Sparebankstiftelsen DNB Grant Exhibition 2024

Oslo Kunstforening is pleased to present the three artists nominated for the Sparebankstiftelsen DNB Grant Exhibition 2024:

Eline Benjaminsen
Margrethe Kolstad Brekke
Nikhil Vettukattil

The exhibition will open 14 November 2024 at Oslo Kunstforening, and the recipient of the grant will be announced during the exhibition period. New as of this year, the recipient will also be offered a studio residency at Edvard Munch’s former studio at Ekely.

This year’s jury consists of Ana María Bresciani, curator at KORO, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, visual artist and professor at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Sandra Mujinga, visual artist and musician, Axel Wieder, director of Bergen Kunsthall, and Elisabeth Byre, artistic director of Oslo Kunstforening.

Eline Benjaminsen (b. 1992, Oslo) lives and works in Oslo. Benjaminsen is concerned by the opacity of market processes and their impact on socio-economic status and how this opacity inhibits our ability to critically engage with those very market processes. Her work thus proposes ways of visually representing those opaque market processes, using strategies such as follow-the-money narratives.

She holds a BA in photography from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She has recently exhibited at venues such as Radius CCA, Delft (Year), Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, (Year), Mannheim Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie (Year), and KunstHaus Wien (Year). In 2024, she will publish the book Collapsed Mythologies – a Geofinancial Atlas together with visual artist Dayna Casey. Benjaminsen is also currently working on the project Footprints in the Valley with land rights activist Elias Kimaiyo.

Margrethe Kolstad Brekke (b. 1979, City) lives and works in City. Through her practice, Brekke explores utopian methodologies in order to address the sublime challenges represented by human-induced climate change and the interconnected metacrisis.

Brekke has an MA in Fine Art from The Art Academy in Bergen (2014), and has exhibited at venues such as Muzeion, Bolzano (Year), Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (Year), Flag-no-flag, Reggio Emilia (Year), Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (Year), No Place, Oslo (Year), in addition to several venues in the Arctic region organised by the Arctic Art Institute. Kolstad Brekke has also participated in collaborations such as the Luftballett project (2015-2018) and Rjukan Solarpunk Academy (2019-).

Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru) lives and works in Oslo. With a background in both visual art and philosophy, Vettukattil works outside of disciplinary categories, often through collaboration and experimentation, and frequently uses appropriation and collage to develop ways of working based on post-production, reassembling, and remixing found objects, ‘readymades’ and audiovisual material. Vettukattil uses these experimental reassembly processes to narrativize alternate histories.

Vettukattil holds a BA in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London and an MA in Contemporary European Philosophy from Kingston University, London. They are part of the Institute for Scene Experiments, and recent exhibitions include Hothouse Flowers, Podium, Oslo (2024), Postproduction, Studiengalerie 1.357 Goethe University, Frankfurt (2023), Contaminators, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2023) and Claustrophobia Alpina III, Ford, Geneva (2023).