FKDS Grant to Elina Nilsson

You can see Elina Nilsson's work in Skylight at the graduation exhibition "A better past is still possible" open every day 12.00–18.00, until June 16.

The Jury`s statement

We have encountered extraordinary projects in this year’s exhibition, noticing that among this year’s students doing is an essential part of knowledge production and that careful reading is important for artistic practice.

In both doing and reading, time plays an essential role. For this year’s prize, the jury has chosen a work that meditates on and collapses time and authorship. The work brings past into a present that unfolds here and now, and it does so in an open-ended manner where collaboration can occur across time and space and consequently allow for non-linear approaches and experiences. The work shows a knowledge of and sensitivity to the chosen mediums and materials, allowing us to experience different parts of the work in parallell. Text, textile and texture are analysed, challenged, reworked and re-articulated through dissolution and fragmentation.
This year’s prize goes to a work that consists of a series of old hand-made towels that has been carefully read and in parts purposely unravelled. The makers of the towels are named, respecting them as past authors as well as including them as an integral part of the work we encounter today. The towels are interwoven with other media: a text in two parts, and two boxes of un-fixed photographs that continues to develop while we look at them.

The work also poses the question of time and place to the activities of reading and research: Do such activities take place before the exhibition, or is exhibiting, and thus the audience or viewer, part of a practice of reading and research?

We, the members of the jury, are convinced that such production modes and questions are of extraordinary relevance in this context and that they will appear again in future articulations.

The members of the Jury were:

Kjersti Solbakken daglig leder av Kunstnerforbundet
Tora Endestad Bjørkheim Høgskolelektor avdeling Kunst og håndverk
Joerg Franzbecker Kurator for avgangsutstillingen
Ellen Aslaksen dekan avdeling Kunst og håndverk

Read more on the FKDS Grant (in Norwegian)