  TWO PIECES OF PAPER: A Thousand Words Say a Picture
A curatorial investigation from Phil Scott, collage artist and educator On the occasion of the symposium: Too Many Chefs? Curating Emotion, Collaboration, and Imagination UKS Young Artists’ Society, Keysers gate 1, 0165 Oslo, Norway 17-18 January 2026 (excerpt from the book) A wide range of multidisciplinary artists were invited to take part in the project, with a simple instruction: each artist was asked to submit two images that, when placed together, create a visual conversation - exploring narrative, juxtaposition, or sequence without the use of text. The openness of the invitation has resulted in a wide spectrum of responses, ranging from instinctive and associative image pairings to deliberately art-historical and reflexive gestures. One such contribution mirrors a seventeenth century self-portrait, collapsing temporal distance into a contemporary visual dialogue that questions how identity is constructed, mediated, and interpreted through images of the self. These varied strategies reflect the elasticity of the brief itself: some images turn inward, others outward; some fracture narrative, while others echo it across centuries. Together, they demonstrate that there is no singular way to construct meaning through images, only multiple and shifting conditions through which meaning may emerge. Featured artists: MARK WALLINGER | NINA FRASER | JAMES DAWE | RAMI MAYMON | GERT MOTMANS | PHIL SCOTT | MAÏTÉ JANE | EVA LAKE | MARIO ZOOTS | ELI CRAVEN | NOELIA MORA SOLVEZ | NICHOLAS LOCKYER | ISABEL REITEMEYER | JOSEBA ESKUBI | NATHANIEL WHITCOMB | JACK FELICE | MARK MULRONEY | SHEZAD DAWOOD | ZEINAB SALEH | SITAARA STODEL | CHRISTOPHER GIDEON | ROBERT VOIGTS | JELLE VAN DEN HEEDE | FERANSIS | DANILO BRANDÃO | SIMON MORETTI | OLIVER KOLDING PALM | JOSEPH CARTWRIGHT | JORGE CHAMORRO |SERGEI SVIATCHENKO | PHILIPPE JUSFORGUES | DEANE HODGSON | MIKAEL SIIRILÄ | BROOKE NEWBERRY | NIKO VARTIAINEN | JOHN WHITLOCK | DENNIS BUSCH | MAX-O-MATIC | MIGHTY JOE CASTRO | BILL NOIR | HENRY WARD | CACO NEVES | NICOLAI HOWALT | RICHARD VERGEZ | SILLA SIMONE | MILLIE BARTLETT | PAOLA DCROZ | ANDREW GRASSIE | | LOLA DUPRE |