Coast Contemporary

Open Mouth, Open Heart. Performance by KVAE & BARK, Karoline Sætre & Øyvind Novak Jenssen, commissioned for Art on Food, 2024. Photo by Anna Penkova / OCA Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Open Mouth, Open Heart. Performance by KVAE & BARK, Karoline Sætre & Øyvind Novak Jenssen, commissioned for Art on Food, 2024. Photo by Anna Penkova / OCA Office for Contemporary Art Norway

NEXT EDITION: Edition nine is scheduled for mid September, 2025.

We would like to give our warmest thanks to all that took part in Art on Food, 2014!

KUNSTBOK OSLO – Oslo´s new Art Book Fair
While we prepare for edition nine, please visit our new Art Book Fair
KUNSTBOK OSLO taking place November 16. & 17th. 2024.
Location is Keysers Gate 1. downtown Oslo in the UKS space.
Artist books, zines, monographs and more. Program on stage and café.
We are also an online artbook-store 365 days a year.
Free entrance!

About us
Coast Contemporary is an international nomadic platform for art, meetings, food and discourse. 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 work as a link to generate future collaborations by slowing down and to make it easier to survive as an artist or art-worker by creating a safe space to speak and present your work.

Coasts seven editions has contributed to 345 reported collaborations in 12 countries.

Art on Food – edition eight
Explore the program of 2024 here: Art on Food – Program 2024

Art on Food took place 16. – 22.09.2024.
Locations: Oslo, Bergen and a train between the two.
We also presented Art on Food in an exhibition at Rådhusgata 19.09-14.10.2024.

About Art on Food

Coast Contemporary´s eighth edition focused on what has been one of our most central elements since the first edition in 2017: Food and Assembly.

Bringing people together to share a meal, insisting on including all guests in the conversation, allowing all to bring something to the table has been key for us in our work. We have been cooking in countless kitchens and over bonfires and served food and drinks in numerous ways as well as presenting food related, critical and loving art-practices. Two years ago it was decided that this was a universe that should be explored even deeper and invited artists, curators, directors, writers, institutions and others relating to this world to come together in edition eight.

We introduced artists and curators working with food as (or in) art, food-activism, experimental cooking, waste and feminism, de-growth, books, harvesting, the politics of food, heritage, agriculture, slow and fast food, the love for nature, animals and earth.
The program was shaped by text, film, textile, a conference, sculpture, painting, art books, conversations, performance, performative meals, walks, visits and sound.

EXPLORE THE ARTISTS OF 2024 BELOW

Amber Ablett (TR/IR/NO)
Gerard Ortin Castellvi (ES/UK)
Unni Gjertsen (NO)
Ane Hjort Guttu (NO)
Hans Edward Hammonds (NZ/NO)
Iselin Linstad Hauge (NO)
Johanne Hestvold (NO)
Lars Holdhus (NO)
KVAE & BARK consisting of Karoline Sætre and Øyvind Novak Jenssen (NO)
Nayara Leite (BR/NO)
Helle Mellemstrand (NO) Presented with OSS – Open Studios Stavanger.
Stéphanie Sagot (FR) Presented with Institute Francais, Norwége.
Lars Sandås (NO)
Pawel Stypula with Dep.Artment (PL/NO)
Agnete Tangrand (NO)
Sveinung Rudjord Unneland and DUI – Den uferdige institusjonen (NO)
Nikhil Vettukattil (IN/UK/NO)
Ragnhild Aamås (NO)

Coast Contemporary is kindly funded and supported by

Arts and Culture Norway – Kulturrådet / Kulturdirektoratet
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the embassies in Paris, Copenhagen, London, Rome and the Consulate General in New York.
OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond BKH – The Artists Relief Fund
Bergen Municipality

Spoons/Ignoring by Amber Ablett. Spoons/Ignoring is a many branched project using carving, workshops, text and installation to explore both our need to turn away and our need to come together. It explores “ignoring” and rest as a regenerative state for action.

Amber Ablett

“I have a social and research-based practice using sound, video and workshops where I use my experiences as a woman with a Trinidadian-Irish-and-British background living in Norway to open up discussion relating to belonging, home and identity. There are different layers of audience participation in my work, from intimate gatherings where co-creation and reciprocity are possible, to sound, video and text installations, which share or extend personal or closed research. I am interested in the spatiality of sound and how it can create communal spaces, to listen, learn and think together; sound in my work is a tool to document and extend.”

Bliss Point poster

Gerard Ortin Castellvi

Gerard Ortín Castellví is an artist, filmmaker and researcher from Barcelona, based in London. The film Bliss Point plunges us into the ever-accelerating rhythm of food supply and the emergence of new techno-capitalist processes. The film guides us from dark kitchens and food advertising sets to AI-managed warehouses.

Unni Gjertsen

Unni Gjertsen is a visual artist, filmmaker and writer based in Oslo. How we perceive geography and history, is a recurrent interest explored through her work. She often employs an ecological- as well as a feminist perspective in her practice.

Paradise Rangers, consisting of Maiken Stene and Hans Edvard Hammonds.

Hans Edward Hammonds

Hans Edward Hammonds works with performance and installation, exploring themes such as collaboration, interaction, and interplay. His latest work series Folding a Square is an installation featuring hand colored and sewn textiles, wood, and concrete sculptures. As well as his own solo practice Hammonds has a history of collaborating with other artists.

Paradise Rangers are two symbolic characters who work from a deep ecological perspective, believing that nature has intrinsic value independent of its utility for human purposes. He also runs the residency Velferden, located in the old mining site of Titania in Sandbekk, Sokndal.

Iselin Linstad Hauge

“At the core of my work is the complex relationship between humans and animals, and how aesthetic preferences influence which animal species are sought after, preserved, and valued. Over the past ten years, I have visited dozens of farms and agricultural production facilities, to observe how industrial livestock farming contributes to the alienation of animals as living, sentient individuals. Recordings from these visits are often a starting point for conversations with experts in animal ethics, environmental science, and ecology, which then feeds back into the production of my artwork.”

Beholder #2 / Container #2. Acrylic One and fiberglass, 240 x 90 x 148 cm. Installation view from the exhibition Sol og Vår i Januar at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in 2018.

Johanne Hestvold

Johanne Hestvold is an artist and sculptor, based in Oslo. Through her practice she reworks familiar objects and materials into new shapes in order to challenge the ways we approach our familiar environments. She uses different materials, such as mycelium composite, a material where mycel (the root-like structure of a fungus) grows around hemp fibres, magnetic foils and iron powder, pieces of energy infrastructure and mass-produces consumer goods. Her sculptures evolves in dialog with and in relation to their surroundings.

Lars Holdhus

Lars Holdhus (Fusa, Norway) is a Norwegian artist and food forest worker who runs Good Praxis with Juha van ’t Zelfde and Arnau Sala Saez. Good Praxis is an art education for climate justice that celebrates successful models of resistance and regeneration through workshops, assemblies, and club nights.

Den mjuke skogen er kun til låns / The soft fores is ours on loan. Solo exhibition at UKS Young Artists Society (2023). Photo by Jan Khür for UKS.

KVAE & BARK - Karoline Sætre & Øyvind Novak Jenssen

Kvae & Bark is an artist duo consisting of Karoline Sætre and Øyvind Novak Jenssen, who work and reside in Trysil. The duo explores their surroundings through foraging and processing of natures produce, goods and materials. Their projects take the form of sensuous installations with a wide range of materials, as well as performative gestures including taste, smell, sound and site-specific narratives.

Meus Caros Amigos part II (2020), performance (40 min). Bergen Kjøtt, Bergen. Photo credits: Thor Brødreskift Commissioned by Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK).

Nayara Leite

Nayara Leite works across text, performance, analogue photography, film and installation. Through autobiographical narrative, political news, archival material and letters to close friends, she produces a portrayal of the reality in which the LGBTQ+ community lives in Brazil and in Norway.

Helle Mellemstrand

I am looking for textiles and forms that convey shared memories and experiences, be it current political events or universal themes such as anxiety, loss, joy, death, the sea and love.

Stéphanie Sagot

Artist, teacher – researcher at university, lover of the earth and the ocean, daughter and granddaughter of oyster farmers, I am committed to the tenderness and care that we can give to these elements, in situated practices connecting other lovers of life. By infiltrating reality to the test of domination, I investigate subjects relating to ecofeminism, the peasantry and agricultural policies.

Co-founder with Suzanne Husky of Le Nouveau Minsitère de l’Agriculture (the New Ministry of Agriculture), we work in a critique of agricultural policies and dream of fruitful transformations. Since 2023, I continue this adventure alone, seeking to re-engage a loving Eco-sensitivity through a dreamlike topographical practice intimately linked to my practices of meditation and trance

Stéphanie Sagot is presented in collaboration with Institut français de Norvège.

Lars Sandås

My last project Deep fried World (2024) thematizes how over consumption characterizes most aspects of our society, and how consumption contributes to destroying the basis of our lives. I am interested in investigating how this is experienced for people – in their lives, bodies and emotions.

Pawel Stypula and Dep.Artment

Dep.artment is an evolving initiative primarily focused on adapting existing apartments in densely populated areas into “Try-How” showrooms of the future. One of its key focuses has been food-related practices based on intuitive processes and community creation. Rather than dwelling on the negative, this space encourages visitors to participate and explore the potential for positive change through creative solutions in practice and innovative thinking. It is a breathing experience and a love letter to relational aesthetics.

Agnete Tangrand

Agnete Tangrand is an artist and chef based in Lofoten in the north of Norway. She is concerned with how different materials represent a form of hierarchy, and using materials, Tangrands works thematize the present and the past, geography and demography, class differences, economics, handicrafts and traditions.

A fully functional kitchen, built as scenography by Sveinung Rudjord Unneland for Ane Hjort Guttus film Manifesto (2020) inspired by Joy Forum.

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland is an independent artist living in Bergen. He is the founder of the artist run gallery Joy Forum (2018-2022) and co-founder of the studio collective the unfinished institution (2022-).

Nordic Research (AI)

Nikhil Vettukattil

Nikhil Vettukattil (IN/UK/NO) is an artist living and working in Oslo. Vettukattil studied at Central St. Martins in London and the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. They are part of the Institute for Scene Experiments.

Dei levande søve, og dei døde har godt av å bli litt skremt / Maintenance sleep (2022). 

Sculpture, cast and found materials.

Materials: soap, salt,  soap substance, salt, food - approved transport boxes.

Dimensions: 30cmx11cmx13cm.
The sculptures were made for the exhibition Stein hard mjelk / Rock hard milk at Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo, 2022.
Photo by Kunstdok/Istvan Virag.

Ragnhild Aamås

In my work you’ll see sculpture, text, collage and sound. I have established a way of working and a body of work that particularly looks at the effects of language and the capture of the writing system. I base myself on poor, commercial and found materials. Since I developed «Echo Cleans the Mirror Sore» for Kunsthall Stavanger over their archive in 2015, I have worked with institutional archives on several occasions." I’m attracted to an investigative form that branches into and interweaves written and visual materials.