PODIUM
PODIUM (Oslo)
With its history dating back to 2003, Podium is among the oldest and still existing artist-run spaces in Norway. Placed inside the squat house Hausmania, Podium have since 2021 been taken over by a new generation of artists. Today the gallery is run by artist and curator Hedda Grevle Ottesen.
Podium´s yearly program consists of a main exhibition program with six to eight exhibitions per year and public program, where we invite thinkers from different disciplines, like philosophy, media theory, environmental studies and politics, to share their knowledge with our audience. We also host a wide range of events from happenings to concerts.
Proposal
Podium is participating for the second time in the Polar/tropic program. This year curator of Podium Hedda Grevle Ottesen (Norway) is presenting three artists that she has previously represented: Alina Vergnano (Italy), Agatha Wara (Usa) and Ferdinand Waas (Germany).
Alina Vergnano (b.1989, Torino) is an Italian artist based in Oslo, Norway. She holds an MFA from the Art Academy in Bergen. The core of her painting practice is mediated through a conceptual and visual interest in how embodied experience dissolves the boundaries between subject and object, body and world. By working at the intersection of painting and drawing and in relation to the space, the aim of her work is to capture the sense of passage and entanglement of a reality that is porous, fluid, and relational.
Vergnano ́s work is represented in public and private collections in Scandinavia, UK, Europe and Asia. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Gyldenpris Kunsthall (NO), Galerie Rolando Anselmi (IT), ECC Contemporary (IT), LNM Oslo (NO), Heerz Tooya (BG), Bergen Kunsthall (NO), Sixi Museum (CN), NEVVEN (SE), QB Gallery (NO), MELK (NO), among others.
Agatha Wara is a Bolivia-born, America-raised artist working across sculpture, installation, moving image, and performance. Her practice centers on staging as a structural condition, understanding the stage as a site that authorizes visibility. Materials that carry cultural excess: celebrity images, plush alpacas, fragments of pop music, are subjected to measured interventions that reduce them to surface, orientation, and system. Across these works, value and meaning emerge through structure rather than expression.
Wara has presented projects in a range of institutional and independent contexts, including the National Museum of Norway, Reykjavík Art Museum, WIELS Project Room (Brussels), Etablissement d’en face (Brussels), Mecènes du Sud (Montpellier), Mae West Gallery (Lausanne), Centralbanken (Oslo), and Dismagazine.com (New York). Her musical project, Foyote Cugly, is currently touring Europe. Wara lives and works in Oslo and is represented by the gallery Damien & the Love Guru in Brussels and Zurich.
Ferdinand Waas, based in The Hague (NL) and Berlin (DE)
Born in Ingolstadt in 1998, Waas studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, and fine arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He completed his studies in The Hague in the summer of 2024 with his diploma film Showmatch. His solo exhibitions include Nada más que la verdad, Segismundo, Guatemala City (2025), Pirate Bay and Chill, DDD Kunsthaus, Yerevan (2024), and Show Match, K4 galleri, Oslo (2024). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at YFD, Zilberman Gallery, Berlin (2025), Please RSVP, the servers, The Hague (2025) and Tense Tides, Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam (2024), among others.
