“The Archive” (2023-2025), installation including equipment, tools, materials and sketchbook pages from the Tricia Blakstad Archive (TBA), soundscape, acrylic painting on board in salvaged frames, and documents from the artists medical transition

For the GSA 2025 Degree Show, Bjorn Blakstad’s practice centred around the themes of archive, identity, and portraiture, and the intersection between them. Through installation, reflective writing, painting, and performance, his work offers an opportunity to view archival objects, and the curation and display of those objects, as acts of portraiture. Influenced by his own identity, philosophical archival theory, and the social spaces he occupies due to his transness and disability, he seeks to question how our identities can be translated and subjectively perceived by the audiences who interact with the ephemera and documents that we leave behind.

His work centres around intergenerational relationships, both between himself and his grandmother, and between communities and their collected or lost histories. His installations are intended to invite interaction and discomfort in the audience, reflecting the emotional resonance of the process of creating the works that he himself experiences outside of the studio. Bjorn’s academic interests continue with themes of identity, archive, and ownership of identity in posthumous curation, in regard to his own practice and the Tricia Blakstad Archive.

He is currently pursuing a Master at The Glasgow School of Art in Curatorial Practice in Contemporary Art. Within this he is continuing his exploration of archives, objects and identity in the curatorial, developing a practice routed in care and communication. His research practice explores the application of conversation and dictation as a research and development tool, and is working to apply these practices ​to the upcoming exhibition of the Archive in The Arc, Winchester in November 2026.

Bjorn currently expresses his visual affinity through the mediums of installation, collection and curation, and maintains an informal “hobbyist” approach to his painting practice, treating it as a private refuge rather than a practice for public display.