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.

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.

Ashen

 (b. 1977) lives and works in Kongsberg, Norway. She is educated at the National Academy of Arts in Oslo. In 2018 she was awarded county artist of the year in Buskerud, she’s held recent solo exhibitions at MELK (Oslo), RAKE (Trondheim), Nord-Trøndelag Art Museum, Tenthaus (Oslo), Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Buskerud Art Centre (Drammen), Bærum kunsthall and CHART Art fair (DK), and is exhibited at Les Rencontres d´Arles summer 2023. She is included in several private and public collections. Honerud is an associate professor of photography at the University of Southeastern Norway, where she is a research group leader and has published a number of articles on artistic research.

Hilde Honerud works in the tradition of documentary photography, but her motifs are far from classical. In a time where news of catastrophic events are part of everyday life, there is a need to question how to communicate these incidents through images. Honerud refers to John Berger’s essay: Uses of Photography (1978) when explaining her position on this subject: “For the photographer, this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial.”

Currently, she works on forms of photographic representation in a time when the future is no longer a given opportunity for the individual future, but a potential for loss and suffering. She argues that this creates a new relation between time, world and self that calls for new forms of representation. The artistic philosophy in these works is deliberated further in 

 and Journal for Artistic Research, issue 29.

Hilde Honerud

 (b. 1977), living in Kongsberg, Norway, is a visual artist and associate professor of photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her thematic content is close to journalistic, but the motifs are far from classic and often abstract. Through a formal approach, she investigates how precarious political and social conditions can be experienced through the everyday and recognizable.

Honerud has recently exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles, CHART Art Fair, MELK, Nord-Trøndelag Art Museum, QB Gallery, Nitja Center for Contemporary Art, Kristiansand Kunsthall, and more. She has been awarded the title of county artist in Buskerud and has participated several times in juried national exhibitions.

She studied at Napier University in Scotland and at the Academy of Fine Arts, (MA) in Oslo. Honerud has been actively involved in building up the Kongsberg Art Association's exhibition program and sits on the board of the voluntary organization Yoga and Sports with Refugees in Greece. She served on FFF's scholarship committee in 2022/23, as chair in 2022. She is on the National Jury for 2024/25 and leads the research group Research in Art and Design at the University of South-Eastern Norway.


What does it take to be prepared? How do one prepare for a future that looms large, seemingly consisting of a complex web of continuous and interconnected crises? What roles may photography take in this waning belief in the future? These questions are underlying in Hilde Honerud’s new body of work, 

, in which she has photographed practices of emergency preparedness.

Emergency preparedness refers to the measures and actions taken to ensure readiness to respond effectively to emergencies and disasters. It involves planning, organizing resources, and coordinating efforts to mitigate the impact of potential crises, involving proactive measures directed at future events. Traveling with her family to locations in Europe and Australia, as well as her home county of Buskerud, Honerud has captured motifs that span from small-scale individual “prepping” via nationally organized emergency services to globally scaled initiatives and corporations developing future food supplies, medicines and energy.

The twenty-two photographs on view can roughly be sorted in four categories: semi-close ups of hands that carefully hold an apple, adjusts a helmet, or handle a machine – minor actions directed at major threats, landscapes that have suffered environmental damage, emergency service exercises involving emblematic danger signals such as fire and smoke, and close-ups of models or sculptures of bodily parts. The risks and possibilities of the future are complex, contradictory, and difficult to keep in eyesight and to act on. Honerud’s photographs reflect an ambition to try.

, the project’s title, is an obvious reference to Susan Sontag’s seminal book-length essay 

 (2003). (This was Sontag’s last publication before her untimely death the year after.) Discussing a variety of historical examples, Sontag here reflects on the ethical and epistemological complexities involved in viewing photographs of human suffering and atrocities. Such photographs may on the one hand instigate (an unhelpful?) suffering by proxy, on the other they risk numbing the viewer.

Particularly relevant for Honerud’s project is Sontag’s pondering on the ambiguity of photographic “truth” and of whether staged or edited photographs may still convey any such thing. While Honerud’s practice is rooted in the long-standing tradition of socially engaged documentary, 

 continues her more recent experimaentation with image manipulation by using Photoshop against the grain. Interspersed across the gallery are a handful of photographs that tickle both our perception and cognition in that they do not seem to add up to one coherent image. In one work, a butterfly on a leaf, photographed in the botanical garden in Copenhagen, is cloned and stamped at a different size. Two versions of the same detail interlace to convey a jolted slide of scale that subtly evokes a slippage between self and world, micro- and macrolevel events (think of the butterfly effect), present and future.

Another key point Sontag discusses is the power that photography has in shaping collective memory and historical consciousness by highlighting and preserving significant events. Honerud’s photographs highlight key developments in the present but are also directed at the future. Her project thereby harbors an overarching question of whether we are witnessing an expansion in photography’s temporality. Through most of its history, photography has been seen as a witness or reservoir of the past, and as a medium that fixes and stores time. With digital photography’s algorithmic and networked conditions for capturing and immediate dissemination images and data, this has changed. Not only does photography point to and participate in a present; it is also increasingly involved in procedures for assessing and predicting future events, risks and outcomes. In this sense, photography is itself enmeshed in practices and systems of emergency preparedness.

– Hilde Honerud's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Regarding the Pain of the Future

 (b. 1987) is a photographer and print-maker living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Through montages of photographs of people, places, things and abstract pictures, his work revolves as much around mirroring his passage through life, as it does around the open interpretation of the meaning of images. That is, through new associations between them. After receiving his MFA from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, Gustafsson’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues such as Galleri Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm (2022), MELK Galleri, Oslo (2022), Lundgren Gallery, Palma (2022), Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2021) and at the Mariatorget subway station in Stockholm (2022). He has released three books; 

 (self-published, 2022) and most recently, A House of Clay (Loose Joints, 2024).

Swedish artist Erik Gustafsson works with analog photography and returns to the photograph's intrinsic elements such as representation, reproduction and the possibilities of experiencing time and space on a flat surface.

His work process often involves cycles of photographing, printing, failing, dodging rules, repeating and scanning. As traces of the process are layered on top of each other, the resulting pictures can be seen as metaphors for memories, or simply as demonstrations of the potential for change that lies in the act of reproduction.

The analog darkroom plays a central part in Gustafsson’s work as it both functions as an extension of the camera and of the mind. Within that space it's important for him to find the balance between doing as much as he can and at the same time knowing when to let go of control.

Alongside Gustafsson’s spontaneous daily-life snapshots, are abstract pictures made without the use of a camera. His ongoing series of Luminograms are original imprints created by rays of light, exposed directly onto light-sensitive paper in the darkroom. The Luminogram process is about as fundamental as photography gets; as such the works raise questions about the nature of the photograph and how it can be made through various techniques and processes.

Erik Gustafsson

Erik Gustafsson (b. 1987) is a photographer and print-maker living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Through montages of photographs of people, places, things and abstract pictures, his work revolves as much around mirroring his passage through life, as it does around the open interpretation of the meaning of images. That is, through new associations between them. After receiving his MFA from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, Gustafsson’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues such as Galleri Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm (2022), MELK Galleri, Oslo (2022), Lundgren Gallery, Palma (2022), Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2021). He has previously published two books; 

 (Heavy Books, 2020). Soon he will release his third book A House of Clay, published by Loose Joints (2024).

Gustafsson places his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise, a truism of photography: to elevate the everyday, to find meaning and take seriously the smallest of occurrences in ordinary life, and to invoke a sense of gratitude and wonder toward consciousness, sensing and feeling. Sometimes excessively normal, elsewhere tender and intimate, later dense and complex, Gustafsson’s warm slices of life are digested in the darkroom, where the technical processes of photography fall in on themselves, becoming embedded in the image: collapsing the space between process and final product.

Balancing consciousness and coincidence, Gustafsson’s moments of magical realism speak of a permanence, a perpetual present, where the continually unfinished image can always be, at a later stage, altered, manipulated and reshaped. Gustafsson’s work is a structure that is built to collapse and resurrect again and again in new ways.

– Lewis Chaplin, Loose Joints. A House of Clay is published by Loose Joints, February 2024, with two essays by Elisa Medde and Louis Nitze.

We are proud to present Erik Gustafsson’s third solo exhibition at MELK titled A House of Clay, where the birdsong of everyday life interacts with cycles of darkroom creation and destruction.

A House of Clay

 (b. 1996, Trondheim) is a Norwegian-Indian multidisciplinary artist with education from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and 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. He has recently exhibited at Fotogalleriet (2023), Mint abf (2023, Stockholm), Melk Galleri (2022), Kunstnernes Hus (2022), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (Stockholm, 2022) and is a selected talent for the Futures Photography platform 2023.

Dev Dhunsi is a Norwegian artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. In recent years, his works have revolved around journeys to his father’s native country, India. His projects, developed in large installations, combine 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, exploring the cultural bridge between his ancestries and upbringing in the physical landscapes of Scandinavia and the techno- and mediascapes of Asia.

Dev Dhunsi’s images are usually surrounded by or immersed in water and sound. One can rarely grasp singular photographic images as he searches more complex narrations, filtering the camera’s impossibility to catch reality within the frame of the given device fully. One needs to look beyond, outside the picture, to come to terms with its realization. Therefore, the images are spinning, they split, they move, they are unreadable and part of larger installations, assuaging referential feelings.

In Encircling Stories, these images, taken in movement over seven years of returning from Punjab to Goa, cutting across several regions of India over several days of train rides, something else emerges, as the relation of peasants to their land differs every time, provoking further deferral. Such relation is indirect and unsearched, equally revealing the complexity of a region where agriculture has been under threat to monoculture and dispossession yet again in recent times. Dhunsi’s originating search addressed instead something more grand and exotic, the longest factory in the world, which was the primary purpose of the ride, with complex unconscious references in terms of desire and constructed dependency over centuries of culturally determined impositions from design history but also familiar relations from his paternal legacy and what he could bring with him from Asia to Scandinavia decades prior.

For this exhibition, Dhunsi’s images standing still are unusual. The machinic system he usually creates to make them unreadable has disappeared. Their freezing into a frame should make us feel more stable, but something remains floating without such a spinning view. Floating, free falling, is considered dangerous in our times. We are taught we need navigation to know where we are going. We need a function. We need to function within the machinic system we have been given.

Through this exhibition, Dhunsi explores how a site turns into sight, pointing to photography’s intrinsic historical function of land grabbing. He speaks about images not only capturing a landscape —as if abstract— momentarily but also serving domination power. The camera grabs the image of a territory, restricts its access, and defines its ownership. Although it seems we are given access through the field of vision to open landscape or the cultural landscape —even nature— we are recirculated as the viewer witnessing and therefore enabling knowledge of sight of the dispossessed. We are non-agential witnesses yet reproducing dispossession.

What may sound like a self-referential and philosophical perspectivization of an artistic practice —going from images that are moving to still images— in reality, is something more tangible. Dhunsi’s images from the carriages in motion over the Indian territory —a nation-state like many others determining rights over land, capital, possessions, and jurisdictions—returning to the same carriages and the same landscape periodically capture at a glance the continuous dispossession of peasants from their land through the ongoing capitalization of these grounds and the consequent displacement of its people. When land is taken away from people, they remain floating without a future.

Dhunsi would usually have left his images “laundering” and potentially be consumed by this free fall to the point of cancellation because of mechanical self-destruction.

Dhunsi’s core images of a textile factory producing bed sheets of which, on other occasions, we have heard sound, haunts us. Its sound, now turning into vision, haunts our dreams and our possibility to rest, another form of free-floating into yet another state of induced imbalance, sleeplessness. The unconscious, Modernity’s introjection of the world, is a dream state where humans think through their inner unknown, sitting on their inside instead of collectively forming cognizant forms of dwelling. Accordingly, the world implodes inside a body on a free fall, an internal chaos, the unconscious, which is also constituted by images. If we all float, though, we have the potential of losing the determinism of Western perspectivism, what continues to keep us in place. It means we have the possibility of entering a new world era, no matter how disruptive that may seem. Or we already have. We are driven by chaos, and we are part of a chaotic revolution.

There is a calming quality to this free fall of being on the verge because, instead of image production, we are losing control of visibility. Through Dhunsi’s work, there is no search for an original vision but for origination. We are embedded into a whole other interface of reality, identity, and representation, whose aim is yet to be enclosed in a single definition.

The project and exhibition is generous supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Fritt Ord Foundation, Norsk Fotografisk Fond and FKDS (Fond for Kunst & Design studenter).

, Dev Dhunsi’s first solo exhibition at MELK.

Represented artists

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