Henriette Blakstad, Artistic and Managing Director, HenBlakstad (Skien / Oslo / Nesodden), Norway
What do I explore as an interdisciplinary artist? What gives me momentum? What do I seek to understand?
Henriette Blakstad / HenBlakstad — visual artist, avant-garde theatre, dance, performance, and costume design. Henriette works at the intersection of performance, puppet theatre, installation, and virtual technology. Her artistic practice is rooted in queer contemporary abstraction — a lesbian, feminist, and erotic expression that challenges norms of gender, identity, and representation. She seeks new languages where emotion and relation are expressed through form, rhythm, texture, movement, and voice rather than through realistic narratives.
The loss of a child profoundly shapes her artistic work. She explores transformation, grief, and intuition as creative forces, as well as the experience of being larger than oneself in the aftermath of loss. Her work revolves around catharsis, embodiment, and transformation — where loss, as a shadow figure, takes shape as a recurring echo across different artistic formats.
After completing her education in acting, dance, and educator (postgraduate certificate in performative pedagogy) at The Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) and Kristiania University College, she undertook her most formative training in The Viewpoints (New York, Anne Bogart / Mary Overlie, 2010–2016), focusing on composition in relation to space, architecture, dramaturgy, text, visuality, and movement. In addition, she has studied at the University of Oslo, Department of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, specializing in Gender Research and Feminist Thought in a Historical Perspective (2024).
Her artistic practice is grounded in a deep understanding of materials and textures, with textiles, sewing, and costume design as recurring core elements. Through HenBlakstad, she currently develops concepts using plaster, latex, casting, and textiles, exploring body, form, and material as carriers of meaning and emotional depth.
In her long-term collaboration with visual artist Guri Guri Henriksen, she has developed visual and performative works centered on paper, papercuts, and light. This collaboration has resulted in numerous workshops at the National Museum of Norway and the performance The Bird Ladies (SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen, 2022), curated by Heidi Hart, Ph.D. (DK/US). The work addresses climate thanatology — climate grief — through an interdisciplinary dialogue between visual art and the academia exemplifying her explorative approach at the intersection of artistic and academic fields.
Her concepts often contain ambiguity; she investigates what she does not yet fully understand. This reflects her ongoing collaboration with Merete Morken Andersen, Associate Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), and H. Blakstad, Associate Professor in Performing Arts (Artistic Research). Together, they explore bodily and non-verbal approaches to creative processes — an unconscious, intuitive language in which the answer emerges before the question.
Through her artistic practice, she continues to develop a personal formal language in which emotion and relation are expressed through form, rhythm, texture, movement, and voice rather than through realistic narratives.
Through HenBlakstad Productions, established in 2009, she has created works presented in Norway, China, Singapore, Denmark, and Taiwan, collaborating with a wide range of national and international companies and artists.
As a performer and educator Henriette Blakstad has a long-standing collaboration with the National Museum of Norway, Grusomhetens Teater, Studium Actoris, visual artist Guri Guri Henriksen, Teater Corpus and Merete Morken Andersen (USN), and has toured extensively in Norway, the UK, India, Iran, Japan, and Denmark.
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