Maria Barnas lives and works in Bergen and Amsterdam. In both her written and visual work, she attempts to give form to the ineffable and has created objects as alternative communication. She studied at the Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Barnas was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for her first collection of poetry Twee Zonnen (2003) and has since published highly praised collections, including Jaja de oerknal (2013), concentrating on mechanisms of fear. Recently Barnas has developed a series of video essays and word objects like The Poet, a hesitating dry-ice speech-bubble machine, shown at Annet Gelink gallery, Amsterdam in the exhibition The Planet O.