Uskkádat Ustaria

Elina Waage Mikalsen (b.1992) is a Sámi-Norwegian interdisciplinary artist and musician from Romssa/Tromsø, Sápmi. She works with sound, text, textile, performance and installation. She often mixes field recordings, voice, electronics and home-built instruments to create sonic spaces that exist somewhere between reality and fantasy. By collecting fragments of stories, materials and practices she works with what lies in between. The holes that the Norwegian colonization of Sápmi has created in the form of loss of language and cultural heritage have become a starting point for imagining what these holes might represent, what matter they constitute and how they continue to affect the people in our societies. Waage Mikalsen collaborates with other artists and practitioners and since 2023 she has organized Šuvva, a gathering in the form of a talk show-collage focused on sounds and listening from a Sámi and Indigenous perspective. Waage Mikalsen has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally in places like Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, MUNCH, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Nuuk Art Museum, Cultural Centre Caisa, The National Museum in Norway, Lofoten International Arts Festival, Singapore Biennale, Toronto Biennial and Roskilde Festival (with Katarina Barruk). She has also been an artist in residence at the Borealis Festival for experimental music, focusing on Sámi sonic practices, ways of listening and experimenting.  

Jassem el Hindi (b. 1981) is French Palestinian Lebanese artist and performer based in Norway. el Hindi examines the double bind of haunting and hospitality, in the company of death poems and distorted folk art. His work is based on broken dances, broken objects, broken texts, cast in nervousness and necessity. His latest dance pieces are based on Arab death poems - works by Etel Adnan, Nazik El Malaika, with western counterparts: Aase Berg, CA Conrad, Tor Ulven - in order to generate baroque, cruel, cosmological worlds. His work often starts with a death poem and a set of iconographic material. Aside from his solo work, el Hindi also creates sound pieces for numerous choreographers around the world, and his latest collaborators include Sina Seifee, Mia Habib, Harald Beharie, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Ligia Lewis, Keith Hennessy, and Clara Furey. el Hindi’s work is shown internationally, and his collaborations have won numerous awards and nominations (Bessie Award, the Dublin Fringe Jury prize, the PICA Portland Jury’s choice, Hedda pris, 8:tension)