Abjectified Project (NO)

Åshild Løvvig (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist with a BA in Acting, focused on storytelling and performance art, and an MA in Linguistics, focused on embodied cognition and acting as a possible language learning tool. She is currently the most experienced in Norway on the expression of drag king and masculine drag art. Her work explores fluidity of gender, expression, and meaning, blending academics, cinematic influences, storytelling and the queer arts, utilising these to navigate the intersection of language, identity, theatre and drag. She has been partaking in a small movement of experimental drag in Norway, exploring the abject, where Åshild’s main focus are genres/expressions as draglesque, drag thing, post-humanism, critical takes on the (cis)feminine identity and queer intersectionality. She has also a deep interest in neurodiversity and inclusion of disability in the arts, and how the able-bodied, neurotypical experience dictates concepts like “quality” and “beauty”.

Katinka Steensgaard (she/her) has a background in drama and theatre with a bachelor and master’s degree in applied drama and theatre studies from Oslo Met in Norway. She wrote her master’s thesis about the drag king expression, and aesthetic experiences when exploring masculinity. She has worked as a theatre pedagogue, instructor and as an actor and drag artist. Since 2013 she has been active within the drag field in Norway and been a part of developing the field further. Some project mentions are Open Drag Stage, BOIS Workzone, Oslo Drag Festival and Oslo Dragskole.

She is inspired by underground expressions, such as the club kid tradition and abject theory and practices.

Sofie Bøttger Bratberg (she/her) is a performing artist who works with drag, movement, voice, and text to explore the diversity of gender and sexuality. She is particularly interested in the gender-neutral – whether that means a blend of genders or a genderless vacuum. In the fall of 2025, Sofie will begin her final year of a bachelor’s degree in screenwriting and plans to write her thesis script on the lesbian heritage. She has been working with drag as an art form for seven years, a practice that deeply informs her writing. Creating queer art for children and young audiences is something very close to Sofie’s heart. Together with Katinka Steensgaard and Remi Johansen Hovda, she wrote, directed, and performed in the plays PrinsHen and the Vanishing Colours and PrinsHen and the Curse of the Nidhuggeren during Oslo MiniPride in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Jens Martin (they/them) has worked with several different art media, mostly with drag, dance, and DJing, since 2013. Jens Martin now works freelance as a performance artist and project initiator. They are an educated dancer from KHiO.

They have been focused on creating spaces for queer performance art, and raising awareness, and articulating with words, underrepresented aesthetics in queer tradition through teaching and exemplification. They linked the term “Abject” together with Drag’s term “Filth” in the drag performance seminar “Becoming the Abject” in 2020. Recently, contemporary romantic ideals have increasingly infiltrated their art, while they have shifted focus from production and facilitation to creation and process. Jens Martin wishes to move towards creating art that to the greatest extent possible consists of homemade material and is currently working in a landscape consisting of movement, text, visual media and performative presence.

Peter David Ramthun (he/him) is both a drag artist and a nurse. He has contributed to abject discourse in Norway through initiating the show series “Abjectified” in 2023 and 2024, which is the direct precursor to this collective. Peter has, through his work as a nurse, experienced several professional fields where he has become familiar with bodily functions and fluids, gained insight into how organ failure affects the rest of the body, and how the medical balance of health works. For the past 7 years, he has worked with drag and stage performance, incorporating his knowledge of the body, anatomy, and medicine, and delved into questions about what “beauty” is and the boundary between the aesthetically pleasing and challenging, as well as using the technique of camp, taken from queer drag art.