Southnord is proud to announce Viola Nimuhamya as the winner of the UP NEXT 2025 open call.

Viola is a Ugandan-born artist based in Bergen, Norway, who recently completed her Master of Fine Art at the University of Bergen. Her practice centers on storytelling as a way of processing personal and collective memory, using installation, fiber art and sculpture, to create works that are both tactile and emotionally resonant.

Guided by a process-based approach, Viola sees creating as a form of narrative in itself, where materials hold memory and gesture becomes language. She often incorporates upcycled textiles into her work, weaving sustainability into her material language. Viola draws inspiration from her own life, cultural background, and the intimate details of the world around her. She blends lived experiences with imagination to explore themes of identity, rest, and presence.

Her exhibition One at a Time unfolds slowly. Like the act that shaped it, it considers rest as an active, embodied state, something that lives within rhythm, repetition, and the quiet insistence of process. Using weaving as both structure and language, the work resists pressure, speed, and overproduction, valuing rhythm over result. It is how rest moves. How things come together.