Aurora Haaland Stenersen

In the NOUA Project Room, NOUA presents Norwegian and international artists working with photography, photobooks and lens-based mediums. The audience will gain an insight into the artist's themes, research and working processes through sketchbooks, test prints, theory and technical tests. Aurora Haaland Stenersen is the third artist to be presented in the Project room in 2023. 

All project room exhibitions are opened with a short tour and artist talk with a presentation of the artistship.The artist talk on 8st June starts with a tour of the Project Room at 7pm, followed by a conversation and presentation in the seminar room (ground level). Lasts until approx. 20.30, sale of drinks from the bar.

Aurora Haaland Stenersen grew up on a small island in Lofoten and uses the camera as a tool to explore her relationship with her hometown, and how belonging, identity and sexuality are shaped among young people in small Norwegian communities. In the past year, Stenersen has traveled through Norway through the Oss i Mellom project to meet queer young people who live in the countryside. As queer and raised in a small town, she wanted to meet young people with similar experiences and offer a more nuanced view of what it means to be queer today.

As a visual storyteller, she explores the outer edges of the documentary photography genre, and using portraits she photographs people both as individuals and as a window to a larger theme. As a game of association, she finds the next step on the path as she walks, and as a student she continues to play, experiment and find her visual language.
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Aurora Haaland Stenersen (1997, NO) is a photographer and visual storyteller from Henningsvær in Lofoten. She is currently based in The Hague, Netherlands as a student at The Royal Academy of Art, where she is pursuing a BA in Photography, specializing in Documentary Photography. In 2021, she graduated from Bilder Nordic School of Photography in Oslo. In the same year, she published a self-published photo book Heimblind, and excerpts from the project were exhibited at the 76th Nordnorske Kunstutstilling. She participated in the mentoring program Emerging Nordic Talents by Atla x NOUA in 2021, and in 2022 she has exhibited the project Us in Between in the form of two exhibitions supported by both the Free Speech Foundation and Arts Council Norway. She also received the Sparebank Nord-Norges talent grant in 2022.