Agenda Art and Craft: Art education and the self organized

Brown Island is an interdisciplinary BIPOC artist collective initiated by students at Konstfack (Stockholm) in 2016 and continues to organise as a community inside and outside the institution. Brown Island have curated group exhibitions, made collective work, arranged public talks and self-published a handbook with lessons on decolonising processes in educational environments.

The Showbar is a collective that among other activities ran a bar in one of the studios at the Oslo National Academy of Arts (KHiO) from 2019 till 2020. The collective was established as a reaction to the prevailing ban on parties and the fact that there were no student bar or common social areas at the school, but during the escalating conflict the critique came to be directed towards the institution as a whole. Although the Showbar was heavily opposed by the school building's private owners during their time at KHiO, the collective managed not only to run a bar, but also an exhibition space, a performance stage, a number of workshops, publish a number of publications, conduct a free tool lending service and a library. The Showbar collective advocates direct action as an activist method against the top-down, over-bureaucratic and meeting-fetishising system that characterises art education in the neoliberal era. The conflict was dramatised in a play at Akademirommet in Oslo in the spring of 2020.

Zoi Johansson (b. 1989) is an artist based in Stockholm where she lives and works as a plasterer and tattoo artist beside her artistic practice. She works in several mediums, but mostly with events, installation and text. Subjects she deals with are class, autonomy and the hidden sides of identity politics. Zoi is currently actual in Kista library short story podcast with her text ”Att florera i skarven mellan två kulturer”.

Magnar Müller Perstølen finished his BFA in 2020 and is today facilitating team development workshops for the private and NGO sector, with a focus on motivation and personal development, vertical communication lines and expectation management as a tool for expanding the individual's personal sphere of influence.

Hampus Håkansson made a name of himself at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo by doing the following things: playing records at Autonoma Showbaren, attempting to legalize the bar, acting a fool, etc. Meanwhile, he also pursued a bachelor in printmaking and drawing at the art and craft department. Following year he has been based in Stockholm, Sweden, to make ends meet.

Mattias Hellberg is a Swedish artist currently enrolling the last year of the MFA programme at the Art Academy in Oslo. His practice deals mainly with social projects and performances that deals with themes such as toxic masculinity and neoliberal business culture and is known to be the one who took ollning to norway. He is the chairman of Föreningen Borgaftons Vänner, co-founder of Team Day and Team Day VIP together with Simon Skuteli and the host of Runkgrottan podcast.

Students and staff in an art department of a major university are so frustrated by the many impositions and requirements decreed from above, that they decide to manage themselves. They act as a subordinate department and appear to follow all the rules. Secretly however, the institute operates as an autonomous, experimen¬tal school with its own rules for teaching, evaluation, reporting, planning, admissions and management. Manifesto stages an alternative school which, instead of breaking out of the institution, takes its place as a parasite inside it. The film raises questions about freedom and self-determination in a society characterized by an increasingly market-oriented education sector dominated by invisible control. Director/ Producer/Screenplay: Ane Hjort Guttu.

Sarah Sekles is a Designer and Artist from Berlin, currently based in Oslo to complete her MFA in Art and Public Space at the National Academy of Arts. She holds a BA from the University of Arts Berlin in Product Design. She has worked as an artist assistant of Reijiro Wada and Tomas Saraceno, as well as a freelance Designer to install woven room partitions for the new Sony Music quarters, or to design and produce porcelain plates for a restaurant in Italy. Sarah Sekles artistic practice revolves around her curiosity, the need to observe and find even more meaningful answers to the questions before her eyes.

Stacey de Voe is an artist whose practice is consumed by an interest in shared moments between cultural, lingual and temporal boundaries and how they relate to identity formation, notions of access, memory and the construction of herstory. Her work weaves together archive material, personal accounts and fiction in order to evoke a contemporary awareness and understanding surrounding seemingly fixed moments of our historical past. Her collaborative process is often expressed through mediums such as radio, printed matter, sound and public gatherings. She has presented work individually and collectively at osloBIENNALEN, Galleri Konstepidemin (Gothenburg, SE), RadiORakel (Oslo, NO), bak basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht, NL), Khartoum Contemporary Art Center (Oslo, NO) and her writing has been published collectively with MIT press, in Urbania 6 and SAMORA Forum. She is currently an MFA candidate at Malmö Art Academy.

Ane Hjort Guttu (b. 1971) is a Norwegian artist and filmmaker based in Oslo. She works in a variety of media, but has in recent years mainly concentrated on film and video works, ranging from investigative documentary to poetic fiction. Among recurrent themes in her work are the relationship between freedom and power, economy and the public space, social change and limits of action. Guttu is also a writer and curator, and she is a professor at the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo.

Ebba Moi was born in Örebro, Sweden in 1971. She is currently head of the Medium- and material-based art MFA program at the Arts & Crafts department at KHIO, where she is a substitute. Her artistic practice is mainly within socially engaged art; working as an artist and curator in various self-initiated projects and collaborations, such as Tenthaus, a discursive space and art collective in Oslo. She has made several public art commissions and exhibitions locally and internationally, using public space as a base for her practice.

Isak Wisløff (b.1989) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo. He works three-dimensionally and investigates the thresholds between objects, artefacts and sculptures. He graduated in 2017 with an MA in design from the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo. He now holds a 50% position as an assistant professor in furniture design at the same institution. Together with three other fellow artists he is running the gallery Hulias located central in Oslo. Isak is also the studio manager for the artist Ida Ekblad. Since 2017 Isak has been a part of the Tom Sachs Studio in NYC and has participated in several of his performances at galleries and museum around the world. Latest was the EXCHANGE performance at Thaddaeus Ropac galley in Paris and SPACE PROGRAM 4.0 at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.