Obrestad/Dølheim (HILO-project)

Obrestad/Dølheim is a Norwegian artist duo founded by Linn Obrestad and Hilde Iren Dølheim. Based in Telemark, Norway, they have collaborated since 2017. Their practice is rooted in re-contextualisation, in exploring how objects take on new meanings when shifted out of familiar contexts, reframed, or disassembled. Working across installation, sculpture, film, and environmental art, their work is deeply intertwined with the natural world, tracing the tension and dialogue between human and non-human landscapes.

Each project is an invitation to slow down and reconsider our relationship with the physical world, its histories, ecologies, and vulnerabilities.

Obrestad/Dølheim are the founders of the Extractions series and co-initiators of EcoEchos film festival. They developed the methodology of complexity-sensitive artivism, combining long-term fieldwork, ethics of care, and cross-disciplinary collaboration in their film and art practices.

Exhibition and catalogue (Galleri Kunstparken, Risør, September/October 2026), presenting the artistic outcomes of CoLab 2025. With artists Obrestad/Dølheim, Stine Gonsholt, Tom Løberg, Emma Arnold, Maj Gret Gaupås. As with earlier Extractions works, it resists resolution, offering instead a collection of voices, gestures, and field-based imaginaries that that confront the overlapping pressures of ecology, economy, and time.
EcoEchos is a film art festival initiated by Obrestad/Dølheim in collaboration with Michelle Sales, Stine Gonsholt and Tom Løberg. EcoEchos grows out of the ongoing Extractions project. The festival’s first edition took place in Skien, Norway, 7–8 February 2026, with a parallel screening in Brazil later in 2026.
The third installment in the Extractions series, this collaborative project explores alternative fieldwork practices in a threatened forest. Through shared artistic research and site specific works, it culminates in a catalogue and exhibition reflecting on extraction, landscape, and resistance.
Extractions is an artistic exploration of the impacts of industrial extraction on ecosystems, communities, and the values that bind us to the natural world. In a society that systematically prioritises short-term profit over long-term sustainability, we expand our gaze from a local mining project at Fensfeltet, Norway, to the global forces driving exploitation and degradation. The project is our response to the troubling reality of a worldview that reduces all life, human, animal, entire ecosystems, to mere resources within an ever-expanding economy.
Metal meets wood, and words emerge: etched into the very fabric of the forest. They speak of an impending mining project, which threatens to transform this place into a toxic wasteland. They speak of progress and its cost - the insatiable hunger for resources. They whisper, gentle imprints, an invitation to tread lightly upon the land.
“Rock, Paper, Scissors”, art project that explores aspects of knowledge and meaning. The project is inspired by the game rock-paper-scissors, where two players simultaneously form one of three shapes with their hands.
The game is a metaphor for the project’s exploration of the interplay and conflicts between different media, materials, and forms of knowledge. The game/play metaphor also reflects the project’s playful and experimental approach to art creation, and how elements of chance and unpredictability are involved in creative processes.
The number 42, which according to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, is used as a unifying element that ties together twigs, stones, pictures, film, and books into a whole.
Ongoing land art project in the Telemark forests
On site investigations and out-door exhibition on the small island of Langøya, Telemark and a follow up exhibition in Galleri Pop in Langesund based on our stay on the island.
Big issues seen though the lens of the everyday, mixed media installation works
Mixed media installation works
Link to documentation video

Extractions III: CoLab (2025)

A collaborative fieldwork and exhibition project.

The third installment in Obrestad/Dølheim´s Extractions series, CoLab brings together artists, researchers, and local participants for an immersive investigation into landscapes under pressure from extraction, industrial transformation, and ecological disruption.

Extractions (2024)

In pursuit of economic gain, both nature and humanity are sacrificed.

Through installations that intertwine natural materials, industrial elements, and visual symbolism, Extractions invites viewers into the complex narrative of both loss and resistance. Roots mounted in steel frames, copper flowers on wood, and fragments of forest ecosystems are transformed into symbols of connection and separation, resilience and vulnerability. Each work is meant as a layered conversation, where opposing ideas and emotions exist side by side, resisting the simplifications of language.

What happens to our collective values when what cannot be sold is deemed worthless? And what do we lose when nature is no longer seen as a living world but as a depleted bank of resources? In Extractions, we look at the consequences of a culture that undermines the essence of what it means to be human, our bond to the earth, to each other, and to a shared future.