Contributors Institutional Genealogies

Saša Asentić is a choreographer, researcher and cultural worker and current PhD researcher at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He was born in former Yugoslavia. During the war in Bosnia, as an antimilitarist, he illegally escaped and found refuge in Serbia, where he started working in the independent scene in the late 1990s. Since 2007, his artistic work has been presented internationally in major venues and festivals of contemporary performing arts in Berlin, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna, Teheran, Athens, Moscow, and other cities. After being a victim of homophobic and xenophobic violence, and fundamentally disagreeing with the corruption in the public sector in Serbia and the right-wing renaissance, he left Serbia in 2011. Asentić works in the field of contemporary dance, performance, and disability arts. His artistic practice is based on the principle of solidarity, and resistance against cultural oppression and indoctrination. Allyship and long-term collaborations play a crucial role in his work. He is an initiator of Per.Art organization, which gathers since 1999 a group of disabled and non-disabled artists, that challenge and counter ableism in dance and culture. 

Alison Burstein is the Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr. Assistant Curator for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Previously, Burstein served as Curator at The Kitchen, Program Director at the nonprofit art space Recess, and as a member of the education departments at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum (all in New York). She has organized exhibitions and programs for institutions including Tenthaus (Oslo, Norway); The Luminary (St. Louis, MO); Knockdown Center (Brooklyn, NY); Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, New Jersey); the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, CA); and NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY). Burstein’s curatorial work spans a range of formats, from exhibitions, commissioned artist projects, and artist residencies, to archival research initiatives, public programs, digital programming, and publications. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and artist monographs, as well as in publications including Tate Etc., Stedelijk Studies, and Metode. She holds an MA in Art History from Columbia University. 

Jina Chang is a time-based media conservator at the Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo). Trained first as a media artist (BFA Pratt; MFA University of New Mexico) and later in conservation (University of Oslo), she works where liveness, memory, and technology meet. Her current research probes temporality in conservation—how performances and performative artworks persist across scores, setups, bodies, and infrastructures. She investigates time as both material and ethics: the intervals of rehearsal and re-creation, the afterlives of documentation, and the institutional tempos that accelerate or slow care. Recent writing traces artistic intention, affective labor, and the recursive work of staging again. With a degrowth inflection, she asks how conservation can recalibrate pace and sufficiency, treating preservation as a political and emotional practice of caring for cultural memory under shifting conditions. 

Mijke van der Drift works on transfeminist and anti-imperial ethics through philosophies of movement, collective action, and counter-cultural production. This work takes the form of writings, performances, and sound pieces, often by way of inter-disciplinary collaborations. Mijke is Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, London and co-chair of its Union branch. Mijke is founding member of the arts collective Red Forest. Together with Nat Raha, Mijke co-authored Trans Femme Futures (Pluto 2024), and co-edit the Radical Transfeminism Zine. Mijke published in Alternatives, Social Text, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, with Cambridge University Press, and many other outlets. 

Hendrik Folkerts is currently Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and will in 2026 assume the role of Chief Curator of Programme at Kunsthaus Zürich. Prior to this, Folkerts held senior curatorial positions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Art Institute of Chicago, document's 14, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He has built a practice rooted in feminist and queer perspectives, performance and liveness, radical hospitality, and the expanded field of contemporary painting. Building on these commitments, at Moderna Museet he has realized exhibitions that broke new ground in both form and content, placing artists’ practices at the centre of developing new exhibition models. Among them are Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit (2024, organized by Tate Modern), which, through an exhibition architecture developed with design studio Formafantasma, emphasized a more immersive and relational approach that revealed the depth of Kelley’s influence on contemporary artists; and Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product (2024), the first large-scale solo exhibition of the pioneering Los Angeles–born, Berlin-based artist, distributed across multiple Stockholm institutions to illuminate different facets of her practice and set to travel to Gropius Bau, Berlin, and MoMA PS1, New York. At the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2010–2015), he developed performance and discursive programs that became a generator of ideas during a period of profound transition, exploring the museum’s potential across the city of Amsterdam during its closure and within the galleries following the Stedelijk’s reopening. 

Maren Dagny Juell lives in Ås and works in Oslo, Norway. She graduated with a Master of Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London (2004) and has a practice encompassing moving image, installation and VR/AR. Maren’s storytelling refers to recognisable narratives from online information culture, games and literature. With humour and uncertainty, she examines the impact of technology on individual autonomy. Through dialogues between human actors, objects and ideas, she explores what kind of visual and technological developments are used to tell us what we should become, and who we are. Maren's most recent solo exhibitions have been at Trondheim Center for Electronic Arts (2023), Tenthaus (2021), Atelier Nord Oslo (2019), Trafo Kunsthall (2018), Podium Oslo (2017) and Trøndelag Center for Contemporary Art (2018). Work has been included in group exhibitions at, among others; the Astrup Fearnley Museum (2008), Stavanger Art Museum (2015) and Bergen Center for Electronic Art (2021). Video works have been shown internationally such as at AMIFF, ZK/U Berlin, The Australian video Biennial in Melbourne and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2023/2024). She has participated in and created new works for various biennials including Riga Photography Biennial (2020), Meta.Morf Trondheim International Biennial of Art and Technology (2022) and Art Encounters Biennial, Romania (2023). In 2024 she won the Lumen Prize, Nordic Award. An international award for artists working with technology. 

Lotte Løvholm is a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde. Lotte’s practice operates in the tension between intensive archival work and more extroverted activities. She values long-term working relationships, which often turn into friendships, and dreams of working in a cyclical manner, in touch with both outer seasons and inner rhythms. She has a steady meditation practice that flows in and out of her professional and personal life and likes to connect art with movements, magic, and history. With an interest in works that address society's shadows, she has explored her own Latvian family history and war traumas together with Latvian curator Inga Lāce in the exhibition "The Latvian Collection" at Malmö Konstmuseum and the Latvian National Museum of Art. She has addressed Denmark's colonial history through publications, exhibitions, and activism, and has had an extended collaboration with visual artist Jeannette Ehlers. Løvholm was the curator of Ehlers’ solo exhibition "Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms" at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, co-curated with Awa Konaté. Currently in her position at The Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde she curates exhibitions at the former psychiatric hospital Sct. Hans Hospital. Løvholm founded the exhibition space Collega in 2022, focusing on co-curation, which is now run by her friend and colleague Jari Malta. Past and current collaborators include Kunsthal Aarhus, Malmö Konstmuseum, Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Tensta konsthall, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Art Hub Copenhagen, blaxTARLINES, Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art, Fuxia 2, Village Unhu, and 1.1 Basel. She has a strong passion for performance art and initiated the article series Living Archives for the performance journal bastard. 

Ifrah Osman is an anti-disciplinary curator and mediator with a background in Peace and Conflict Studies. Her practice is driven by critical research, inclusive methods, and transnational perspectives, developing innovative ways to make contemporary art accessible, relevant, and responsive across audiences, formats, and geographies. Osman has collaborated with institutions including MUNCH, KORO, Bergen Kunsthall, and Kunsthall Oslo. She has curated exhibitions, live events, and multilingual public programmes, as well as led large-scale commissions. Her projects explore the intersections of language and art, engaging both dominant epistemologies and alternative ways of knowing. Unfolding across multiple temporalities, her work is rooted in practices of slow world-building. She is currently Program Developer at Kunsthall Oslo and curator for KORO at the Norwegian Embassy in Nairobi. 

Manuel Pelmuş lives and works in Oslo. He is an artist with a background in choreography and dance and investigates the idea of a live presence within the context of exhibitions, exploring the human body’s relationship to memory and the construction of history. He was awarded the 2012 Berlin Art Prize for performing arts, and he represented Romania at the 55th Venice Biennale in collaboration with Alexandra Pirici in 2013. His work has been widely presented at a number of international museums and biennales, including, Palais de Tokyo, MUNCH, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kyiv Biennale, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. He was a research fellow at the Academy of Fine Art Oslo and is currently Vice-rector of artistic research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. 

Ana Ribeiro is a Time-based Media Conservator based in London. Ana studied Conservation and Restoration in Lisbon (FCT-UNL) and trained in media conservation at the S.M.A.K (Ghent), NiMK (Amsterdam) and Tate where she now coordinates the acquisition of new time-based media artworks joining the collection. Since 2016 Ana has been caring for performance-based artworks part of the collection and their communities, such as Lee Mingwei’s Our Labyrinth or Tony Conrad’s Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain. Recently she has focused on the preservation of choreographic works and the conditions to sustain them in a museum context, contributing to the Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum project as an Institutional Associate Researcher. Stemming from the learnings of working with performance-based artworks and their artistic practices and a desire to apply degrowth principles in her work, Ana is interested in understanding how these disciplines inform each other and can allow for a more reflective, just and responsible conservation practice in the museum. 

Helle Siljeholm is an artist and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway, currently pursuing a PhD at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her multidisciplinary practice spans film, installation, sculpture, choreography, and performance. Her research focuses on geological entities—such as mountains and land formations—and their complex entanglements with human, natural, and cultural systems across geological time, the present moment, and possible futures. Helle’s artistic work and research are strongly influenced by a decade of collaborative artistic projects in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. Helle has also been co-curator of Høstscena: East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2023), curator for the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts' graduation exhibition for BA students: St. Olavsgate 21: Til Salgs (2021) and artistic director for Barents Spektakel: The World's Northernmost Chinatown (2019). This autumn, she is developing several new projects: a commissioned work for the Walk & Talk Biennale in the Azores, a new short film premiering at Cinema Lais/ Greek Film Archive in Athens, and a solo- exhibtionat Kunstnernes Hus in collaboration with choreographer Ingri Fiksdal. She is also presenting a new iteration of The Mountain Body project at the Reykjavík Dance Festival, co-authored with Palestinian writer Mazen Maarouf and Italian curator Lisa Gilardino. 

Kjersti Solbakken is the current director of Bergen Kunsthall, and has worked as a freelance curator, writer, and institutional leader, previously based in Oslo, Norway.In 2022 Solbakken was assigned as curator of Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) 2024, organised by the North Norwegian Art Centre, and as curatorial resident at ISCP in New York with support from Office for Contemporary Art Norway – OCA. From 2017 to 2022, she served as the Director of Kunstnerforbundet, one of Scandinavia's oldest artist-run exhibition spaces. With a program of over 20 exhibitions annually, she oversaw the establishment of Atelier Kunstnerforbundet, a studio collective and network of art enthusiasts focused on engaging the public in the centre of Oslo. Solbakken has also been appointed Director of Galleri Format and Fotogalleriet. She has curated exhibitions for various institutions, including Hordaland Kunstsenter, Vestlandsutstillingen, and Astrup Fearnley Museet. As an active initiator in the self-organised field, she has contributed to the establishment of platforms such as Feil forlag and the project space Holodeck and was for a period involved in Tekstallianse—a Nordic festival for micro-publishing and printed matter. 

Nikhil Vettukattil is an artist living and working in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture and video, their practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences. Recent exhibitions include DECADE, AGIT, Berlin, DE (2025); designofthetimes, 3236rls/Le Bourgeois, London, UK (2025); Defund the Police, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2024); and Stipendutstilling, Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo, NO (2024) among more. Forthcoming exhibitions include Four Dilations at MoMA PS1, New York, US and Figures of Fascism and Anti-Fascist Solidarity at Kaaitheater, Brussels, BE.