Sandra Vaka
Still Thirsty
23 May - 15 June 2025
Opening 23.05 18-21:00
Mikey Laundry Art Garden MLAG
Halfdan Kjerulfsgate 4, 5017, Bergen.
Opening Hours: 1-4 pm Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment
www.mikeylaundryartgarden.com
IG:@mikeylaundryartgarden2
Contact: 95477184
Sandra Vaka (b. 1980, Stavanger) lives and works in Stavanger after many years as an active artist in Berlin and Copenhagen. She was educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO), and holds a Master’s degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Sandra Vaka has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and her works are included in numerous private and public collections, including Stavanger Art Museum, KORO – Public Art Norway, Danish Arts Foundation, NOCO – Nordic Contemporary Art Collection (Sweden), the art collections of the municipalities of Trondheim, Stavanger, and Sandnes, among others. She is currently working on a public art commission for Teglverket Kindergarten, commissioned by the City of Oslo’s Department of Culture, and another for Lervigskvartalet, commissioned by Stavanger Municipality.
For the past fifteen years, Sandra Vaka has created works that, in various ways, shed light on the conditions and expectations of living in a world saturated with products and technology. Her serial works point to desire, consumption, and pleasure—hallmarks of today’s consumer society. Her practice blends humor and seriousness in a deliberately dual approach. Sandra explores everyday objects we hold close to the body, such as towels, straws, and computer screens.
Vaka joins MLAG’s 2025 thematic focus ‘Heavy in Love’ which looks to our toxic relationship to earth, consumption and society. The artist explores how the seemingly trivial plastic object—the drinking straw—has shifted in symbolism: from representing celebration, euphoria, and innocent childhood, to becoming an icon of overconsumption and man-made environmental destruction. She highlights the straw as a cultural battleground—both banned and defended, mocked and celebrated—using it as an entry point to reflect on contemporary complexities around the body, consumption, and nature. By elevating the straw through repetition, scaling, and aesthetic manipulation, she reveals the dual nature of the consumer item: at once temporary and constant, excessive and essential.
The works also invite associations with the body’s nutrient absorption, the circular cycles of nature, the modern human’s involuntary daily intake of microplastics, the visual overflow of circulating images, material recycling, and the paradox of consumables as both fleeting and eternally present in an endless cycle of use and discard.
Sandra Vaka’s somewhat humorous, oversized straw sculptures in Still Thirsty are made from heat-formed acrylic glass mounted into naturally shaped granite stones, unearthed from her mom’s place in Bjoa, and used as pedestals. As a monument to the act of drawing in all one can from life—and to humanity’s unquenchable desire to consume—the mutated straws rest upon rocks formed long ago in our lithic history – the Caledonian period roughly 490–390 million years ago.
The sculpture series has also been exhibited outdoors, including at Stavanger Kunsthall and Bergenhus Fortress, under the title Thirsty. In these settings, the sculptures emerged from the ground, collecting rainwater and incidental debris, slowly brewing a natural cocktail—like remnants of a party. For the party may be over, but we are still thirsty.
Also check out other Arts events in Bergen, Fine Arts events in Bergen, Parties in Bergen.
