About FLOAT
FLOAT is a site-specific art project focused on Lake Mjøsa and its associated waterways, explored from both scientific and artistic perspectives.
An important event within the FLOAT project is the conference taking place in Lillehammer on Monday June 16th, and Tuesday June 17th, 2025. The conference aims to bring together artistic and research-based practices and theories under one roof, communicating these to an art-interested as well as environmentally committed audience. The presentations will explore site-specific artistic interventions in nature, museum collections management, and ecological and historical issues. The conference is organized in collaboration with the Association of Visual Artists Innlandet.
FLOAT is initiated by artist and curator Egil Martin Kurdøl and organized in collaboration with Oplandia Centre for Contemporary Art and Kunstbanken Centre for Contemporary Art.
The FLOAT conference
16.-17.06.2025
Artists:
Abbas Akhavan
Ansgar Ole Olsen
Marianne Stranger
Jon Benjamin Tallerås
Judy Watson
Speakers:
Caterina Benincasa, SciArt, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
Kristin Bergaust, Oslofjord Ecologies/Professor, OsloMet
Ragnhild Bjørnsen, Lågendeltaet Associasion
William Fox, Institute for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art
Helga Feste Hunter, Tilsig, Gjøvik and Toten Art Associations
Ingvild Krogvig, The National Museum
Eivind Slettemeås, Harpefoss Art Centre
Jørn Wroldsen, Mission Mjøsa, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Compère:
Merete Hovednak, Director, Contemporary Art Centres in Norway
The conference will be held in English.
Conference program
When: June 16th-17th 2025
Where: Kulturhuset Banken, Lillehammer, Norway
Monday June 16th
11:00 – 12:00
Registration and lunch
12:00 – 12:15
Welcome
Egil Martin Kurdøl, Curator, Christel Sverre, Kunstbanken Centre for Contemporary Art and Siri Leira, Oplandia Centre for Contemporary Art
12:15 – 12:35
Judy Watson
Artist introduction
12:35 – 12:55
Ansgar Ole Olsen
Artist introduction
12:55 – 13:15
Abbas Akhavan
Artist introduction
13:15 – 13:35
Break
13:35 – 13:55
Jon Benjamin Tallerås
Artist introduction
13:55 – 14:15
Marianne Stranger
Artist introduction
14:15 – 15:00
Jørn Wroldsen
Presentation of the research project Mission Mjøsa at NTNU Gjøvik
15:00 – 15:20
Break
15:20 – 15:50
Kristin Bergaust
Artistic research: investigating the Oslofjord waterbody as narratives, histories, scientific data and a possible subject of legal rights.
16:00 – 17:00
Visit to Lillehammer Art Museum
Presentation of Jana Winderen’s sound installation ferð
17:00 – 18:30
Break
18:30
Dinner
Tuesday June 17th
08:45 – 09:15
Registration and coffee
09:15 – 09:45
Helga Feste Hunter
Tilsig–an Art Project in the Gjøvik Region
09:45 – 10:30
Eivind Slettemeås
A historical approach to artist run and site specific art projects in Norway and the Innlandet Region
10:30 – 10:50
Break
10:50 – 11:35
William L. Fox
Land Art, Archives, and the Institute for Art + Environment
11:35 – 12:20
Ingvild Krogvig
On early Conceptual Art and Land Art in Norway during the 1970s and 1980s
12:20 – 13:15
Lunch
13:15 – 13:45
Caterina Benincasa
NaturArchy: when Art Science Policy work on common ground
13:45 – 14:05
Ragnhild Bjørnsen
Nature reserves under threat: a deep dive into activism work by the association Friends of the Lågen delta
14:05 – 14:45
Questions and summary
The FLOAT artists
Abbas Akhavan
Abbas Akhavan’s (b. Tehran, Iran; lives/works: Montreal & Berlin) practice ranges across site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture, and performance. The direction of his research has been influenced by the specificity of the sites in which he works, including the architectures that house them, the economies that surround them, and the individuals that frequent them. The concept of the garden—and by extension, the spaces and species just outside the home, such as the backyard, public parks, and other domesticated landscapes—have been foundational components in his work. In recent large-scale installations, Akhavan recreates cultural sites affected by international conflicts, attending to the multivalent ways in which ongoing geopolitics fight for control of historical narratives. Through his work, Akhavan engages with formal, material, and social legacies that shape the boundaries between public and private, domesticated and wild, hostile and hospitable.
Akhavan received an MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2006), and a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal (2004). Upcoming solo exhibitions include La Biennale di Venezia, Canada Pavilion (2026); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2026); Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2025). He is the recipient of the Fellbach Triennial Award (2017); Sobey Art Award (2015); Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014); and the Berliner Kunstpreis (2012).
Ansgar Ole Olsen
Ansgar Ole Olsen (b. 1952, Lyngen, Norway) works with sculptures in metal. He has a background as a sheet metal worker from the shipyard in Tromsø and art education from the Norwegian School of Craft and the Oslo National College of Art and Design (1982-1986).
Olsen combines the reuse of materials from old machines, vehicles, and agricultural tools with a modernist style. The works in stainless, lacquered or eroded, rusted steel thematize objects, motifs and materials from industrial, labor history and coastal culture, set in a stylized, abstracted and often playful form.
Olsen has held solo exhibitions at several of Noway's art centers and participated in numerous group exhibitions regionally and nationally. He has presented works at Collect at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and several other international exhibitions. Much of Olsen’s artistic work has involved larger decorative assignments in both public and private commissions, such as at Sommerlyst Secondary School in Tromsø, the Sami Science Building in Kautokeino, and Bodø Airport.
Olsen’s works are part of the collections at the National Museum, Nordenfjeldske Museum of Arts and Design, Nordnorsk Art Museum, the Norwegian Arts Council, as well as Innlandet County Municipality. He lives and works in Østre Toten.
Jon Benjamin Tallerås
Jon Benjamin Tallerås' (b.1984, Oslo, Norway) improvised actions, informal sculpture and low-profile infiltrations belong to a tradition of urban wandering that reaches back at least as far as André Breton's photographic expeditions in 1920s Paris. Tallerås investigates urban space, exploring hidden and often non-used areas of the city. Using found materials to create sculptures and making transient performances that claim the accidental gaps and spaces formed on the margins of functional architecture.
Tallerås has exhibited extensively throughout Norway and abroad, and his works have been shown in institutions such as: The Munch Museum (Oslo), Museum of contemporary art (Oslo), Bergen Kunsthall (Bergen), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), Kunsthall Oslo, LIAF Biennial (Svolvær), Stavanger Kunsthall, Kristiansand Kunsthall, Treignac Projet (France), CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), Kunsthall C, Stockholm (Sweden) LCCA (Latvia) and Pori Art museum (Finland).
Marianne Stranger
With a multidisciplinary practice, performative scenarios are at the core of her work, either in the process or the final piece. Staging materials in real environments is central, and the playful, yet critical look on the way we relate to our surroundings is in focus. Stranger's work alternates between stage space and outdoor space, where the movement of the artwork can bee seen as a performance in itself. In search for dramatic potential in the material's relation to its surroundings, surreal scenarios emerge.
Stranger often uses music and sound as the foundation of her pieces. She believes in the emotional and collective potential that music has, and often intergrates this time-based element in her work, either as a performance to stage the installation, or in the piece itself.
In recent years, water has become a recurring stage for her sculptures, inspired by the beaver’s remarkable entrepreneurial skills in shaping its environment with water at the center.
With a broad background in music and theatre, her installations often blend different expressions. Marianne's works include sculpture, installation, performance, theatre, electric guitars and sound art scapes. Stranger has shown works at Ultimafestivalen, Du Beast (Berlin), Hamar Performance Festival, Oslofjord Triennale, Østfold Kunstsenter, Manipulate Festival (Edinburgh), among others. She holds a BA in Theater and Performance Design from LIPA in the UK.
Judy Watson
Judy Watson
Photo: Rhett Hammerton. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meeanjin/Brisbane.
Born in Mundubbera, Queensland in 1959, Judy Watson is a Waanyi descendant of north-west Queensland. Her ancestry and personal experiences have greatly influenced her artistic practice, which spans a variety of media including painting, printmaking, video, sculpture and installation.
She often addresses the complex history of colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities. She explores themes of migration, survival and recovery, seeking to bring awareness and understanding to these issues. Her work is a powerful means of storytelling and a form of cultural preservation.
Exhibiting extensively since the 1980s, Watson co-represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale and won the Works on Paper Award at the 23rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in 2006. She was also the recipient of the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2006 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award. In 2011, Watson’s exhibition waterline was shown at the Embassy of Australia in Washington DC, and in 2012, she exhibited in the Sydney Biennale. In 2018, the Art Gallery of New South Wales staged a major exhibition of her work titled the edge of memory. Watson has also received commissions for several public art projects across Australia, including fire and water at Reconciliation Place in Canberra in 2007, ngarunga nangama: calm water dream at 200 George St in Sydney and tow row for the Gallery of Modern Art’s 10th Anniversary in Brisbane in 2016, and bara at Dubbagullee (Bennelong Point) in the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden in 2022.
mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri, a significant survey of Judy Watson’s practice, opened in 2024 at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Her work is also included in several significant Australian and international collections, including all of Australia’s state institutions, the National Gallery of Australia, the Tokyo National University of Technology, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the British Museum, and MCA/TATE. Watson is an Adjunct Professor at Griffith University, and in 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Art History by the University of Queensland.
Conference speakers and contributors
Caterina Benincasa
Photo: X.
Caterina Benincasa
Caterina Benincasa is the curator of the SciArt project of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. With a background in Physics, Philosophy, History of Science, Contemporary Art and World Heritage Studies, Caterina cultivates a deep interest in art-science practices, epistemology and aesthetics, and the interweaving of scientific inquiry, artistic research and societal engagement. For the past 20 years she has worked at the crossroad of science-art-society, specialising on transdisciplinary practices and art-science collaborations–where art is intended as a mode of research and inquiry. She has founded a number of initatives amongst which Polyhedra.eu, a cultural organisation fostering art-science experimentation; Innovate Heritage, a research platform endorsed by UNESCO aimed at fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange between the contemporary arts and the heritage field; KLAS@MPI, an artist-in-residence and science-in-society programme of the Max Planck Society.Caterina has participated in numerous talks and conferences and has served in a number of boards and committees. As art-science expert, she is a member of the expert board of Schering Stiftung.
Kristin Bergaust
Photo: Ellen Røed.
Kristin Bergaust
Kristin Bergaust is an artist, researcher and curating organizer, currently a research leader and professor at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design in OsloMet, in Oslo, Norway.
She investigates contemporary conditions through feminist and transcultural perspectives, fed by cultural history, scientific data and other narratives while employing artistic, performative, and technological practices. This was visible in her curatorial and artistic project Oslofjord Ecologies for Creative Europe from 2016. In the collective curatorial and artistic endeavor Oslofjord Triennial, the engagement for the Oslofjord were put to practice on an off-grid island Lågøya in August 2024.
Commissioned by the SciArt project NaturArchy of JRC-European Community, Kristin developed Ocean Connections, with scientists Guillermo García Sanchéz and Evangelos Voukouvalas. The resulting video installation looks at the Oslofjord as a subjective protagonist and a carrier of scientific data, but most of all as a portrait of a natural water body and its forces.
Ragnhild Bjørnsen
Photo: James Welburn.
Ragnhild Bjørnsen
Ragnhild Bjørnsen is an associate professor at the University of Inland Norway. Most of her work centers around childhood in hypermobility. Through a lens of Psychological Anthropology, she unravels relationships of childhood and the life-course, and how children's rights become constrained by geo-political interests. In recent years, her anthropological case studies have been childhood on the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard and in the Norwegian Foreign Service.
Ragnhild’s motivation as an environmental activist began with a local case in Lillehammer. She witnessed how environmental scientific knowledge was twisted into false narratives by local and national politicians to justify building a highway across the local nature reserve – the Lågen delta. Despite expressed outrage amongst Norway’s top researchers, and the National Environmental Agency’s verdict that this highway was illegal, the government decided to change the legal regulation of the nature reserve to build the highway. Ragnhild is a member of the activist group “Friends of the Lågen delta” and focuses especially on lobbying to strengthen national environmental protection legislation. She is also a co-author of a forthcoming book on interrelationships between human and non-human nature, where she writes about activism.
William L. Fox
Photo: X.
William L. Fox
William L. Fox is founding Director of the Institute for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, and has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published sixteen books on cognition and landscape, hundreds of essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. His most recent title is Michael Heizer: The Once and future Monuments (2019). Fox is also an artist who has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in eight countries since 1974. He has written books set in the extreme environments of the Antarctic, the Arctic, Chile, Nepal, and other locations. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation and has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, the Australian National University, and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Merete Hovdenak
Photo: Yina Chan / Kunstsentrene i Norge.
Merete Hovdenak
Merete Hovdenak has served as Director of the Contemporary Art Centres in Norway (KiN) since 2016. She is a certified curator (NMF) and holds a Cand.philol. degree with a major in Art History from the University of Oslo.
Hovdenak previously worked as a curator at Galleri Würth (2014-2016), and as curator and head of department at Gråmølna/Trondheim Kunstmuseum from 2008 to 2014. From 2010 to 2012, she undertook a work residency in Paris, where she studied museology at the École du Louvre, with a particular focus on hybrid institutions within the art field.
She has published a range of texts on art history and museum studies. Her forthcoming publication, When Modernism Does Not Become Unmodern: Norwegian Printmaking in the Tangen Collection (Kunstsilo), will be released by Orfeus Publishing. She was also editor of Inger Sitter: Catalogue Raisonné–Prints, published by Orfeus in 2017, and Per Kleiva–Prints, published by Press in 2018.
Helga Feste Hunter
Photo: Phen Hunter.
Video still, 2023
Photo: Helga Feste Hunter.
Helga Feste Hunter / Tilsig
Helga lives and works on a smallholding in Kolbu, where she maintains her studio practice focused on printmaking and paper- and textile-based art. Her work explores themes of life and fertility, often manifested through structures and systems inspired by natural processes such as growth, fermentation, cracking, and fissuring. She is one of the participating artists in the Tilsig project.
In the summer of 2023, Eastern Norway and Lake Mjøsa were profoundly affected by nature’s forces. Massive volumes of water surged down the Gudbrandsdalslågen River and its tributaries. With the water came driftwood, hay bales, and other debris that accumulated and floated on the surface. That year, Mjøsa took on a new character for everyone living around the lake.
The lake has long been undergoing changes—not all of them visible. It faces significant pollution from runoff linked to agriculture, industry, settlements, and other factors that continue to reshape its identity.
Taking its starting point from the following quote
“We produce signs because there is something that demands to be said.”
—Umberto Eco, summarizing Charles S. Peirce in Between Fullness and Emptiness, G. Danbolt.
the Tilsig project seeks to explore what it is that demands to be said. Tilsig aims to stimulate artistic processes related to the movement of water—inside, towards, and out of a lake. The project is intended to be open-ended and exploratory.
Ingvild Krogvig
Ingvild Krogvig is a curator at the National Museum in Oslo. Her research interests span modernism, avant-garde movements, and contemporary art, with a particular focus on early Conceptual Art and Land Art in Norway during the 1970s and 1980s. This focus culminated in the exhibition Silent Revolt at the National Museum in 2016.
She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Oslo, where her thesis explored Conceptual Art in Norway. Her work in this field has been published in the anthologies Norsk Avantgarde (Novus) and A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries (Brill).
Krogvig is the former editor-in-chief of the Nordic art journal Kunstkritikk, and has contributed extensively to exhibition catalogues, journals, and newspapers including Morgenbladet, Kunstkritikk, and Billedkunst, as well as to Norway’s leading literary magazines Vagant and Vinduet. She has also taught at the National Academy of the Arts, including in the Art and Craft Department at KHiO.
Eivind Slettemeås
Photo: Johnny Vaet Nordskog.
Eivind Slettemeås
Eivind Slettemeås is a curator, editor and writer who lives in Sør-Fron, Norway. He is founding director of Harpefoss Art Centre in Gudbrandsdalen. He has engaged with site-specific practices, writing and theory over the last years, and is currently working with mapping and exploring the diversity and history of artist run practices within this field in Norway.
Jørn Wroldsen
Photo: NTNU.
Jørn Wroldsen
Jørn Wroldsen is a Norwegian physicist and academic leader. He specialized in theoretical elementary particle physics, earning his MSc in 1977 and PhD in 1982 from the University of Oslo.
After spending some years at CERN, he joined Gjøvik University College in 1986. He has held key roles, including professor of physics, rector of Gjøvik University College from 2000 to 2015, and vice-rector of NTNU in Gjøvik from 2017 to 2021.
In recognition of his research, he was awarded the H.M. King's Gold Medal in 1986 for a prize problem with a given title, a prestigious honor in Norwegian academia. His most cited paper “The nucleon-nucleon force and the quark degrees of freedom” (1988), has been cited 128 times. He received the H.M. King’s Gold Medal in 1986 for a prize problem with a given title. In 2023 he got the King’s Medal of Merit.
In recent years he has been managing the community project Mission Mjøsa research program, showing his commitment to societal impact beyond academia.
Tickets
Travel and accommodation
How to get here:
The fastest, easiest and greenest way to get to Lillehammer is by train
Plan your trip here
Where to stay? We can recommend:
Scandic Victoria Lillehammer Hotel
– For any questions related to travel/accommodation, see contact info below
Accessibility
– Accessibility for wheelchairs/rollers/strollers:
Please use the ramp by the entrance in the backyard
– Elevator with access to all floors
– Hearing loop system
– We offer free admission with companion certificate:
Please send an email to siri.leira@oplandia.no to claim ticket
– For any questions related to accessibility/assistance, see contact info below
Contact
FLOAT is initiated by artist and curator Egil Martin Kurdøl, and organized in collaboration with Oplandia Center for Contemporary Art and Kunstbanken Center for Contemporary Art.
If you have any questions, please get in touch!
Egil Martin Kurdøl, Curator
Siri Leira, Producer, Oplandia Center for Contemporary Art
Christel Sverre, Producer, Kunstbanken Center for Contemporary Art
Supporters and collaborators
