Solvej Dufour Andersen (born in Denmark) is an artist based in Geneva. In her minimalistic installations with sound and light, the Absence has been an ongoing subject of exploration. In her video pieces she is interested in the portrait art and the personal narrations of her protagonists. The interaction and the abilities of the storyteller to tell and the artist to retell are of mayor concerns. Andersen has participated in several exhibitions in Europe. For many years she was running the art-space Planet 22 with artist Peter Stoffel in Geneva. She was grated the Swiss Art Award in 2008.

Pia Arke was a visual artist, who worked with photography and text primarily. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1993 and held two additional degrees from that institution: a Cand.Phil. in Art Theory from the Department of Art Theory and a Multimedia Design degree from the School of Media Arts. Born in Greenland by a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, most of her work deals with her Greenlandic background and the history of Greenland. Arke exhibited in a large number of contexts and completed several public art commissions for the Danish Polar Center, the Ministry of Defense, and the Environmental Investigations of Denmark, among others. Arke was the recipient of the 1999 award from the Danish Arts Foundation and in 2000, she received a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Pavel Borisov, Murmansk, Russia, works as a teacher at the Youth Art School in Murmansk. In addition he is a freelance art historian and a philosopher. He has initiated a lecture series on contemporary art in collaboration with the Murmansk County Library, and is building up an archive of literature about contemporary art and philosophy in the school where he is working.

Yvette Brackman is a sculptor, filmmaker and writer, born in New York. Her recent projects include Common Knowledge, an ongoing project based in the Kola peninsula of Russia, Technically Sweet and an exhibition based on an unrealized Michelangelo Antonioni screenplay from 1976. She lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. www.yvettebrackman.info

Axel Rudolf Wegner Buljo is born in Bugøynes, Norway. He is a painter, collector, photographer and amateur biologist. He has photographed insects in his home municipality since the 1970s.

Boel Christensen-Scheel is an Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Art
Didactics at Oslo University College. Christensen-Scheel holds a Ph.D. in
contemporary art and performance theory, and her field of interest mainly
concerns art’s relational capacities from bodily experience, epistemology
and didactics, to more explicit political and ecological projects. She has
translated Nicolas Bourriaud ‘Relational Aesthetics’ to Norwegian (Pax
Forlag, Artes, 2007), and more recently she has published an essay about
Kjartan Slettemark’s Nixon Series (Torpedo Press, 2010).

Magali Daniaux & Cédric Pigot are an artist-duo based in Paris. They have
been working together since 2001, and are aiming at developing a resolutely
polymorphic work turned towards experimentation. Their practice takes its
starting point in research on sound, text, and drawing, combining various
visual material and communicative approaches in their fictionalizations.

Maja Dunfjeld (artist and professor) is a Sámi duojár living in Norway. She is one of the pioneers within the field of traditional Sámi handicraft, with her long practice and with a Ph.D. in duodji (University of Tromsø). Dunfjeld was one of the five young Sámi artists invited to do the art commission at Láhpoluoppal school in the mid 1970s, that came to have an important influence on the discourse and practices of Sámi art. Since then Dunfjeld has participated in several exhibitions. She is teaching and lecturing about duodji at the Sámi University College in Guovdageaidnu. In this context, her work and viewpoints regarding the interrelation between the Southsami language and duodji are emphasised.

Dr. Aileen A. Espíritu is born in the Philippines, grew up in Alberta, (Canada). She Is a senior research fellow at the Barents Institute, Kirkenes, Norway (since 2007). Espíritu’s research project is entitled “Service Provision, Environmental Management, and Sustainable Communities: a qualitative comparative study of Quality of Life in the Barents Region.” The aim of this research project is to determine how a good quality of life of Barents communities is sustained, or in some cases attained in an environment of transformation and change brought on by the “new economy”. Aileen Espíritu’s doctoral dissertation examined the impact of oil and gas development on indigenous peoples in Northwest Siberia, and analysed the industrialisation (Sovietisation) of their culture, economies, and way of life. She has recently completed a project on the political participation of indigenous women and men in Northwest Siberia since the 1930s.
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Frederikke Hansen holds an MA in Art History and Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. During the 1990s, she ran and curated a number of alternative exhibition venues in Denmark and Germany – including LXX (Aarhus), Galleri Campbells Occasionally (Copenhagen), and the project space frø (Berlin). In 1997, Hansen left Denmark to make Berlin her permanent basis from where she would be curating local and international projects. Later, she moved to Zurich to work for the kunsthalle Shedhalle, first as a curator (2000-03) and later as artistic director (2003-04). In a Scandinavian context, Hansen is known for pioneering feminist and queer politics and practices in curating and writing on art. In this way, all her individually curated projects have applied gender and sexuality as categories of analysis pertaining to the joys and struggles of social, political, and economic relations, spanning from the anti-war movement to electronic pop music. In short, her individual curatorial practice can be described as an attempt to deconstruct privilege. She is part of the curator collective Kuratorisk Aktion with Tone Olaf Nielsen.

Elina Heikka is director of The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki since 2007. She is an engaged researcher and active writer. Elina Heikka worked as director at the Central Art Archives 2006-2007 and as researcher 2001-2006. Researcher at The Finnish Museum of Photography 1998-2001. Editor in chief for the journal of photographic art, Valokuva-lehti 1996-1997 and editor at the same journal 1994-1996. Heikka’s articles and research has been published in a multitude of publications.

Susan Hiller has lived and worked in London since the early 1970’s, when she first became known for an innovative artistic practice involving automatic writing, e.s.p, photomat machines, wallpaper, postcards and other aspects of popular culture. Hiller cites Minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism and her previous study of anthropology as major source for inspiration. The common denominator in all Hiller’s works is their starting point in a cultural artifact from our society. Her work is an excavation of the overlooked, ignored, or rejected aspects of our shared cultural production. Her art has long been recognized for its visualization of everyday phenomena that lie within the recesses, byways and blind spots of our cultural surround. Using sound, video, text, photography or drawing – whatever her basic materials demand – her works open up an area of instability, where fixed meanings are dissolved, and where the audience is directly implicated in the emergence of new meanings which become visible only through the work and our experience of it. Hiller’s art has been recognized by mid-career retrospectives at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996), as well as by numerous solo and group exhibitions.

Geir Tore Holm lives and works in Oslo, Gildeskål and Tromsø. He has been interested in social relations and power structures, often related to his Sámi background; first discussing individual identity, connecting to a larger cosmos, then addressing difficulties in ethnic representations. From 2003 developing the long-term dialogue and ecology project Sørfinnset skole/ the nord land with his partner Søssa Jørgensen in collaboration with Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija from Thailand. In 2006 he was engaged as Project Manager for developing the Tromsø Academy Of Fine Art, where he used to be a Visiting Professor. He is now a Research Fellow at the Oslo National Academy for the Arts.

Aslaug Juliussen is an artist, pedagogue and therapist who holds a degree in textile art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Recently, she moved to Tromsø, but for twenty years, Juliussen was living in the interiors of Finnmark in northeastern Norway. There she worked with reindeer herding besides actively producing and exhibiting her art. Embodying the Norwegian, North-Norwegian and Sámi cultures, she acculturated to the Sámi reindeer herding culture to which she was a newcomer. Jointly, these hybrid positions – the mix af national, regional and indigenous identities on one hand, and the double status of the newcomer as participant and observer on the other – are the „topos“ from which Juliussen has experienced the world and from which her artistic analyses and expressions spring. Juliussen has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally and abroad and is the recipient of numerous grants.

Thomas Kintel is a freelance culture analyzer and art mediator, based in
Bergen. Holding an MA degree in Cultural Studies, he has been writing and
lecturing on issues concerning the Sámi art world. He is interested in borders
surrounding and defining artistic activity, and in social and cultural
delimitations within different communicative spaces.

Krishna Kireev aka Oleg Kireev (1975-2009) lived and worked in Moscow. Kireev was a media-journalist, artist and writer, author of “Media-activist cookbook” (Moscow, Ultra-Culture, 2006; national prize “Innovation- 2007”). He did various performances, such as nj’ing, news-jockeying – at the disco, the nj mixes are not tracks or videos, but news from the web.
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Britt Kramvig is a Norwegian social anthropologist and filmmaker of Sámi origin, currently living and working in Tromsø and Oslo. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Planning and Community Studies at the University of Tromsø. Her interests include music, lyrics, films, postcolonial, phenomenological, and feminist studies. Among her latest publications are Encounters: Conflicts of Values in Sámi-Norwegian Everyday Life (Oslo University Press) and The Silent Language of Ethnicity, (European Journal for Cultural Studies). Kramvig’s latest film productions include Firekeepers (dir. Rossella Regazzi) as well as co-producing Suddenly Sami (dir. Ellen Lundby).

Kuratorisk Aktion is an independent curatorial collective founded in 2005 by Danish-born independent curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen. The collective works internationally from Berlin and Copenhagen and is committed to using curating to generate new critical knowledges about the global capitalist order and the ideologies of inequality that sustain it. Collaborating with artists as well as theorists and activists from all over the world, the collective produces exhibitions, interventions, and events that engage such ideologies as nationalism, racism, patriarchal supremacy, and heteronormativity in a critical manner. Through their facilitation of alternative knowledge production, Kuratorisk Aktion aims to contribute to the destabilization of these ideologies, which in turn may lead to positive sustainable change. Their recent projects include: Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (Iceland, Greenland, The Faroe Islands, and Finnish Sápmi, 2006); asking we walk, voices of resistance (Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen, 2008); and The Road to Mental Decolonization: Healing the Postcolonial Traumas of Nordic Indigenous Women (Tromsø Gallery of Contemporary Art, Norway, 2008).

Erkki Kurenniemi is a pioneer of electronic art in Finland, a former nuclear scientist who composed computer-based music and designed his own instruments at Helsinki University’s Department of Music in the early sixties. He was a pioneer of industrial automation at Rosenlew in the seventies, and an automation designer in Nokia’s cable division in the early eighties. The exploratory search for new species of user interfaces for musical instruments and the semi-automatic generation of music have been among Kurenniemi’s main goals in his career. Today Kurenniemi is devoted to the obsessive effort of recording his own life, preserving all his thoughts and observations, trivial objects, and a constant stream of images, continually recording an audio diary, making videotapes, and shooting 20,000 photographs a year. Thus creating a reconstruction of his life, a “virtual persona,” to be premiered in July, 2048. These days Kurenniemi works as an independent researcher, specializing in subjects such as artificial intelligence.

Mark Leckey is an artist based in London. He graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990. He is mainly working with collage art, music and video. Aspects of British culture has been the subject of many of Mark Leckey’s works, as one of his main areas is on the social, emotional, and spiritual fabric of contemporary British youth culture. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, while also contributed to numerous group shows international. He is currently professor of film studies at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and was a founding member of the musical collectives Donateller and Jack too Jack. Mark Leckeys found art and found footage pieces span several videos, most notably Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Lights and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize.

Marysia Lewandowska is a Polish born, London based artist who has collaborated with Neil Cummings between 1995–2008. She is a co-author of many projects such as The Value of Things (Birkhauser, 2000), Give & Take (Victoria&Albert Museum, 2001), Capital (Tate Modern, 2001), Enthusiasm (CSW Zamek Ujazdowski Warsaw, Whitechapel Gallery London, Kunst Werke Berlin, Tapies Foundation Barcelona, 2004/06), Museum Futures (Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2008). Those projects, have explored the public function of archives, collections and exhibitions in an age characterized by relentless privatization. Her new project Tender Museum (Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2009) addressed the relationship between artist and critic through staging fictional radio broadcast. Her current interests engage with legitimacy of conversation as a site of the unacknowledged knowledge, including Women’s Audio Archive (CCS Bard College, NY, 2009/10). Our Radical Parents (Mossutställningar, Stockholm 2010) is planned as a film and a book based on a series of conversations exploring radical acts present in practices of everyday life, as well as questions of generational hand down. Museum Vocabularies (Calvert22 Foundation, London 2010) project traces the dissemination of cultural activities under communism. Double Act. 1917 is a recent commission for the Sámi Art Festival in Trondheim. Marysia is a Professor at Konstfack where in 2005 she established Timeline: Artists’ Film and Video Archive. // www.marysialewandowska.com // www.womensaudioarchive.org // www.enthusiastsarchive.net

Aviâja Egede Lynge is a Greenlandic social anthropologist, who lives and works in Nuuk where she teaches anthropology at the Institute of Arctic Education, University of Greenland. Lynge’s interest are postcolonialism (mental decolonization), culture, development of indigenous societies, and rural areas. Lynge participated in Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (2006) with the paper “The Best Colony in the World”.

Ole Henrik Magga is a linguist and professor at the Sami University College in Kautokeino. Magga was the leader of the Norwegian Sami Association from 1980 to 1985, and the first president of the Norwegian Sami Parliament from 1989 to 1997. Magga was to found the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) in Canada in 1976. In the period 1992-1995 was Magga member of the UN’s cultural commission. In 2002, Magga became the chairman of the UN Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples. In 2006 Magga was made Commander of the Order of St. Olav for his efforts for the Sami and indigenous peoples.

Kobena Mercer is a lecturer and critic based in the UK. Mercer writes and teaches about the visual arts of the black diaspora in both the UK and the US. He will be Visiting Professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University in Spring 2009. He is the author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994) and of monographs on Isaac Julien and Adrian Piper amongst others. He is series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, the most recent of which is Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008). Mercer was the inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.

Hilde Methi, Kirkenes, Norway, works as an independent curator and culture worker. She is interested in economic and geopolitical issues while engaging into local, cross-border situations through various collaborative projects, often of extended duration involving certain groups of people. She worked at different art institutions since 1993. From 2002 to 2007, she was the director of the art and culture production company Pikene på Broen (Girls on the Bridge) in Kirkenes. Methi is responsible for the Sami Art Festival 2008-2011.

Joar Nango is an architect and artist based in Oslo, Norway. Nango graduated with an MA in architecture from NTNU in Trondheim (2008), where he also has been involved in researching the subject of Saami architecture. He is currently editing and publishing Sámi Huksendáidda, a small fanzine that researches Saami architecture from different perspectives. He is inspired by the creative simplicity and DIY mentality that exists within northern rural environments. In addition to his projects in printed matter, he is also working collaboratively on projects that intersect art, design and architecture.

Tone Olaf Nielsen (b. 1967) holds a Cand.Phil. in Art History from the University of Copenhagen (1994) and an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from UCLA (2002). Working as an independent curator and educator since 1996, she has curated a large number of exhibitions and events that critically unpack questions of difference and diversity, intolerance and conviviality, agency and resistance in the age of global capitalism, migration, terror, and war, including Democracy When!? Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 2002) and Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark (Aarhus, Denmark, 2004). Merging postcolonial, feminist, anti-capitalist, and pluralist democracy theories, Nielsen’s work explores the socio-political dimension of curating and its potential to contribute to positive social change. In addition to her individual practice and work with Kuratorisk Aktion, she is also active within the artist-curator collective Goll & Nielsen, which she co-founded with visual artist Morten Goll.

Dr Andrea Phillips (London) is Reader in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Director of the research project Curating Architecture which aims to interrogate ideas proposed by recent and recurring influences of architecture on artistic and curatorial practice. She publishes on the relation between politics, aesthetics and the design of space; art, architecture and cultural capital in a contemporary transnational milieu. She is currently preparing a book on ‘transnational aesthetics’ which argues that globalization is shaped by, and shapes contemporary aesthetic forms as a critical refinement of its more orthodox understanding as a process described through context, thus repositioning aesthetics as a term of politics. Phillips has published widely on art, architecture and politics, and is a regular speaker at conferences and public events on the subjects.

Katarina Pirak Sikku holds a MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University (2005). Her photography, drawings, installations, and text-based work draw from both immediate family history as well as historical occurrences that have had an impact on her personal life. Sikku’s approach to traditional representation often makes use of subtle displacements, which upsets the logic that organizes established customs. Through her work, she evokes emotions of mourning and grief in the minds of her audience, but she does it with humor and a tremendous amount of generosity. She strives for a combined reflection of the political and social arenas as well as the private and public realms of experience. Sikku’s latest exhibition has been at Skellefteå Konsthall, Sweden, 2008. Pirak Sikku lives and works in Jokkmokk, Sweden.

Rossella Ragazzi (MA, PhD, currently Post Doc Research Fellow in Visual Anthropology and Museum Studies at University of Tromsø Museum, Sami Ethnographic Unit), was born in Rome in 1965. Her main fields of research are: visual anthropology, indigenous studies, cinema, performance, migration & childhood studies. Senior lecturer at Visual and Cultural Studies Dept, University of Tromsø, institute of Social Anthropology from until 2007. Member of the board of the Commission of Visual Anthropology, among other institutional affiliations. Co-owner of Sonar Film, Norway. Her recent anthropological film is Firekeepers (2007).

Iben Mondrup Salto lives in Copenhagen and grew up in Greenland in the years of the Greenlandic Homerule. She works as a writer and lecturer, and has written the book De usynlige grønlændere (The Invisible Greenlanders), which is a collection of coversations she had with 15 persons from Greenland. The conversations are centred around the same subject; identity, language and culture in postcolonial Greenland. Her work is always connected to Greenlandic matters and topics like identity, etnicity and culture. Salto is educated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and holds an MA in Art Theory and Communication.

Åsa Sonjasdotter works in Berlin/Tromsø. She studied at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway, and at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, MFA from the latter. Since 2007 she works as a Professor at the Art Academy in Tromsø. Sonjasdotter focuses on place, identity, power, relations and language. An ongoing project is Potato Perspective. Her projects often function as social forums, in which the artist herself often acts and interacts with the subjects involved. Sonjasdotter has been a founding member of Women Down the Pub from 1996 to 2006, which operates within the current debate on gender. Projects include the anthology Udsigt /View – feminist strategies in Danish visual art, 2004.

Peter Stoffel is a Geneva-based artist who works with painting, installation and various other media. He is one of the key figures behind the “Appenzell Biennial” founded in 2002. He founded “Planet22” in 1999 with artist Solvej Dufour Andersen, as a new art space in Geneve. In his sociopolitical reflexive work, Stoffel is the kind of artist who, through deconstruction of unidirectional modes of thinking, can pull off eminently pathos-laden questions of exploitation and exoticism without ever looking sensationalist, didactic or even heavy handed. Here his interest has been on public space and its connotations, functional and otherwise, playfully exploiting the normal use of specific architectures, functions, or symbols. Central to his works is questions of the communicational reality through exploration of themes like representation, identification, visibility and the unseen. Some of the most central questions are about insight as blindness.

Kristin Tårnesvik is an artist based in Bergen. Her focus of research has
developed from questioning ethnicity, geographic and national belonging
in the North, to investigate political ideology and hegemonic structures.
Focus in particular is upon the reciprocity between destruction and revolution,
vision and utopia, and acts of the individual within a political system.
She works with video, installation and photography. Tårnesvik is also a cofunder
of the artist-run space Knipsu in Bergen.

Morten Torgersrud works as an artist based in Kirkenes, Norway. Torgesrud situates his practice in the context of contemporary political configurations of the northern landscape such as Sápmi and Barents. Considering ontological and conceptual aspects of photography and space/place, his research aims at developing perspectives on photography through its relation to a political-economic landscape.

Michael Vinka has since 1984 studied and researched languages. Since 2005 he has taught Southsami at Umeå University, where he is now a lecturer in Sami languages. His research is directed toward the description of the Southsami and Umesami within the framework of generative grammar. He has been interested in Japanese, the African Bantu languages and the North American Iroke languages. In his opinion research within the generative grammar can and should be part of the local Sami communities. This research can strengthen the work of language revitalization.

Julita Wójcik lives and works in Gdansk, Poland, where she graduated in
the Academy of Fine Arts in 1997. A starting point for her work is a private reading of social conventions and codes, which she ‘familiarize’ and employ in her art-projects. These are often prosaic and feminine interpretations of everyday life, in form of interventions. Julita is interested in the communist-era that still affects peoples’ lives in various ways and degrees. What are the traces left from that era in our present time, that could be perceived as points of references in our everyday life just as naturally and obviously as we perceive ‘the Western’? Her works represent a deeper meaning only when placed in an artistic context, which, on the one hand, elevates them, and on the other, strips art of its elite quality. Julitas’ works have been shown in exhibitions in Poland and internationally.