Photo: ©Hufton+Crow

They are Erik Friis Reitan (fine art), Annie Anawana Hobøl (fine art) and Thorolf Thuestad (music), financed by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (PKU) and Magnhild Øen Nordahl (fine art) and Craig Wells (music), funded by the University of Bergen (UiB).


"This will strengthen the research community at the faculty and be a good start for the upcoming artistic PhD degree at UiB," says Johan Sandborg, vice dean of research at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD).


New regulations which will make an artistic PhD program possible are on the steps from the Ministry of Education.


"At the next year's admission, we will most likely be able to admit candidates for the new artistic PhD. We aim to have a total of 15 artistic research fellows at KMD," says Sandborg.


Read about the projects:


Erik Friis Reitan receives funding for the project 'The Teleportation Rhizome'. One of Reitan´s key interests is how art deals with issues of spatiality. Thus, the goal of the
research fellowship project will be to create a set of interconnected works that
together investigate the relationship between two forms of imaging: the photograph
and the map. Read more about the project.

Annie Anawana Hobøl´s project 'Subtle Encounters', explores the involvement of women in the struggle for independence and the process of postcolonialisation in Africa and the Caribbean. Read more about the project.

Thorolf Thuestad´s project ’Emotional machines: composing for unstable media’ is particularly concerned with the tension between anthropomorphism and
 mechanomorphism: the way we see human characteristics in our machines, and conversely in
how we expect our surroundings, including fellow humans, to act in a deterministic or
mechanistic way. Read more about the project.

Magnhild Øen Nordahl´s project is titled ’Testing Space: Towards a better understanding of the relationship between the physical and the virtual in artistic production’ She asks: Is there something in common between handling physical objects in a physical
space and handling virtual objects in a virtual space? And How does handling objects in a space influence creativity and formation of knowledge? Read more about the project.

Craig Wells´ project has the title 'Emergent Ears - Playing the multi channel system and becoming played by it'. This project will advance from three integral confrontations between electronic music, live embodied improvisation and multi channel loudspeaker systems. Emergent ears is primarily concerned with opening electronic music to all possible permutations of interruption and spatial configurations. Read more about the project.

The five fellows will be affiliated the Fellowship Programme at the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (PKU). Read about the Fellowship Programme here.