JANNE TALSTAD

Visual Artist | Norway

Janne Talstad is a Norwegian artist who is mostly working with photography and video. She’s been doing extensive anthropological, photographic and videographic studies in Svalbard, Cambodia, Antarctica, The Falklands Islands, Yugoslavia and the reminiscence of World War II in central Europe. She’s balanced the need of the aesthetic approach of being an artist with the ethical responsibilities of documenting what is at face value through the medium of analogue photography and digital video. She summarizes these mediums and experiences in complex installations where she generates labyrinthine installations of plywood where her videos and photography is reveal within a narrative. Her engagement within the world as a whole, realizing the weakness of individuals in confrontation with totalitarian regimes, inspired her to be the initiator of a program which took the stand for the weakest medium in the Norwegian art world at the moment: the language of the free expression of video.

Since 2015 she has been organizing the initiative Open Video, to encourage Norwegian and international artist to show their videos together as part as a whole. The program has been shown in venues in Oslo and abroad, with the intention of being open to all, revealing video as the most free medium of any.