Created in collaboration with Tenthaus and Hersleb VGS in 2017, “Grønske Landscape Experiment” was a series of workshops about beauty and immigrant identity with students that had newly arrived in Norway mostly as refugees. The workshop formed the basis of the installation and happening “Cocktails & Dreams” at Tenthaus in October 2012 which also featured these images.

In the workshops, we discussed how notions of beauty are subjective and are shaped by one’s experiences and backgrounds. In addition, we discussed how new arrivals to a country bring their own ideas of beauty. We discussed how perhaps  these ideals could be reconstructed into a new context in order to create identities and futures not just for themselves, but also for Norway.

The students were asked to create masks related to beauty and they posed in the Norwegian forest. Some months later, I asked them to choose an image online of what they found beautiful and it is interesting how the images relate to their masked selves.

Perhaps these images say a lot about their identities and possible futures?