ROM and Oslo Open invite you to this year’s UKE 35 – two days of conversations, insights, and learning across art, architecture, design, and other creative disciplines. Rather than presenting finished results, artists, designers, architects, writers, and institutions open up their processes: the methods, experiments, challenges, and pathways that lead to transformation, inclusion, environmental and social sustainability.

UKE 35 is an annual professional festival and meeting place for students and practitioners in art, architecture, and design, organized by ROM for kunst og arkitektur.

Oslo Open is the annual weekend when visual artists and craftspeople open their studios to the public, offering a unique glimpse into their creative processes.

Contributors

Alba Colomo is a cultural worker who currently directs La Escocesa, a residency and artists studio space in Barcelona. She is co-founder and caretaker of la Sala, an in(ter)dependent collective project and she has researched the potential of permaculture as a methodology for curatorial practice and art institutions through a Jerwood Arts bursary. In 2021-22 she developed the project fantasmas que circulan (ghosts who wander) on institutional psychotherapy as part of the NO-EXPO programme at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. In 2022 she curated the exhibition Digesting the world where it is at the CaixaForum in Barcelona. In 2019, she was part of the curatorial team of Fotonoviembre at TEA, Tenerife (Spain), where she has curated the programme #Now. From 2015 to 2018 she was curator of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (UK). She has undertaken permaculture training through the Permaculture Association UK.

Bjørn Hatterud (f. 1977) is a writer, curator, critic, and essayist who also makes noise music as a side hustle. He is queer, disabled, and he grew up in a rural, working class community. He is particularly interested in class and social mobility - oppositional pairs such as high and low culture, inclusion and exclusion, deviance and normality. Hatterud works across disciplines at the intersection of cultural history and contemporary art. He has received the Norwegian Critics Prize, the Library Literature Prize, as well as the Fritt Ord Award for his work to improve freedom of expression for disabled people.

Einar Sneve Martinussen, PhD, is an associate professor of design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) in Oslo.

He is an experienced designer, researcher, and educator working across social development, culture, and technology. His design and research practice focuses on creative, interdisciplinary exploration of the relationships between societal change, technology, and everyday life—often in collaboration with municipalities, public administration, and the cultural sector. 

He is particularly engaged in what he calls “design for the community”: using design practice and methodology as tools for critical, socially oriented innovation.

Elisabeth Brun (b. 1977, Northern Norway) is a filmmaker, artist and researcher working across moving image, installation, text, XR and archival practices. Her site-specific work explores how topographies, infrastructures and media shape perception, memory and environmental awareness.

Her films and installations have been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Seattle Art Museum, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, MedienKunstTage NRW and Lofoten International Art Festival. She holds a PhD in Media Studies, and is the author of Place and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2025), which examines the eco-critical potential of essayistic and experimental film practices. 

Brun is trained in site-specific and public art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is a founding member of the international artist collective NODES, which collaboratively develops events, workshops and artwork at the intersection of media art, artistic research and socio-environmental activism. Currently, she is  a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions (CRAPCC), Aarhus University. Brun is based in Oslo.

Hac Vinent develops their artistic practice from an anti-ableist and queer perspective, informed by their experience as a deaf, neurodivergent and trans non-binary person. Their work spans multiple formats—including image, text, sculpture, archive, installation, video and performance—understood as interdependent languages through which to investigate the relationships between body, desire, technology and subjectivity. Vinent has presented solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia. They have received numerous awards, grants and residencies supporting artistic research, creation and production. Their work is held in several public and private collections.

Heidi Dolven is a policy designer at Nav, and leads the work on preparing and implementing the pilot Et enklere Nav (A simpler Nav). Through various roles, she has extensive experience in promoting the use of service and system oriented design to address challenges related to collaboration, innovation, quality, and policy development in the public sector. Heidi is trained as a product designer from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, and has previously worked at the design agency Halogen, the City of Oslo, the Norwegian Directorate of Health, and DOGA – Design and Architecture Norway.

Maria Traasdahl is a policy designer at NAV and part of the project team for the pilot Et enklere NAV (A simpler NAV). She specializes in service and system oriented design for the public sector, based on her education at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), and experience from the design agency Halogen, the Norwegian Directorate of Health, and three trust reform pilots at NAV. Maria has particular experience in facilitating processes, analysis, and negotiation through visualization.

Isabella Bhoan is a chartered landscape architect and the Head of Landscape Europe & APAC at WW+P, London. Her work operates at the intersection of ecology, technology, and social equity, reimagining landscape architecture as a framework for environmental justice, inclusive people-centred design and urban rewilding. With a global portfolio spanning diverse climate zones and urban conditions, Isabella brings a systems-based approach to sustainable design that is both data-driven and deeply contextual.

She is the developer of Landscape Information Modelling (LIM) Arboris, a digitally enabled planning tool that quantifies ecological benefits and integrates them into digital design workflows. LIM enables more responsive, regenerative, and inclusive landscape strategies, particularly in resource-constrained or ecologically sensitive contexts.

Isabella’s practice foregrounds collaborative, nature-positive futures, advocating for technological innovation that enhances biodiversity, supports public health, and empowers communities through landscape-led development.

Jørgen Craig Lello (b. 1978, Fredrikstad) is a visual artist and architect educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KhiO), Department of Fine Art, and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). In the artist duo LELLO//ARNELL, he has worked on site-specific commissions and exhibitions in galleries and museums in Norway and internationally for over 20 years. As an architect, he has specialized in spaces for the production and presentation of art, including through his diploma project, which proposed studios, shared workshops, and exhibition spaces in the former locomotive workshop in Middelalderparken in Oslo. Alongside private commissions for galleries and artist organizations, he has also worked with modular and micro-housing in private practice.

Olve Sande (b. 1984, Førde) works at the intersection of painting, site-specific art, and architecture. His practice examines the relationship between artistic work and its spatial conditions, where physical reality functions both as motif and material. In recent projects, he has drawn on decorative painting traditions, with particular emphasis on the mutual dependence between painting and architectural space. In 2021, he completed his diploma project Between Painting and Site at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where he investigated how painting relates to place as both material and action, and how spatial conditions shape – and have historically shaped – painting throughout art history.

Malene Abildgaard is Director of Development and Communication at the Utzon Center in Aalborg. For more than 15 years, she has worked with architectural communication for children and young people, and is one of the driving forces behind the Network for Architecture, Children and Youth. Malene is trained as an architect and holds a master’s degree in Children’s and Youth Culture and Aesthetic Learning Processes. She works with architecture as a tool for education, community building, and sustainable societal development.

Through architectural education, aesthetic learning processes, and craft psychology, she explores how children and young people can learn through the body, the senses, and hands-on making, while also developing a deeper understanding of their connection to nature, materials, and the communities they are part of.

Her work is based on the idea that children and young people should not only learn about the future, but be given the opportunity to shape it—through creative processes, understanding of nature, and concrete experiences of influencing their surroundings.

Malene is the author of several non-fiction books on architecture aimed at children and young people, including Utzon’s Universe, Build, Draw & Learn, and The Architect’s World.

Malin Langøy Aarbø has a background as a journalist and cultural critic. She has written for Finansavisen and various local newspapers, and has worked as a music reviewer for GAFFA Norway.

In 2017, Aarbø participated in Kritikertoppen in Dagsavisen. She has worked at Det Norske Samlaget, and has previously held a project-based position at ROM for kunst og arkitektur through the Arts Council Norway’s trainee scheme for people with disabilities.

She has now received support from NFFO to debut with a non-fiction book about her own life, a writing project that emerges from a strong commitment to equality and justice.

Rami Maktabi (b. 1968) works as a producer for visual art and literature in Den kulturelle skolesekken in Østfold (BKS).

His cultural and artistic background consists of a BA in fashion design from Nottingham Trent University, a one-year program in arts education for children and young people at Østfold University College, and a recent one-year program in literature communication for children and young people through the Norwegian Institute for Children’s Books.

In addition, he has carried out educational outreach work in schools for the National Museum’s school exhibition program and at Galleri F15 in Moss.

Maktabi has held several positions in the cultural field, including exhibition coordinator at Fredrikstad Art Society for many years, board member of Norske Kunstforeninger, and member of the expert committee for cross-disciplinary schemes at Arts Council Norway for two terms.

From 2011 to 2024, he established and ran the exhibition space and gallery No13 Contemporary in Fredrikstad.

Stine Nilsen (NO) trained at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Movement and Dance in London, gaining a First Class BA Dance Theatre, and an MA from Middlesex University.  She worked as a freelance dancer and teacher in London, joining Candoco Dance Company as Artistic Co-Director 2007-2017. As Artistic Co-Director she was responsible for the artistic vision and commissioning of new works that were pushing the boundaries of dance and who can dance.

In 2017 Stine Nilsen took over as CEO and Artistic Director of CODA Oslo International Dance Festival, one of the largest contemporary dance festivals in the Nordic countries. Since 2024 she has been Artistic Director of Dansens Hus, Oslo.

Uke 35 2026 is supported by KORO.