a collaboration in the making between Johan Andrén and Mark Walker
June 18th you're all welcome to a public sharing of Solar Scars
Nytorget 15, at 18.00 - 21.00
Mark and Johan share an interest in solar cycles, material imprints, analogue photographic technologies and experimental image making, and both make work from a corporal and sensuous relation to the world around them. Their stay at NKF will be another opportunity to keep developing their ongoing collaboration, this time mediated through stencil printing with a spirit duplicator from the 1950s.
Mark and Johan commanced collaborating during the Masters program at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and exhibited together at Showcase LAB106 in Frankfurt in March 2025.
Johan Andrén (born 1991 in Sweden) is a visual artist based in Oslo, Norway. Andrén holds a BFA in Photography from Akademin Valand in Gothenburg (including an exchange semester at Listaháskóli Íslands, Reykjavík), and an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
Photography is at the centre of his practice, both through making his own photographs with a camera and working with found images. He often experiments with analogue photographic materials, in addition to other media such as text, video/film and found objects.
With a focus on spatially sensitive installations and self-publishing, he explores themes such as light and visibility, photographic objects and image culture, relations, affect, and the power dynamics in looking and depiction, astronomy, alienation, visual traces and imprints.
Andrén has exhibited at Fotogalleriet, Kunstnernes Hus and Atelier Nord in Oslo, 3e Våningen in Gothenburg, and Galleri Format in Malmö. In 2021 he finished a public commission for Region Kalmar Län. Andrén also works in collaborations and community projects. Among other things he is a founding member of the artist run experimental platform NEJD, part of Oslo Crit Klubb and is a studio resident at Hausmania Kulturhus.
Mark Walker is a Nottingham born artist, currently based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He has a MFA from KHiO (Oslo national academy of the arts), a Meisterschüle from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where he studied Sculpture under Professor Tobias Rehberger, and a fisrt class BA in Painting from Camberwell college of Arts, UAL.
Mark's practice grows from an understanding of time; indoctrinated as something to be measured and exchanged through labour. Coming from a working class background, his engagement with time is deeply personal, and through his art practice he has been re-learning what time can mean beyond its conventional constraints.
His work has taken a research-driven direction, exploring time as both a lived experience and a philosophical, historical and material question. Currently, Mark is developing drawings with spiralling helixes, altering conventional clock divisions to investigate how measurement systems shape temporal experience. His work aims to examine how working-class temporal experience can confront established timekeeping norms.
Past exhibitions include; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010, at the ICA, London and A Foundation, Liverpool. Pashmina at the Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt. ÜBERMORGENKÜNSTLER, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and nnausea at PRETEXTO, Pasto, Colombia.
And most recently; Valume at EXGIRLFRIEND, Berlin, Free education for all, It’s not too late to change your mind at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo and Vårutstillingen at Fotogalleriet, Oslo.