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Felipe Mujica (Chile/US),  Johanna Unzueta (Chile/US), Songül Boyraz (Turkey/Austria), Peter Höll (Austria)

Kulturøya is a long-term placemaking and cultural project run by Leva Urban Design at Sølyst in Stavanger, Norway. Sølyst is a smallisland, where you can find several large industrial ship cranes, expansive nature and a few human inhabitants. Kulturøya will transform the island through collaborative artistic action. Find Your Eyes is a year-long project at Sølyst curated by Monika Wuhrer. Find Your Eyes will see, over the course of the year, a rotating group of artists who will collaborate on artistic interventions on the island. The first team will include Felipe Mujica, Johanna Unzueta, Songül Boyraz and Peter Höll: two sets of husband and wife pairs who regularly work together on projects. Together these four artists will set the stage for future projects by other artists involved in Find Your Eyes.

On Sølyst, Find Your Eyes will work with the existing landscape to generate a social environment where artists have the opportunity to create work in conversation with one another. Curating programming on Sølyst means embracing the elements. Taking inspiration from the nature and hidden treasures, such as the nature walks and newly planted garden on the island, Wuhrer has curated a program of artists interested in collaborating with the local community and the island itself.Pieces will be scattered across the island, some discrete and some more conspicuous. While some work will be visible from boats or cars, other work will be discovered by curious hikers who listen and look carefully for interventions. Each of the four artists selected for the inaugural program places a strong focus on installation, light and participatory projects influenced by artistic, social and political movements. Find Your Eyes will engage the Stavanger community in contemplation about the effects of political and social history on nature, diversifying and enriching the town with an array of artists from different geographic and political climates. 

On an island that demonstrates a sharp contrast between nature and the industrial, Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta work with oppositions–indoor and outdoor, nature and industry–to experiment, creating work that interacts with the environment. Mujica works with 2 women, Harbia from Syria and Faisa from Palestine, to embroider textile and explores divisions and instability, creating projects grown from geometric abstraction. For Mujica, the devices of image-making are simultaneously an historical set of references and a set of creative tools. Unzueta’s work examines the technological, historical and social implications of labor, exploring production through the handmade and industrial. Through explorations of divisions and imbalance, their collaboration will question the perception of art and labor, inciting reflection on the possibilities of collaborative public spaces.

The second pair of collaborators, Songül Boyraz and Peter Höll, create a project exploring the lives of refugees and social outsiders through work that focuses on the lives of individuals and personal relationships. In Stavanger, Boyraz and Höll connected with a diverse group of kids for extended programming during their project. The artists develop work on site, enhancing the natural environment through connections with local residents. By connecting the hyperlocal to broader issues of global inequality and the refugee crisis, Boyraz and Höll encourage visitors to disconnect from their everyday habits to explore underrepresented facets of global crises, local politics and personal experience.