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 strong bond has developed between them – both in lifestyle and in the expression of emotions through art. The unique situation and living conditions in Iran have guided their artistic path in a specific direction.
On Velferden They want to see, touch, hear and sense the nature around them, and bring out stories from the piles of mine waste in the form of an art collection. Stories that will show the relationship between humans and nature from a new perspective. They want to use mine waste, soil, plants and the region's culture in their artwork.
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 shumf sol was published. In 2025 she was awarded the Grimsrudstipendet “… 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 fall of 2024, Stensland participated in the Autumn Exhibition.
"On 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 in England.
Focusing on long-term documentary projects, Igor explores changing landscapes through quiet observation and intuitive documentation. His work has followed Catholic pilgrims through Latvia’s economically disadvantaged eastern regions and documented post-industrial mining towns in Cornwall, UK. He is currently working in the Harz Mountains in Germany, where he explores themes of loneliness and loss in a landscape of dying spruce forests, while also exploring the relationship between human activity and natural processes along Hamburg’s 100km “Green Ring”.
On Velferden Trepeshchenok will walk in the mining area and document a terrain that carries memories of extraction, while gradually becoming something new. Through slow observation with photography and video, he will examine how these places acquire new meanings in the transition between their industrial past and an 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 about challenging formats and intersecting artistic processes. Blennow’s practice explores time, memories and the space between, and situates itself in the grey area between black box and white cube, between fixed choreography and improvisation, a sanctuary and a rupture. In these liminal spaces, the body enters an undefined zone, where anything can happen within a given time frame, where the monsters emerge, and intuition leads.
On Velferden She will continue her studio work with The Dying Swan Song — a new performance (scheduled to premiere in 2027) about grief, loss, and transformation. Inspired by the myth of the Swan Song and the ballet Swan Lake , she explores the grieving body and the echoes of ancestors, surrendering to the shadow side and opening up to the repulsive, while reflecting on how endings can carry the seeds 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 who have collaborated since 2012 and now live and work in Sandnes, Rogaland. Their artistic practice transcends multiple forms and formats, in search of meanings and methods to contextualize their existence within a broad political and cultural spectrum.
"In connection with our residency on Velferden "We look forward to using the time and peace offered to further develop our ongoing research and video practice, while also being open to experimentation and interaction with the local environment and the stories of the place."
Kiarash Dadgar and Sara Oveissi
02.01 - 31.01
Kiarash Dadgar (b. 1994, Esfahan, Iran) is an Iranian-Canadian filmmaker, writer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. He holds an MA in dramatic literature from Soore Art University in Tehran and is completing an 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 been screened at over 300 international festivals and won more than 110 awards globally. On Velferden Kiarash will develop Graveyard , his first feature film – a dark, poetic tale set on a fictional island, exploring love, death and power structures through surreal and symbolic imagery. He intends to use the production stay for visual research, writing and collaboration with his creative partner.
Sara Oveissi (b. 1994, Tehran, Iran) is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary visual artist and art/creative director working in photography, video, and mixed media. Her work explores memory, identity, displacement, and emotional transformation through a poetic visual language and experimental storytelling.
With a background in graphic design, collage and digital media, Sara creates visually charged spaces that are emotionally moving and blur the boundaries between external reality and internal experience. Her practice often draws on 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 interdisciplinary collaborations. At Velferden Sara will work with her creative partner Kiarash Dadgar to develop Graveyard visually, focusing on research, visual experiments, and site-specific image production as part of the project's pre-production phase.
Taylor Smith
05.01 - 31.01
Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith is an American-born (Rochester, NY, 1993), French-naturalized visual artist currently based in Oslo. She understands the climate crisis as a crisis of perception, and thus as a crisis of both emotion and agency. With this as a starting point, she attempts, through interdisciplinary collaborations, to deconstruct the perceived boundaries between scientific and artistic knowledge. She holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, an MA in Cultural Communication from the École du Louvre in Paris, a BFA in Painting, and a BA in Art History from Boston University. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and Atelier Nord in Oslo.
On Velferden Through photochemical film, microbial image 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 who explores the physical and psychological dimensions of toxicity. He paints exclusively with biohazardous materials such as herbicides, drugs, and post-industrial waste.
On Velferden Nic will begin a new series investigating the by-products of the mining industry in Southern Norway, where he works directly with contaminated sediments and mineral waste. His paintings will show the unique visual properties of these materials (e.g. colour , viscosity, opacity and reactivity), as well as the effects they may have on the environment around them. Upon request, Nic will arrange meetings with his paintings. These occasions may require the use of rubber gloves, gas masks or protective suits.
