About the festival

Open Out Festival is an annual one-week contemporary art festival putting forward queer artists and performers aiming to make the public art scene in Tromsø more diverse, accessible and open. Our primary goal is to showcase high quality contemporary art within a broad queer perspective - we want to put forward hidden and marginalised voices. We investigate social, political and personal realities and dreams and we believe that art has a strong power to formulate and imagine these.

Featuring more than 20 artists/ artist groups from all over Norway and the world, we invite the audience to experience high quality contemporary art in the festival exhibition, the rich performance program, a short film program, and to take part in workshops and events related to the title. All events are free of charge and open to all.

The aim of the festival is three-fold:
* to strengthen the presence of queer, feminist and intersectional perspectives in the art scene and more generally in society
* to make quality art events accessible to a broader, younger and more diverse audience
* to stimulate artistic (co)creation and queer community building in the North through a local and global approach

festival guidelines
Team

Olga Gry Becker (she/her) // Festival director 

is a Danish / German artist and organizer based in Tromsø. She moved to Tromsø in 2018 to study at the Academy of Art in Tromsø and to be close to mountains and rivers. She has been involved in Open Out since 2022. Her studies include exchange studies at the Danish National School of Performing Arts (scenography) and the National Film School of Denmark (set design). Apart from working with Open Out she works broadly within the field of art as a technician, host, designer and with her own work in collective projects. She also works with several other jobs such as assisting cooks at random peoples weddings, guarding metal festivals and serving overpriced falafel bowls.

Marion Bouvier (she/her) // Logistic and host Coordinator

is one of the co-founder of Open Out Festival. After being the festival’s director for 5 years, she happily passed on the baton to Olga, and is now part of the team as artists host and member of the selection committee. Marion works full-time as festival director for NUFF (Nordisk Ungdoms Filmfestival), promoting short films made by emerging talents and organizing film workshops for youth. She is also a writer and editor: she recently co-edited the Arctic Art Newspaper, publishes art essays for Hakapik.no, and printed the Pigeongram Collective’s collection of essays on Riso. Marion is originally from France and has been living in Tromsø for almost 8 years.

Amalie holthen (she/her) // curator and producer

 is an artist based in Tromsø with a BFA degree from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. She works with different collaborative and organizational projects, besides her individual practice. In her own works, Amalie investigates expectations of the phenomenon brought by the language, and questions the limitations of language and representation, the fallibility of perception, and the construction of knowledge. “I am particularly interested in how language defines access or restriction and how constructed codes(rules) sometimes extend only certain bodies, and do not leave room for others. In living a queer life, codes constructed by language - such as traces of heterosexuality - make it difficult to take up a place without feeling those traces as points of pressure. Such pressure points impress on the body, involving the ‘not-expected’/unfamiliar, and these unfamiliar and subtle impressions redirect my attention to the ‘less proximate’, or even the deviant as an orienting effect in my artistic practice, and life in general.”

Tuva Johansen (she/her)

is an activist, writer and journalist from the norwegian side of Sápmi. She has been part of the OO team since 2023.