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.

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

lives and works between Oslo and Rio de Janeiro, where she completed the Capacete programme in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions are 

 Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro and Melk (2019); and 

 at UKS, Oslo and Ultima Festival (2017) – recent group exhibitions and other projects include 

, Espaço C-A-M-A, São Paulo, Brazil (2021); 

, Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland (2020); 

Mind moves with matter, body blends into space

, Centre Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France (2017) and 

, Preus Fotomuseum, Oslo (2017). Among other curatorial projects, Dolven Balke curated the biennale 

 – LIAF – with Linn Pedersen in 2011 and co-founded and programmed the artist-run space REKORD in Oslo from 2006 to 2010.

 evokes a sense of instability. It is used to describe a difficult situation or time, conjuring unrest, agitation or excitement. Despite the magnitude of its symbolism, it is also used to describe an intimate reality, as is often the case in the artist’s work. 

Dolven Balke depicts familiar situations in seemingly ordinary places, grown out of her own experiences. In her images there are figures relaxing by water, bones of aquatic animals, a grieving man lying on a picnic table, a woman pumping milk from her breasts or an MRI scanner with signs of recent use. Mundane scenes become condensed monuments to everyday life. Her photographs are often shown side by side with sculptures using tactile materials and recognizable objects.

 shows original polaroids cut out from cast silicone objects. The material is skin-like, typically used in prosthetic limbs or special effects. These rectangular sliced bodies in different tones replicate water-resistant patterns such as anti-slip pads, dish drying mats, wetroom appliances and suction pumps. 

The artist finds tenderness in the unemotional materials that lend support in moments of frailty or affection. In the two sculptures that give the exhibition its title, parts of an ambulance stretcher cast in iron sink into pieces of mattress foam. The heaviness of these tools slowly pressures and shapes the contrastingly soft bodies displayed on the floor. The show also comprises two larger prints on transparent foil draped over folded blue bench paper – a kind of plastic paper used in medical examinations.

A stainless metal handrail greets the visitors at the entrance in an offer of support. The shiny and cold architectural feature, like a safety measure on the deck of a ship, curves around the wall and guides the audience into the exhibition. Albeit the exhibition’s tidy surface there is a massive suggestion of liquids flowing, spilling, draining, dripping and pumping. A playful reference to the wetness that accompanies care and intimacy, and the failed attempts to contain life’s relentless leakage.

, Thora Dolven Balke’s third solo exhibition at the gallery that inaugurates our newly refurbished space at Hallings Gate. Featuring a new body of photographic and sculptural work. 

Rough Seas

Thora Dolven Balke lives and works between Oslo and Rio de Janeiro, where she completed the Capacete programme in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions are FLOW, Cavalo, Rio de Janeiro (2019); All that respires, conspires at UKS, Oslo and Ultima Festival (2017); Von hinten durch die Brust ins Auge at Kristiansand Kunsthall (2015) – recent group exhibitions and other projects include 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, Frankrike (2017) and The Young Lions, Preus Fotomuseum, Oslo (2017). Among other curatorial projects, Dolven Balke curated the biennale Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF – with Linn Pedersen in 2011 and co-funded and programmed the artist-run space REKORD in Oslo from 2006 to 2010.

FLOW imagines the body as a system of open channels that its owner can lose control over in certain singular but commonplace situations, related to sexuality, illness, childbirth and age. Images from intimate domestic scenes are interspersed with hospital interiors and marine animals, alongside a series of tinted fountain heads. These are based on faces found in the gardens of Museu do Açude, in the Tijuca forest in Rio de Janeiro, undated and made by unknown artists. Spending time in the park, Dolven Balke saw an image of this life-flow in the fountain figures, with their gaping mouths relentlessly spilling water. In collaboration with the museum she was able to take moulds of them on site.

The flow is of time through matter, preserved in a variety of materials with different life-spans. Traces of water through stone and copper are captured in resin, while the slow disintegration of a whale’s body is made physical by an augmented TV flat screen, disassembled to expose the fragile technology beneath. A series of silicone objects, with industrial patterns cast from anti-slip matts, allude to the surface of skin. Encasing original polaroid photographs, they are shown alongside enlarged prints that make visible the dust, hairs and organic matter from the scan, sharp against the larger soft motif. The subjects seem to exist in a liquid atmosphere, floating between layers of chemicals and light, stuck in the thickness of an instant.

The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council Norway.


Presenting a new series of works, Thora Dolven Balke’s second solo exhibition at MELK is a reflection on bodies in vulnerable situations and the often mundane spaces where major life events unfold. FLOW continues Dolven Balke’s exploration of the slippage between analogue and digital mediums, presenting original and enlarged polaroid photographs, epoxy resin and silicone cast objects and a video installation, all from 2019.

FLOW

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.