Olga Gry Becker // Director
Olga (she/her) 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 // Logistic and host Coordinator
Marion 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.
Camilla Renate Nicolaisen / Curator and Designer
Camilla (she/her) is one of the co-founders of the Open Out Festival. She is an artist based in Tromsø with a studio space at Kysten, the Troms Municipality Culture Centre. Nicolaisen received her Fine Arts Bachelor’s degree from the department of Ceramic at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, and her Master’s degree in Contemporary Art from The Art Academy of Tromsø Arctic University.
Being a visual artist her practice involves ceramic structures, sound art, herbal remedies, drawings and installations with natural materials. Her main interest these days is the various symbiotic relationships in which our species are involved to ensure survival, and how this is changing in the face of climate change. One such art-research project she is working with now is revolving around the thematic of humans relations to seagulls along the northern coast. Her work points out to the necessity of going beyond the dichotomy of nature vs. culture, and enquires into how habitual knowledge can make its way into the future of the planet. More generally, Nicolaisen wants to challenge dominant narratives linked to colonization, gender norms and consumerism.
Amalie Holthen // Curator and Producer
Amalie (she/her) 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.”
EARLIER CREW MEMBERS:
Kristina Primakova (2018-2023) co-founder
Anna Näumann (2021)
Guri Simone (2019-2020)
Siri Mari Vitalis Larsen (2018-2019) co-founder
