Coast Contemporary

About Us
Coast Contemporary was founded in 2015 and is an international nomadic platform for art, meetings, food and discourse based in Norway. It is also a journey and an assembly bringing together artists, curators, critics, institutions, art workers and the public for a multi-day program of performances, talks, screenings and a conference program.

We aim to present a rich artistic program and to work as a link to generate future collaborations between participants by slowing down and use time to make it easier to survive as an art-worker. We are engaged in solidarity economics and believe in sharing. Coasts eight editions has so far contributed to 360 reported collaborations in 12 countries.

UPCOMING: MUTANT PROSPECTS – Edition Nine, September 15. – 21. 2025
Locations: Sokndal, Sogndalstrand, Hå, Jæren and Stavanger in Rogaland, Norway.

Artists exhibiting in MUTANT PROSPECTS

Siri Austeen
Eline Benjaminsen
Anette Gellein
Miriam Hansen
Ilavenil Vasuky Jayapalan
Marte Johnslien
Linda Lamignan
Anna Sofie Mathiasen
Andreas Olavssønn Rongen
Martin White

NORSK TEKST
Publikums Program med gratis Guidet tur

Offentlig Program på Norsk MUTANT PROSPECTS

Velferden Sokndals Scene for Samtidskunst ønsker publikum hjertelig velkommen til guidet tur av utstillingene på Velferden kl 17.30.
Du kan besøke alle utstillinger mellom klokken 14.00 og 20.00 på Tirsdag, 16. september og mellom 14.00 og 19.00 på Onsdag.
Gratis og åpent for alle!

ENGLISH
We welcome you to join our Public Program at Velferden with exhibitions, talks, performance and screenings in Sokndal.
Doors are open Tuesday from 14.00 to 20.00 and Wednesday from 14.00-19.00.
Guidet public tour at 17.30.
Free entrance. Welcome!

Professional & International Program
The professional program lasts all day/evening from the 15 to the 21st of September.
If you are attending the Professional Programme as Artist or Curator your programme arrives by E-mail and you can also find it here MUTANT PROSPECTS Programme 2025

LOCATIONS 2025

LOCATION ONE – September 15.-18.2025
Our Conference and Artistic Program will take place at Sogndalstrand kulturhotell and at Velferden Sokndal Scene for Samtidskunst in Dalane. The ninth edition will be curated by Tanja Sæter, founder of Coast Contemporary. Artist Kenneth Varpe is in charge of presentations. Artists and founders of Velferden, Maiken Stene and Hans Edward Hammonds has been invited to co-curate a part of the upcoming edition by inviting three resident artists. Velferden Arena is located in the old offices of the Titania mine, extracting Titanium dioxcide from Earth and run by artist Maiken Stene.

LOCATION TWO – September 18. – 21.2025
On the 18th we drive along the coastline of Jæren with a visit to Hå Gamle Prestegård and end up in Stavanger city. Visits and curating in Stavanger will be made in collaboration with Hanne Beate Ueland, director of Stavanger Kunstmuseum and Hanne Mugaas, director of Kunsthall Stavanger. We also collaborate with Open Studios Stavanger as the festivals international visitors program during the Studio Festival.

Both locations are located in Rogaland county council in the South West of Norway.

Funded By
Coast Contemporary 2025 is generously supported and funded by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Arts Council Norway, OCA-Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Rogaland County Council and Stavanger municipality.

Please see our Archive for previous editions.

Artists Proudly Presented in the 2025 Edition

Siri Austeen

Siri Austeen lives and works in Oslo, Sørumsand and Tistedal. In her artistic practice, Austeen is concerned with the relationship between sound and place and how different listening strategies affect our understanding of reality and ourselves as part of a whole, across social and political spaces. Austeen is currently involved in AVGANG/DEPONI at Velferden 2023-2026 with the project «To gather a mountain». Through a serie of field recordings, texts and performative interactions she reflects up on the local mining industry, its tailings and changes in the landscape due large scale resource extraction.

Eline Benjaminsen

Eline Benjaminsen (b. 1992) makes camera based follow-the-money narratives combining video, print- and publication making. Her works are attempts at observing the always weird, often violent and mostly invisible spaces where market fundamentalism, financialisation and ecological crisis meet.

Anette Gellein

Anette Gellein (b. 1995, Sola, Norway) is a multidisciplinary artist working at the nexus of visual art and film. Gellein’s practice revolves around themes of power, politics, sexuality, gender, and emotion. Drawing inspiration from camp and horror, German Expressionism, literature, avant-garde cinema, and queer politics, they create visual poems that reveal hidden emotional landscapes.

Miriam Hansen

Miriam Hansens artistic practice emerges from an interest in humanity’s relation to botanical matter, through medical history, cultural heritage and plants as spiritual subjects/deities. Intertwining this historic material with oral traditions and myths, forum-posted trip-reports and the soothing confidence propagated by the wellness industry, her practice looks into questions of healing and legality, as well as morality and the idea of “the holistic” in contemporary society.

Ilavenil Vasuky Jayapalan

Ilavenil Vasuky Jayapalan (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist and musician of Eelam Tamil origin from Oslo, Norway. Jayapalan’s work is deeply influenced by the worlds of cinema, music, and media, often orbiting around the tension between national consciousness and collective unconsciousness. The notions of freedom, truth, and desire are recurring themes of his works, often entangled with technology and power, genocide and rebirth, evolution, neo-eugenic and Tamil spirituality, all seen through the prism of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Often resulting in works that speculates on futures that emerge from the contemporary fringes of society.

Marte Johnslien

Marte Johnslien (b. 1977) is an artist working with ceramic sculpture, installation, and artist’s books. In the artistic research project TiO₂: The Materiality of White, which she leads at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Johnslien investigates how the pigment titanium white originates in Sokndal, Rogaland, where the mineral ilmenite is mined, before being sent to Fredrikstad to be processed into titanium dioxide (TiO₂). She is an Associate Professor of Ceramic Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Department of Art and Craft, and holds a doctoral degree in artistic research from the same department (2020).

Linda Lamignan

I am a visual artist whose work tells stories about the experience of floating in between different worlds. Through objects, video, music and performance, I explore notions related to wandering and diaspora, transformation and love. With an animistic approach, I work with materials connected to the industries, histories, living landscapes and cultural relations between West Africa and Scandinavia. I seek to step outside the idea of seeing living landscapes and elements as a resource for economic profit and instead understand them as an extension of our own bodies. Where the passage of time unfolds and sources of wisdom, spirit and memory is stored.

Anna Sofie Mathiasen

I often use a character based on myself, as an avatar, to write myself into the fictions I construct. For example, the central figure in Pet Follies, the penguin, is a kind of alter ego – an autobiographical figure. In the film Selvfølgeligheden, which was produced for an Asger Jorn exhibition at IVAM, I voiced one of the two narrating characters – a pig exploring Jorn’s ideas about ornamentation.
With animation and drawing as my foundation, I typically develop cross-media and montage-based narratives in the form of installations, drawings, collages, sculptures, and videos. I work especially with narrative stop-motion and animated films that combine hand-drawn and found imagery – inspired by children’s TV such as Cirkeline, Historiebogen (Hastrup), Pingu (Gutmann), and La Linea (Cavandoli).

Andreas Olavssønn Rongen

Andreas Olavssønn Rongens work could be considered as a defense for a poetic approach towards the world – as an expanded line-of-thought, where materials and intentions interplay in temporary relations bound in time and space outside a market-oriented logic. Working cyclically with the same materials, he introduces them into temporary relationships before dismantling, melting, recycling or reformulating them as components in new constellations and sculptural networks. As a result his work often appears as sculptural eco-systems or archives, open-ended assemblages and stacks upon stacks documenting interventions and gestures.

Martin White

Martin White is an artist based in Oslo, who was born on unceded Gadigal and Dharug lands in Sydney, Australia.
White works with complex archival material, contextualising it, annotating it, narrativizing it and distributing it. White invites audiences into these stories that interrogate legacies, histories, ideologies and national identity narratives using film, performance, video, remix, print, intervention and publication.
Martin Whites work The Souls of White Folk deeply examines a specific case of solidarity from The Namibia Association in Elverum – a small industrial town in Norway – to Namibia’s independence organisation, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO).