Elina Waage Mikalsen is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Tromsø, Sápmi/Norway, currently living in Oslo.

She works with sound, performance, textile, installation and text. Elina has a background in art and film, and in 2015 was named Young Artist of the Year at the international indigenous festival Riddu Riđđu. Since then, she has taken part in a number of group exhibitions and performance programmes. Elina’s artistic work is closely linked to her Sami and Norwegian affiliation. She starts from body and landscape, oral storytelling traditions and the gaps in her own family history. She is keen to take the Sami view of the world seriously, and how people and nature are inextricably linked.

The holes that Norwegianization has created in the form of loss of language and cultural heritage have become a starting point for imagining and discussing what these holes represent, what matter they constitute and how they continue to affect the people in our societies. As a de-colonial practice, she collects fragments of histories, materials and practices and explores tensions in the spaces between, where the ambivalent and ambiguous reside. She sees ambiguity as an important tool for challenging western narratives related to the body, landscape and dominant storytelling.