbeider mellom Lisboa og Oslo, hvor hun for tiden tar en mastergrad i billedkunst ved Kunstakademiet i Oslo. Dragseth arbeider multidisiplinært med fotografi, film, lyd, tekst og installasjon. Arbeidene springer ofte ut fra hennes egne livserfaringer, og blir til stykker av oversatt virkelighet, og forholder seg til de etiske landskapet som oppstår i skildringen av delte erfaringer og minner. Dragseth har stilt ut ved en rekke etablerte instutisjoner og kunstnerdrevne visningssteder som blant annet MELK Galleri, Kristiansand Kunsthall, Kösk, og Sol Nexø, og var nylig aktuell med utstillingen MARBLES ved OSTRA Practise i Lisboa, og på Pachinko i Oslo.

En rødmalt rygg vender seg i en slags statisk bevegelse oppad; sorte tegn står skrevet på den grå tåkehimmelen over en lav horisont; en inngang i mellom glitrende, solbadede, vibrerende grønne blader og brunt stillestående vann. Thyra Dragseths fotografier er orgier av farger og lys, som drar, blender og skjermer øynene som ser. Bildene er som portaler til et annet lag av virkelighet, portaler som leder oss til steder og erfaringer vi har lyst til å besøke, men er redd for å bli holdt fanget av.

Opplevelsen av å bli holdt utenfor, og samtidig dratt inn i bildenes både gåtefulle og konfronterende ikonografi avspeiler en forestillingsverden som både er allmenn – slik alle kan oppleve den fysiske og sosiale verden som et felles, objektivt anliggende – og personlig, utilgjengelig for andre.

Fotografiene vil ikke plasseres; det vil si de forholder seg ikke ensidig til enten omverden, eller en personlig indre verden. De peker isteden innover mot seg selv, i et bilde som skaper sin egen virkelighet.

Vi erfarer, tolker og tyder verden i enhver våken tilstand. Ulike farger får forskjellig betydning, former og bevegelser assosieres med noe meningsfullt, noe vi kjenner til, noe som betyr noe for oss. Vi legger en film av betydning mellom oss og tingene. Dragseth griper fatt i akkurat dette momentet, denne filmen, dette mellomrommet hvor meningsfylden oppstår mellom oss og omgivelsene. Mellom oss og erfaringene, og lar oss hvile i det.

Så går vi rundt i en meningsfull verden og ser ikke helt hva vi omgir oss med. Tingene blir borte for oss. De sløres av denne filmen, som fyller oss med mening der vi går rundt med mange forskjellige historier i både hjernen og kroppen forøvrig. Sånn blir vi fremmede i verden.

Når tilskueren gjør sine tankesprang inn og ut og i mellom bildene; fra sengeleiet i jungelkrattet til slørede konturer i purpurfargede omgivelser; fra det sorte vindu badet i natteskygger til den uredde nattsøsteren, nysgjerrig bærende på et granskende kvinnesyn på sin nakne rygg;i dette mellomrommet (i denne filmen), gir det ukjente like mye mening som det kjente.

Og det som omtales som en film, altså en hinne, rommer også fordommer; Som at et fotografi nødvendigvis avbilder noe som allerede eksisterer. Disse bildene viser oss at det ikke nødvendigvis er slik, for virkeligheten er ikke fremkalt ennå, og det som henger på veggene vitner om et sug etter en annen mer magisk virkelighet.

MELK er glade for å presentere Thyra Dragseth på Oslo Negativ.

Entrances

lives and works between Oslo, Norway and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recent solo and duo exhibitions are Modo Host, CAMA, São Paulo (2024); Rough Seas, MELK (2021); False Spring, Lydgalleriet, Bergen (2020); You’re Dead, K4, Oslo (2020); FLOW, Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro and MELK (2019); and All that respires, conspires at UKS, Oslo and Ultima Festival (2017). – recent group exhibitions and other projects include Moon in your Mouth, UKS, Oslo (2023); Preliminares, CAMA, São Paulo (2021); Journey to the heartlands, Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland (2020); Mind moves with matter, body blends into space, Kunsthall Trondheim (2019); Off the Page, Bergen Kunsthall (2017); Slutten, Kristiansand Kunsthall (2017); Innland, Centre Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours (2017) and The Young Lions, Preus Fotomuseum, Oslo (2017). Among other curatorial projects, Dolven Balke co-curated the biennale Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF – with Linn Pedersen in 2011 and co-founded and programmed the artist-run space REKORD in Oslo from 2006 to 2010. From 2021-2023 she was a central part of the collective public art work 

, a full-time art education for inmates of Agder Prison in Froland, produced by KORO Art in Public Space.

A line through Dolven Balke’s work could be how humans act in precarious situations, and how those actions are inscribed on their surroundings. She works in the studio next to a more documentary approach with sound, film and photography - with materials made to support or augment the body directly via technology, or metaphorically as sculptural counterparts or aids to the photographs, films and sound works. Dolven Balke draws on language we use to describe experiences that seem impossible, although they are perhaps the most real of all: events related to time, our own vulnerability and attachments, as persons and as part of a society. Her work catalogues the surfaces and objects that accommodate, carry, give support, nurture and soften the body in intimate as well as institutional settings. She uses found materials in photographic collages and video sculptures; like anti-slip mats, water repellent paper, silicone and latex sheets, exam table bench paper, towels and memory foam. Dolven Balke often references water and flow, as an image of the absurd attempts to tidy, dry up, and control the massive leakage that accompanies life.

Thora Dolven Balke

 (b. 1982) lives and works in Oslo and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Her practice is strongly mediated through photography and moving images, heightened by their sculptural installation, often alongside sound and objects made of materials such as silicone and resin. Dolven Balke’s work is socially engaged and at times collaborative and curatorial. In the past years, she initiated the Agder Kunstakademi, a collective work of public art produced by KORO (Public Art Norway) in the form of a three-year education program developed and run by artists for inmates in the maximum-security prison at Agder Prison. Recent exhibitions include Modo Host, CAMA, São Paulo (2024); Moon in Your Mouth, UKS (2023); Rough Seas, Melk (2021); False Spring, Lydgalleriet (2020); Mind moves with matter, body blends into space, Kunsthall Trondheim (2019) and FLOW, Melk and Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro (2019)

In her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, the artist examines the short-sightedness of human metrics and structures through an exploration of materials such as glycerin soap, silicone, acrylic, ropes, hooks, and gemstone stickers. Dolven Balke considers how objects can embody layers of intimate narratives, often in the intersection between photography and sculpture.Throughout the show there are architectural elements such as fences and spikes, with their shapes recast in translucent soap. The decorative hostile barriers that should divide external from private and secure the fragile openings of a building are reimagined in bendable, easily dissolvable constructions, resulting in a vulnerable boundary between domestic life and the outside world.These tensions between rigidity and frailty, vastness and confinement, and the organic versus the perpetual also appear in the works that give the exhibition its name: two prints on thin silicone sheets depicting cetacean fetuses preserved in glass jars, photographed at the Sandefjord Whaling Museum. Captured in their most defenseless, pre-life state, the close-up images of the specimens suggest the potential of enormity these creatures were denied, as they are suspended from biological time for research and contemplation.In Dolven Balkes photographic works in the exhibition, everyday scenes are infused with marine imagery, as in a new series of works that layer large-format transparent negatives over sparkling gemstone stickers. Their crystal, drop, eye and tear shapes add a sense of teenage wonder to the compositions, evoking joy and playfulness as well loss and uncertainty.Hanging on the gallery's end wall are three pinkish silicone bodies cast from infant bathtubs. Slouching figures, sagging under the weight of their own softness and succumbing to gravity. These hollow, skin-like casts, reminiscent of deflated or empty vessels, are caught between states of support and collapse. Yet, there’s a seductive quality to their limpness, much like jellyfish in the medusa phase. This sense of suspended animation, of bodies existing in a state of potential without fulfillment, echoes the exhibition’s broader themes. By using materials that dissolve, bend, and stretch, the works throughout Human Scale explore the ambiguity of our defenses—whether physical barriers, fragile bodies, or emotional protections.

The exhibition was conceptualized and produced with the assistance of Mathew Lacosse

A big thanks to Fellesverkstedet and Jack Hughes, Atelier Kunstnerforbundet, Bo Bisgaard, A K Dolven, Asta, Maris and Felipe R Pena

MELK Oslo is pleased to present Human Scale by Thora Dolven Balke, opening on September 13th.

Human Scale

(b. 1996, Trondheim, Norway, based in Stockholm, Sweden) holds a BFA from Oslo National Academy of The Arts and an MFA from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.	He has recently explored the distribution and attitudes towards photography and textile production creating a symbiotic relationship between the two mediums, while simultaneously looking at the world through a lens of queer theories and diasporic gaze. Recent exhibitions include: Fotogalleriet (Oslo; NO), Mint abf (Stockholm; SE), MELK (Oslo; NO), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo; NO), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (SE; Stockholm).


Dev Dhunsi makes large installations, combines textiles, lens-based works, and experimental printing techniques into mixed media presentations. The images themselves speak to sociopolitical and anthropological questions that exist beyond the picture’s frame. Dhunsi’s works examine identity, origin, and encounters between cultures, exp loring the cultural bridge between his ancestries and upbringing in the physical landscapes of Scandinavia and the techno- and mediascapes of Asia. Dhunsi explores how a site turns into sight, pointing to photography’s intrinsic historical function of land grabbing, and how photographic representations have been used to serve the interests of dominant power structures.

Working with cameras he focuses on what is outside the picture frame or on other-than-human beings, such as minerals, spirits, textiles, and ancestors. Creating site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to images that morph, decay, and evolve, his ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistence among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Dev Dhunsi

Lesia Vasylchenko

 (b. 1990 in Kyiv, Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway) is an artist working across various media including video, photography, and installation. She holds a degree
in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University
of Kyiv, and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Vasylchenko has recently been shown at the Kunsthall Oslo; MUNCH Museum; Henie Onstad Art Center; Oslo Kunstforening; Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art. Her work is part of the collection of Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA / Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland.

 (b. 1996, Trondheim, Norway, based in Oslo, Norway) holds a BFA from Oslo National Academy of The Arts and an MFA from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

He has recently explored the distribution and attitudes
towards photography and textile production creating a symbiotic relationship between the two mediums, while simultaneously looking at the world through a lens of queer theories and diasporic gaze. Recent exhibitions include: Fotogalleriet (Oslo; NO), Mint abf (Stockholm; SE), MELK (Oslo; NO), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo; NO), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (SE; Stockholm).

In the former Soviet Union, monumental bas-reliefs made
by artists and craftspeople were often used for decorating modernist buildings, factories and cultural centers, schools
and libraries. These socialist realist motives had an educational function, promoting moral and ethical values, advertising progress and propagating the idea of a bright future. But
this future never came. New generation of people born in independent Ukraine are experiencing nostalgia for the future that never came and has to rethink how to live together in a world occupied by uncertainty and feeling of an “unknown tomorrow”.

Lesia Vasylchenko tries to reconstruct understandings of presentness, discover shadow histories which were hidden in the past, and what do we want the notion of ‘future’ to mean and to become.

In the Hindu scripture Shatapatha Brahmana, written between the 6th and 8th centuries BCE, one encounters scientific knowledge of geometry, observational astronomy, and many tales, where time is told in a cyclical, nonlinear way. The book recounts how the sweat dripping down the god Shiva’s head is the water of the Ganges River, where the ashes of generations of deceased people travel along the currents like a miniature collection of the past.

Dev Dhunsi departs from a lens-based practice to explore remains of untold ancient tales, including gay love.

The two male water gods, Varuna and Mitra, represent the two stages of the moon: waxing and waning. Mitra controls the ocean depths while Varuna rules over the ocean’s upper regions and the tides. The two gods meet on new moon nights, and Mitra is described as “implanting his seed” in Varuna in order to secure the moon’s waning.

For CHART 2024 MELK is excited to present new work from Lesia Vasylchenko (UA) and Dev Dhunsi (NO).

CHART 2024

Frido Evers

Frido Evers (b. 1980) has a bachelor's degree from the Academy for Art and Design, ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL), and he received a master’s degree at Kustakademiet in Oslo. He lives and works in Bærum (NO).

Frido Evers explores layers in search of moments of stillness and presence. Layers of meaning and layers of material have been emerging as a mode of operating in the last decade of his practice. This is maybe most visible in his collages, where several pictures printed on acrylic glass and other materials are overlain, and all kinds of settlements to the composition are added to that. The same technique is found in his installations as well.Atmospheric scenes of decaying industrial and human dreams, strange science fiction-oriented universes, and architectural dystopia tend to be the direction of the results of this process.

He has been represented by Galleri Maria Veie (NO) and later by CINNNAMON in Rotterdam (NL). He has, among other places, shown works in Galleri Kösk (NO), Bærum Kunsthall (NO), Noplace (NO), Brenau University (US), Blomquist (NO), Zürcher Gallery (NY), Flipbook Gallery (AU), Örebro Kunsthal (SE), De Fabriek (NL), and Raid Projects (LA). He has been shown at several art fairs around the world, such as Art Basel Hong Kong (HK), Art Rotterdam (NL), Art Amsterdam (NL), and Pulse Art Fair (NY).

In the lazy embrace of the night sky, a subtle phenomenon known as "ashen light" has stirred curiosity for centuries. This ethereal glow, reported on the night side of the planet Venus, offers a charming contrast to its namesake, a celestial body named after a goddess of love and beauty. Yet, beneath the veneer of Venus' entrancing cloud cover lies a harsh world of searing temperatures and inhospitable conditions. Amidst this dissonance, a tantalizing suggestive gleam touches the slumbering side of the planet.

For generations, observers have been captivated by tales of ashen light, dating back to the 17th century. However, despite numerous accounts, this spectral radiance has eluded confirmation through rigorous scientific instruments or precise measurements. Frustratingly elusive, it resists clear observation and photography, shrouded in its faint and changeable nature. Recent glimpses captured by spacecraft, including the Parker Solar Probe, have hinted at features on Venus's dark side that could be linked to ashen light. Yet, these tantalizing hints remain inconclusive, preserving the enigma that challenges our comprehension of Venus and its turbulent atmosphere.

The concept of perceiving something while lacking evidence to establish its existence is a riddle that transcends far beyond the boundaries of this celestial phenomenon. It serves as an open invitation to delve into the intricacies of human perception, beckoning us to explore the metaphorical and symbolic dimensions of this elusive radiance—what we see but cannot perceive clearly.

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We are excited to announce the opening of Frido Ever's first solo exhibition at MELK on June 21st. We hope to see you at Hallings gate 5 from 18.00-21.00 this Friday for the final show before the summer break.

Represented artists

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