Guests at Winter Residency 2025 / 2026
These are the guests who will be coming for residencies at Velferden this winter!
Kai Solbakken
01.10 - 02.11
Kai Solbakken (b. 1995, Lillehammer) is a Norwegian visual artist living in Bergen. He works mainly with painting and drawing, in addition to photography. The starting point for the paintings is often a drawn composition based on one or more reference photos, which gradually changes form and expression as it is painted over. Forests, nature and scenes from life outside the city are typical inspirations for his pictures.
During the stay at Velferden Kai will familiarize himself with the area, and work on his practice based on this. He will use the time to create a production consisting of painting and drawing, based on reference images from the local area.
His motifs are usually set in darkened, nocturnal environments and often contain an encounter between nature and man-made things. The traces of mining in Sokndal create a clear encounter between nature and man-made things, and this will serve as the background for his working period at Velferden.
Mohammad and Masoud Khorasani
01.10 - 02.11
Mohammad and Masoud Khorasani are two artist brothers born in 1989 and 1990 in Fasa, Shiraz, Iran. They have grown up together since childhood and a deep bond has been created between them in their lifestyle and expression of emotions through art. The specific situation and conditions of life in Iran have led their artistic path in a specific direction.
At Velferden, they want to see, touch, hear and feel the nature around them and bring out stories from the pile of mining waste in the form of an art collection. Stories that will show the relationship between humans and nature with a new perspective. They want to use the mining waste, soil, plants and culture of the region in their artworks.
Runa Aarbakke Skjeldal
27.10 - 16.11
Runa Skjeldal (b. 1998) was raised in Rælingen. In 2021 she made her debut with the novel Eleonora, and in 2024 the novel Kalk og fuktig sol was published. In 2025 she was awarded the Grimsrud Scholarship “… for her fine linguistic playfulness and ability to portray the young person with deep empathy and great seriousness. Skjeldal also writes beautifully and intensely about relationships on the verge of disintegration, and about young people who are forced to navigate new ways in unfamiliar terrain.”
She is now working on what will be her third novel. This will be her main work during her stay at Velferden. She publishes a free writing workshop weekly that is sent by email to subscribers of the blog: runaskjeldal.wordpress.com. Runa has studied at the author's study in Bø, and in Tromsø, and learned French and Italian to be able to read Marguerite Duras, and Fleur Jaeggy in the original languages.
Karianne Stensland
03.11 - 30.11
Karianne Stensland (b. 1969 in Bodø) lives and works in Oslo. Stensland has a master's degree in visual arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim (2000-2005), and theater studies at the State Theater Academy in St. Petersburg (1992-93). Stensland works in video, text, drawing, music, performance and sculpture. She was one of the artists in the studio program of the Norwegian Artists' Association (2020-2023). Stensland worked in the Scandinavian art group High Heel Sisters (2002-2007), and was one of the initiators behind the Marienborg project space and studio community in Trondheim (2005-2010). In recent years, she has had solo exhibitions at Møre og Romsdal Kunstsenter (2022), Kunstbanken Hedmark (2020) and RAM gallery (2017), in addition to the National Museum's opening exhibition and the Artists' Association's June Exhibition in 2022. In the autumn of 2024, Stensland participated in the Autumn Exhibition.
"At Velferden I will be working with text, drawing and music. Can a poem become a drawing, a drawing become a song? The goal is not to have any clear goal for the stay, but rather to let ideas and whims unfold spontaneously, randomly and freely."
Igor Trepeschenok
03.11 - 07.12
Igor Trepeshchenok (b. 1984, Riga, Latvia) is a photographer based in Hamburg, Germany. He studied photography at Falmouth University, England.
Working primarily on long-term documentary projects, Igor explores landscapes in transition through quiet observation and intuitive documentation. His work has followed Catholic pilgrims through Latvia's economically challenged eastern regions and documented post-industrial mining towns in Cornwall, UK. Currently, he is working in Germany's Harz Mountains, exploring themes of solitude and loss within a landscape of dying spruce forests, while also investigating the relationship between human activity and natural processes along Hamburg's 100km Green Ring belt.
At Velferden, Trepeshchenok will wander the mining landscape, documenting terrain that holds the memory of extraction while slowly becoming something new. Through slow observation with photography and video, he will explore how these spaces accumulate new meanings as they transition between their industrial past and uncertain future.
Ingvild Melberg Eikeland
10.11 - 13.12
Ingvild Melberg Eikeland (b. 1989) completed a master's degree in art at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2019 and now lives and works in Stavanger. She has exhibited at Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Andersson/Sandström (Stockholm), Galleri Punkt (Oslo), Studio 17 (Stavanger) and Photoworks (Glasgow), among others.
Eikeland's artistry combines various media and materials, such as sculpture, photography,
video and programming, where the works are presented as installations. Her practice
is based on questions related to experiences of our world through local and global
narratives, and how different perceptions arise, are shared, shaped and changed through
the creation of myths.
During the stay at Velferden, Eikeland will attempt to establish communication with
geological formations in Sokndal. Using sensor technology, she will collect data
which forms the basis for describing the life experiences of individual stones. The project
builds on ideas related to deep time, historicization in the interpretation of data, and the myth of
glossopetrae: fossils and rock formations that in ancient times were interpreted as petrified
tongues.
Sanna Blennow
01.12 - 04.01
Sanna Blennow (b. 1988, Sweden) is a choreographer, performer, and educator, based in Copenhagen, always curious to challenge formats and crossbreed artistic processes. Blennow’s practice investigates time, memory and the in-between, positioning her practice in the grey zone between the black box and the white cube, set choreography & improvisation, a sanctuary and a rupture. In these liminal spaces, the body enters an undefined zone, where anything can happen for a set time, where the monsters come out, and intuition guides.
At Velferden she will continue her studio research for The Dying Swan Song—a new performance (planned to premiere in 2027) of grief, loss, and transformation. Inspired by the myth of the Swan Song and the ballet Swan Lake, she explores the sad body and ancestral echoes, surrendering to the shadow side and unzipping the abject, while reflecting on how endings may hold the seed of something new.
Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu
08.12 - 21.12
Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu (b. 1991, Iași/Timișoara, Romania) are an artist couple collaborating since 2012 and currently living and working in Sandnes, Rogaland. Their artistic practice transgresses multiple forms and formats, searching for meanings and methods to contextualize their existence within a broad political and cultural spectrum.
“With the occasion of our residency stay at Velferden, we are looking forward to making use of the offered time and solitude, developing our ongoing research and video practice, while being open for experimentation and interaction with the local environment and histories.”
Kiarash Dadgar and Sara Oveissi
02.01 - 31.01
Kiarash Dadgar
Born in Esfahan, Iran in 1994, Kiarash Dadgar is an Iranian-Canadian filmmaker, writer, and interdisciplinary artist currently based in Toronto. He holds an MA in Dramatic Literature from Soore Art University of Tehran and is completing his MFA in Film at York University. His work often explores memory, displacement, aging, and social injustice through minimalist visual storytelling and hybrid cinematic forms.
His award-winning short film The Steak has screened at over 300 international festivals and won 110+ awards globally. At Velferden, Kiarash will be developing Graveyard, his first feature film—a darkly poetic story set on a fictional island, exploring love, death, and power structures through surreal, symbolic imagery. He aims to use the residency period for deep visual research, writing, and collaborative development with his creative partner.
Sara Oveissi
Born in 1994, in Tehran, Iran, Sara Oveissi is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary visual artist and art/creative director working across photography, video, and mixed media. Her work explores memory, identity, displacement, and emotional transformation through poetic visual language and experimental storytelling.
With a background in graphic design, collage, and digital media, Sara creates emotionally resonant visual spaces that blur the line between outer reality and inner perception. Her practice often draws from personal and collective narratives shaped by migration, trauma, and resilience.
She has exhibited her work in Iran and Berlin and continues to expand her visual language through cross-disciplinary collaborations. At Velferden, Sara will be working alongside her creative partner Kiarash Dadgar to visually develop Graveyard, focusing on research, visual experiments, and location-based image-making as part of the project’s pre-production phase.
Taylor Smith
05.01 - 31.01
Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith is a U.S.-born (Rochester, NY, 1993), French-naturalized visual artist currently based in Oslo. She understands the climate crisis as a crisis of perception, and thus capacity for affect and action. With this in mind, through interdisciplinary collaborations, she attempts to deconstruct perceived boundaries between scientific and artistic knowledge. She holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, an MA in Cultural Mediation from the École du Louvre in Paris, a BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Boston University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and Atelier Nord in Oslo.
While at Velferden, through the media of photochemical film, microbial image-making processes, sound and text, she will explore the violent aesthetic and material gestures employed in the processes of mining, toxic waste disposal and landscape ‘restoration’.
Nic Nathanson
05.01 - 31.01
Nic Nathanson (b. 1992, Los Alamos, New Mexico) is a painter exploring the physical and psychological dimensions of toxicity. He exclusively paints with biohazardous materials such as herbicides, narcotics, and post-industrial debris.
At Velferden, Nic will begin a new series investigating the byproducts of the mining industry in southern Norway, working directly with contaminated sediments and mineral waste. His paintings will demonstrate the unique visual properties of these materials (e.g., coloration, viscosity, opacity, and reactivity) as well as the range of effects they can have on the environment around them. On request, Nic will facilitate encounters with his paintings. These occasions may require the use of rubber gloves, gas masks, or hazmat suits.
