Performance · Photography · Video / Film · Sound · Sculpture · Installation · Neon · Text
Bearing
Live performance, 04:39 min, Svalbard, 03.08.26.
Video documentation projected during Intimate Distances – blurborders International Performance eXchange at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), Bangkok, 08.08.26.
Against the Svalbard landscape, the artist moves across a plank balanced on stacked stones, holding a block of Himalayan salt in one hand and a spray bottle of water in the other. At intervals, she pauses and sprays the salt with water in repeated sequences. When the plank
meets the ground, the structure continues to hold — the balance shifts but does not collapse.
Through body, salt, water, and stone, Bearing explores interdependence and balance as a continuous negotiation between stability and dissolution, between bearing and being borne.
The Sedimentation of Trust
Beginning after the end (2025)
Himalaya salt and steel
20 x 180 x 15, 5 cm
The number 13 introduces a subtle disruption to an otherwise recognisable order; thirteen salt blocks form a fragile line on a precisely fabricated steel plate, supported by five brackets.
The structure balances between stability and dissolution. The steel insists on precision and structure, while the salt — porous and slowly changing — carries traces of geological time. Together, the materials establish a tension between control and entropy. The work suggests an understanding of time in which endings are not final, but part of an ongoing material transformation.
Installation view Nordnorsken 2026 / The North Norwegian Art Centre
Trust (2025)
Himalaya salt, cloth and blood
42cm x 15cm x 9cm
Trust is a condition of democracy, yet it becomes increasingly fragile with distance from power: Am I heard? Am I seen? Bringing together salt and blood—materials charged with histories of preservation, sacrifice, value and belief—the work gives physical form to the vulnerability of trust at a moment when shared facts and collective realities are increasingly unstable.
Installation view Midtpunkt - NK 50 year / Galleri Nord-Norge 2025
IAMNOWHERE / TOGETHER ELSEWHERE
Presented in SEVEN TIMES THE COLOR OF THE SUN
The North Norwegian Art Centre, 04.10.25 – 04.01.26
Curated by Adriana Alves & Vanina Sarachino / Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik
The works move between presence and absence, proximity and displacement. Through body, landscape, light and language, iamnowhere / Together Elsewhere considers the unstable relationship between where we are, where we belong, and where we imagine ourselves to be.
The neon work iamnowhere was first presented in the solo exhibition of the same title at Muratcentoventidue Gallery, Bari, Italy in 2024, alongside the video work Surrender and the photographic series Mnemosyne.
Pigment print from live performance on PhotoRag 305g Hahnemühle
Framed in oak with AR glass
100 × 171 cm, Edition 1 + 1 AP
(Also available in 80 × 47 cm, Edition 5 + 2 AP)
Neon wall sculpture
Transparent glass tubes filled with neon gas and transformer
100 × 14 cm, Edition 2/3 + 1 AP
FALLING FOR RELIGION
The red neon pulses between desire and danger, vitality and warning. The endless circle evokes how belief, ideologies and structures of power repeat and renew themselves, while the title FALLING FOR RELIGION opens a tension between devotion and collapse—asking what happens when conviction becomes power.
Red neon, letter formed glass tubes, transformers
300 cm diameter
Commissioned for solo exhibition at Galleri Backer, Vestfold University, 2011
Exhibited at The North Norwegian Art Centre, 2012
Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik
CAPITAL
Live performance, Longyearbyen, 17.09.2024 / 17 min
Arctic Action - What Happened to us? International Performance Festival, Longyearbyen, 2024. Curated by Stein Henningsen
CAPITAL uses language, metal, sound, repetition, and escalating bodily force to examine the consequences of systems built around accumulation and value. Poverty, distress, debt, ignorance, depletion, deprivation, starvation, and emptiness emerge as the counterweight to capital – conditions produced or intensified by unequal distributions of resources, power, and wealth. Through repetitive actions, industrial materials, voice, and sound, the performance builds from resonance toward increasing intensity and rupture. Developed within the geopolitical landscape of Svalbard, CAPITAL extends beyond its specific location to address a universal tension between accumulation and depletion, wealth and deprivation, growth and its human and environmental costs.
A MOUTHFUL
Live performance, Spitsbergen Art Centre, 14.09.2024 / 30 min
Arctic Action - What Happened to us? International Performance Festival, Longyearbyen, 2024. Curated by Stein Henningsen
A Mouthful uses wheat grain, stone, gravel, and repetitive bodily action to explore survival, consumption, endurance, and the fragile relationship between body, environment, and sustenance. Through repetition, balance, and the recurring number seven, nourishment and vulnerability meet geological matter in a ritual-like cycle of holding, release, and destruction. Developed within the Arctic landscape of Svalbard, A Mouthful extends beyond its specific location to reflect on a universal condition: our dependence on the material world that
sustains us, and the precarious balance between nourishment and depletion, endurance and vulnerability.
Arctic Presence
A solitary point of light marks human presence within an Arctic landscape shaped by extraction, infrastructure, and environmental vulnerability. The work reflects on relationships between technology, atmosphere, and perception in a territory where climate and geopolitics remain in continuous negotiation.
Pigment print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag 305 g, Oak + AR glass
69 × 85 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Installation view The North Norwegian Art Exhibition, Nordnorsken 2026 / The North Norwegian Art Centre
By Ina Otzko and Stein Henningsen / 18:00 min / Arctic Pavilion
A poetic and political documentary reflection on shifting geopolitical realities in the Arctic.
Set during the closure of Norway’s last coal mine on Svalbard in 2025, the film explores the transition from resource extraction to signal extraction, examining how surveillance, infrastructure, and digital systems reshape territory, sovereignty, and collective futures.
Premiered at Nordover Art Centre, Longyearbyen, August 14, 2025, in connection with the 100th anniversary of the Svalbard Treaty. Part of the Arctic Art Forum V Exhibition and screening program at the Climate House, National History Museum, Oslo 2026
Winner — Environmental, Cannes World Film Festival (2025)
Honorable Mention — Berlin Kiez Film Festival (2025)
Official Selection — Best Hollywood Day Short Film Festival (2026) / Rome Prisma Film Awards (2026) / Los Angeles Film and Documentary Awards (2026)
SURRENDER
Solo Exhibition, Galleri Nord-Norge, Harstad, 2023
Photo: Steve Nilsen / GNN
SURRENDER brought together photography, video, sound, and neon in an immersive installation centred on surrender as a condition of attention: a relinquishing of control that allows other relationships between body, time, memory, and environment to emerge.
At the centre of the exhibition, Mnemosyne (2023) approached landscape as an archive of personal and collective memory. The video work Surrender extended this temporal field through moving water, fractured light, and immersive sound, placing the body within processes of continuous environmental transformation.
Neon works including Take your time (2015), (Be)longing (2014), and Slowly becoming light (2022) interrupted the space with propositions of duration, belonging, and transformation, while the Polaroid series How is your heart? brought the exhibition back to the intimacy and vulnerability of the body.
Interiors 72/12
Interiors 72/12 is the first in a series of self-timed photographs and performance-for-camera works, developed primarily between 2012 and 2013 through temporary stays in private homes. Placing her own body within unfamiliar domestic architectures, Otzko explores the threshold between intimacy and exposure, belonging and displacement, inner and outer space.
Working simultaneously as photographer and subject, the body becomes a sensing and spatial instrument – measuring, inhabiting, and subtly recalibrating each environment. The domestic interior, conventionally associated with privacy, security, and ownership, becomes provisional: a site of negotiation between body and architecture, familiarity and foreignness.
The series established questions that continue to resonate throughout Otzko’s practice: how physical presence shapes our relationship to place, how belonging is constructed and unsettled, and how sustained attention can transform the experience of space.
First presented as Interiører / Interiors 72/12 at the Nordic Contemporary Poetry Festival Exhibition, Hamar Art Society, Norway (2013), in collaboration with poet Hanne Bramness. Later exhibited in Sono Qui, Puoi Sentirlo at Castel dell’Ovo, Naples; Bodø Art Society; Vadsø Art Society; Arkhangelsk International Photo Festival; St. Petersburg Museum of Nonconformist Art; It Was Meant for All Things to Meet at Galleri Nord-Norge; and Galleri Syn.
GET INTO THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Presented in the solo exhibition Slowly becoming light, the group exhibition It was meant for all things to meet, and at Juxtapositions Art Fair.
Featured in KATALOG 35.2, 2024.
Developed during the Covid-19 lockdown in Italy (2020–2021), GET INTO THE HEART OF THE MATTER turns inward at a moment when the external world had contracted. Through a sequence of intimate photographs, the work approaches attention as an active state: a way of staying with uncertainty, vulnerability, and the passage of time rather than escaping them.
The title becomes both instruction and proposition—to move beyond the surface, remain with what is present, and enter more deeply into the conditions of being.
Quiet yourself / Open eyes / Open ears / Open mind / Open heart / Dive in / Immerse yourself / Play / Listen / Absorb / Reflect / Get to the heart of the matter
— Brian Pertl, Deep Listener
15 images
20 × 20 cm
Mounted on aluminium with acrylic front
IT WAS MEANT FOR ALL THINGS TO MEET
Galleri Nord-Norge, Harstad, 2022
Artists: Ina Otzko, Anne Lingaard Møller, Eva Fachè, and Jet Pascua
Curated by Ina Otzko & Jet Pascua
Inspired by Richard Blanco’s poem Complaint from El Río Grande, the exhibition considered what it means to exist in relation—to one another, to the landscapes we inhabit, and to forces that extend beyond the individual. Through photography, video, sound, and installation, the artists approached attention and poetry as ways of confronting ecological and social uncertainty, asking what forms of responsibility emerge when seemingly separate lives, histories, and environments are understood as interconnected.
Ina Otzko presented works from the series Interiors 72/12, Get into the heart of the matter, A handful, and the video work Make me tender again.
SONO QUI, PUOI SENTIRLO?
Solo exhibition, Castel dell’Ovo, Naples, 2015
Curated by Maria Savarese
Later presented at Bodø Art Society, Norway, 2018
Leviathan (2015) was conceived specifically for the solo exhibition Sono qui, puoi sentirlo? at Castel dell’Ovo in Naples. The work consists of 78 unique Polaroid photographs produced inside the crater of the dormant Solfatara volcano in the Campi Flegrei, just outside Naples.
Working within the volcanic site, Otzko approached the landscape not simply as a subject, but as an active participant in the photographic process. Heat, steam, mineral residue, and atmospheric conditions interacted with the unstable chemistry of the Polaroid film, affecting the images as they emerged and continuing to alter them over time. The photographs remain materially unresolved — suspended between appearance and disappearance, control and transformation.
The title is drawn from George Oppen’s poem Leviathan, in which questions of truth, language, fear, and human relation unfold against the material presence of the world. This tension resonates throughout the work: between what can be seen and what resists visibility, between human attempts at control and forces that exceed them. Geological and human timescales converge as the volatility of the volcanic landscape meets the instability of the photographic image.
Within Sono qui, puoi sentirlo?, Leviathan was presented in dialogue with Trust / Tetrahedron (2015), a tetrahedral structure drawn in white neon and inspired by reflectors encountered at the volcanic site. The form is stable only insofar as each edge supports the others, making trust a physical condition of the structure itself. Set against the geological and photographic instability of Leviathan, the work extends the exhibition’s investigation of mutual dependence, control, transformation, and our relationship to forces beyond our command.
Title reference: George Oppen, “Leviathan,” in New Collected Poems.
STAY A WHILE YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL
Presented in REFLEX
The North Norwegian Art Centre, Norway (2012)
Kulturens Hus, Luleå, Sweden (2013)
Sámi Center for Contemporary Art, Karasjok, Norway (2013)
Later exhibited in I Enter the Landscape from the North
Kulturbadet Galleri, Norway (2024)
Referencing Goethe’s Faust, STAY A WHILE YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL takes its title from the desire to suspend time at the moment of beauty. Twisted neon tubes rest on a 100 × 100 cm concrete platform, 10 cm thick, while directly above, an equally sized concrete slab, 60 cm thick, hangs from chains and a pulley. The fragile, luminous lines of neon are caught between two geometric masses, creating an uneasy equilibrium between light and weight, beauty and threat, stillness and potential collapse—the desire to hold a moment against the inevitability of its passing.
Presented in REFLEX alongside selections from Interiors 72/12 and poems by Hanne Bramness.
Neon, concrete, pulley, transformers
100 cm × 100 cm x 100 cm
TREASURES IN HEAVEN
Presented at Den 74 Nordnorske Kunstutstilling — Annual Juried Traveling Exhibition in Northern Norway (2020), and Shore Line, Arkhangelsk Regional Lore Museum, Arkhangelsk, Russia (2020).
Acquired by Meløy Health and Welfare Centre, Nordland County Municipality, 2021.
TREASURES IN HEAVEN (2018-2019) is a series of photographs of the Tyrrhenian Sea, where shifting light, surface, and atmosphere transform a seemingly boundless landscape into a register of environmental change. The sea appears at once enduring and vulnerable, holding the tension between what exceeds human time and what is increasingly altered by human action.
The title draws on Henry Miller’s reflections on humanity’s responsibility toward the Earth, and on the possibility that awareness may emerge through moments of crisis and uncertainty.
Series of seven photographs
Hahnemühle Photo Rag 305g
100 × 150 cm
Edition 3 + 1 AP
SLOWLY BECOMING LIGHT
Slowly becoming light (2022) holds transformation within the phrase itself: not light as a fixed state, but as something gradually entered or becoming. Rendered in neon, language becomes illumination, marking a threshold between visibility and disappearance, material presence and immaterial light.
First presented as part of the main exhibition at Festspillene Helgeland, Jacobsenbrygga, Helgeland Museum, Norway, 2022. Also presented in TRE: Flow | Movement | Rhythm, ArtBase Helgeland (2022), SURRENDER, Galleri Nord-Norge (2023), and Shadows and Beacons (2023–2025).
NorlandiIART
The work is installed in the window of Stormen Concert hall in Bodø, 200 cm x 300 cm.
The image is from the series Interiors 15/13.
"NorlandiART is the result of so many outstanding artists choosing Nordland as the point of departure for the art they create. Important choices are made to produce versatility in art. Modern technology enables one to take part in the global dialogue about artistic trends and tools, regardless of where one lives. One is always centrally located in a world context. The physical place where one lives, the basis for what one creates, makes an important difference."
NorlandiART is a project by Are Andreassen.