6 Jan 2022
INTRO
New INTRO artists 2022

Welcome Tora Schultz and Isabella Solar Villaseca, the INTRO artists of 2022 at O – Overgaden

We kick off 2022 by sharing some really great news: Tora Schultz and Isabella Solar Villaseca have been selected from an overwhelming number of young, talented applicants for the third INTRO program at O – Overgaden.

This week we’re initiating a close collaboration lasting throughout 2022. Together with O—Overgaden Schultz and Solar Villaseca will create two large scale solo exhibitions which are set to open in the autumn of 2022.

This is the third year that O—Overgaden – in collaboration with Aage & Johanne Louis-Hansen’s Foundation – invites newly graduated artists to apply for the long-term, advantaged INTRO program. With almost 100 thoroughly prepared applications from young, talented artists O—Overgaden has experienced a significant increase in interest for becoming a part of the program.

Tora Schultz and Isabella Solar Villaseca made it through the eye of the needle with their convincing and precise artistic expressions and their projects which individually present new perspectives on and critiques of our 2022-world.

Tora Schultz

Tora Schultz has a feminist and minimalist approach to sculpture and investigates structutal gender discrimination existing in the world around us. Everyday objects, from kitchen racks to bricks, car seats and furniture, are designed on the basis of biased data disregarding whoever that diverge from the standard body. Schultz’s sculptures challenge these distorted objects, which affects us on an everyday basis and quietly wield a suppressing, invisible violence. With her play between materials, references to institutional design and pop cultural tales, Schultz makes us aware of the disregarded narratives among which we exist – and questions them.

Tora Schultz (b. 1991, Denmark) holds an MFA from Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm (2021). During the past years she has exhibited at Bizarro in Copenhagen and at SKF/Konstnärshuset, Issues and Tre Kronor in Stockholm. Schultz was awarded the Niels Wessel Bagge’s Kunstfond honorary grant in 2021.

Isabella Solar

Isabella Solar Villaseca’s practice integrates music and rhythm, historical archive material, text, poetry, found video footage and sculptural and performative elements. Solar Villaseca’s work focuses on the South American diaspora in Scandinavia. Simultaneously she investigates how resistance strategies – sometimes gathering around different types of music or other, potentially rather small, everyday actions – can be applied as a reaction against neo liberal politics.

The folklore traditions of Chile, which Solar Villaseca currently works with, include – among other things – the Cueca dance which has been used as a rhythmic, storytelling mode of protest by communities of women, especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s. According to the artist, however, this type of protest also draws it threads all the way up to Scandinavia today.

Isabella Solar Villaseca (b. 1992, Stockholm, Sweden) holds an MFA from Bergen Kunstakademi and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (2021). In that same year she was one of the recipients of the Poul Erik Bech Foundation’s art award.