The Sedimentation of Trust
The Sedimentation of Trust investigates trust as a fragile material and social condition through salt, steel, blood, and folded cloths, where processes of erosion, sedimentation, and balance reflect questions of vulnerability and collective coexistence.
Beginning after the end (2025)
Himalaya salt and steel
20 x 180 x 15, 5 cm
Installation view Nordnorsken 2026 / The North Norwegian Art Centre
Trust (2025)
Himalaya salt, cloth and blood
42cm x 15cm x 9cm
Installation view Midtpunkt - NK 50 year / Galleri Nord-Norge 2025
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)
FALLING FOR RELIGION
Installed as a circular red neon structure, FALLING FOR RELIGION reflects on belief, perception, and collective psychology through repetition, light, and spatial tension. The work explores how ideological and spiritual systems shape human experience, identity, and relations of power.
Red neon, glass tubes, transformers
300 cm diameter
Commissioned for Galleri Backer, Vestfold University, 2011
Exhibited at The North Norwegian Art Centre, 2012
Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik
ARCTIC ACTION — WHAT HAPPENED TO US...?
International Performance Festival, Longyearbyen, 2024
Curated by Stein Henningsen
A Mouthful
Live performance, Spitsbergen Art Centre, 14.09.2024
30 min
Using wheat grain, stone, gravel, and repetitive bodily action, A Mouthful explores survival, consumption, endurance, and the fragile relationship between body, environment, and sustenance within Arctic conditions.
(Wheat grain, seven plates, seven large stones, a mouthful of gravel)
CAPITAL
Live performance, Longyearbyen, 17.09.2024
17 min
CAPITAL reflects on extraction, inequality, depletion, and social vulnerability through spoken language and performative repetition within the geopolitical landscape of Svalbard.
(Poverty, Distress, Debt, Ignorance, Depletion, Deprivation, Starvation, Emptiness)
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
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
The works explore presence, distance, and shared perception through photography, live performance, and neon installation, where body, landscape, light, and atmosphere become intertwined within shifting ecological and psychological spaces.
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
SURRENDER
Solo Exhibition, Galleri Nord-Norge, Harstad, 2023
SURRENDER brought together photography, video, sound, and neon works in an immersive installation exploring time, memory, presence, and ecological interconnectedness through light, water, atmosphere, and spatial perception.
At the centre of the exhibition was Mnemosyne (2023), a series of black-and-white photographs and a large-scale lightbox reflecting on landscape as an archive of personal and collective memory. The video work Surrender expanded this temporal field through moving water, fractured light, and immersive sound, exploring relationships between body, perception, and environmental transformation.
Neon works including Take your time (2015) , (Be)longing (2014), and Slowly becoming light (2022) functioned as quiet interruptions within the space, while the Polaroid series How is your heart? introduced a more intimate and immediate register of presence and vulnerability, reflecting on attention, belonging, and lived experience.
Interiors 72/12
Interiors 72 / 12 consists of a series of self-timed photographs and an 18-minute video; a performance for camera. Produced in a Berlin apartment while the building’s façade was under renovation, the work explores the relationship between private space, bodily presence, and urban transformation.
Working alone with a 10-second delay, Otzko stages her partially undressed body within rooms disrupted by the persistent sound of drilling and hammering. As the building’s exterior surface — its public face — is stripped, rebuilt, and aestheticised, the body emerges as a parallel surface: vulnerable, temporal, and resistant to polish.
The work unfolds at the threshold between interior life and external restructuring, where exposure, instability, and transformation become shared spatial conditions.
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, as well as at 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
A photographic series developed during the Covid-19 lockdown in Italy (2020–2021), exploring intimacy, time, vulnerability, and emotional transformation in relation to isolation, presence, and (be)longing.
The work reflects on slowness, attentiveness, and embodied perception through quiet gestures and shifting psychological spaces.
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 explored questions of time, consciousness, coexistence, individual and collective responsibility, and the human relationship to landscape and environment. Through photography, video, sound, and installation, the artists approached poetry and attentiveness as ways of navigating ecological, social, and existential uncertainty.
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
Staged within the historic spaces of Castel dell’Ovo and spanning more than 400 m², the exhibition brought together key works produced between 2003 and 2015 across photography, video, sculpture, performance, sound, and text. Interiors 72/12 formed part of the exhibition and served as its primary visual identity.
Conceived specifically for the exhibition, Leviathan (2015) consists of 78 unique Polaroid photographs produced inside the crater of the dormant Solfatara volcano in the Campi Flegrei near Naples. Working at the threshold of visibility, Otzko explored instability, geological transformation, and the material vulnerability of photographic processes through steam, mineral residue, and shifting chemical reactions. The title refers to Leviathan as both mythic force and figure of excess — creation and destruction held in tension.
The exhibition also included Trust / Tetrahedron, a neon and copper sculpture inspired by the volcanic site’s reflectors, accompanied by a composition of field recordings from the crater.
STAY A WHILE YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL, 2012
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)
Neon, concrete, pulley, transformers
100 × 100 cm
The sculpture extends Otzko’s ongoing exploration of perception, reflection, temporality, and the gaze. Referencing Goethe’s Faust, the title evokes the desire to suspend time at the moment of beauty, while the suspended concrete structure and luminous neon forms reflect tensions between stillness and instability, permanence and transformation.
Presented alongside selections from Interiors 72/12 and poems by Hanne Bramness, the work explores relationships between body, space, attention, and perception through light, material tension, and spatial resonance.
TREASURES IN HEAVEN, 2018–2019
Presented at Den 74 Nordnorske Kunstutstilling — Annual Juried Traveling Exhibition in Northern Norway (2020) and Shore Line, Arkhangelsk Regional Lore Museum, Arkhangelsk, Russia (2020)
Purchased for Meløy Health and Welfare Centre, Nordland County Municipality, 2021
A series of photographs reflecting on the Tyrrhenian Sea as a space of environmental vulnerability, interconnectedness, and transformation. Through shifting light, surface, and atmosphere, the work explores relationships between ecological fragility, perception, and human responsibility within landscapes shaped by climate change and extraction.
The title references Henry Miller’s reflections on humanity’s responsibility toward the Earth and the possibility of awareness emerging through crisis and uncertainty.
Series of seven photographs
Hahnemühle Photo Rag 305g
100 × 150 cm
Edition 3 + 1 AP
SLOWLY BECOMING LIGHT, 2022
Main exhibition, Festspillene Helgeland
Jacobsenbrygga, Helgeland Museum, Norway, 2022
Also presented in TRE: Flow | Movement | Rhythm, ArtBase Helgeland (solo exhibition, 2022), SURRENDER at Galleri Nord-Norge (2023), and Shadows and Beacons (2023-2025).
SLOWLY BECOMING LIGHT brought together photography, video, sound, and neon installation in an exhibition exploring perception, transformation, memory, and atmospheric presence through light, duration, and spatial experience.
The exhibition included the neon work Slowly becoming light, a selection of video works, and the photographic series A Handful and Get into the heart of the matter, creating an immersive environment shaped by stillness, listening, and shifting emotional and ecological states.