Kristian Engelsen (b. 1989) works across film, painting, sculpture, and music, bringing together materials from diverse cultural contexts to construct shifting constellations of meaning that question how truths are perceived and shaped. His practice explores how collective truths emerge—through ideology, dogma, and cultural consensus—and how these constructions flow into aesthetics, shaping what is experienced as form, significance, and as reality. He holds a BA in Film Direction from Westerdals School of Communication (2013) and a BA in Cinematography from the Norwegian Film School (2016), and lives and works in Oslo. With roots in both Norway and French Polynesia, I am drawn to the spaces where truths shift and belief systems collide. The Society Islands in French Polynesia was among the last places on earth to be colonized, marking a late encounter between the South Pacific worlds and European power.

The Enlightenment’s colonial ideals of progress and reason met the islands through missionaries and commerce, transforming entire worlds of meaning, often by replacing one form of dependence with another.

Less interested in presenting answers but rather exploring fractures:

How dogma takes hold, how collective truths are shaped, and how cracks

in these structures allows and strengthens other forces come through

love, art, expression to overflow and reveal something vital.