Artist in Residence, Stockholm, 1 September–14 November 2025

Alisa Oleva is a walking artist based in London. She works in the city’s spaces and streets, exploring the politics of public space and how the city moves — and how we move it — through urban choreography and urban archaeology. Her practice engages with traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Projects have taken the form of one-to-one and collective performances, walking scores, intimate encounters, gatherings, parkour sessions, walkshops, soundwalks, and audiowalks.

Photo: Christa Holka

Alisa Oleva

During her IASPIS residency, she will continue her work around walking and home-finding, exploring how people with experience of migration connect to new places through their everyday walks. What places in the city make one feel at home? What places from other homes do we carry with us when we are elsewhere? What new desire lines do we trace as we walk in search of connection to the land? In Stockholm, she will use walking as her primary medium to explore residential areas and social housing, especially on the city’s outskirts. Having grown up in a “sleeping district” at the last stop on a metro line, she is particularly interested in the city’s edges and in walking that happens in the margins.

Alisa holds a BA and an MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently undertaking a fully funded, practice-based PhD on walking in performance art at the University of East London. She has worked with institutions and festivals including LADA, RIBA, and ICA (London); Compass Festival (Leeds); Izolyastia (Mariupol); Artsvit (Dnipro); Performistanbul (Istanbul); Q-O2 (Brussels); CONA (Ljubljana); and Work Hard Play Hard (Minsk). In 2023, she received an international bursary from Another Route and is currently leading monthly art walks in East London commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD. She is part of WHW Academy 2025, Remember Freedom, and is an artist-in-residence at Nida Art Colony this year.

Website – www.alisaoleva.com

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/alisaoleva/