Bjorn Blakstad
(He/Him)
I am an artist-curator working with archives, collections and the systems through which cultural knowledge is gathered, organised and made available. My practice explores how histories are constructed through acts of keeping and categorisation, and what happens when the structures that contain those histories are made available for reinterpretation, participation and amendment. I am currently exploring the contemporary archival impulse and its relationship to lived experiences and documentation of community action that remain under or un-represented within institutional histories.
My practice began through contemporary fine art, initially painting and illustration, later moving through portraiture, installation, assemblage, photography, dictation and writing. Having been left the contents of a family member’s studio and archive in my 3rd year, I began a focused investigation into speculative identity, fictioning the archive, and the subjective interpretations through which a person might be represented posthumously within curation and archiving. This evolved into a long running exploration into curatorial archival inquiry and artist material accumulation.
I work by constructing frameworks to manage information, document replicable processes and facilitate public engagement with collections and archival actions. I’ve done this through interactive exhibition design, student intervention programming, interview research systems and information architecture led thinking. I am interested in who gets to decide what is collected and preserved, how it is described, what relationships are made visible between materials, and who is able to access and interpret the resulting knowledge. The systems are part of my work, and I often consider them as outcomes in my artistic practice.
I sometimes say that my chosen medium is Excel, A4 paper and Blu Tack.
Alongside completing my BA and continuing into the MLitt in Curatorial Practice, I volunteer with OurStory Scotland, a queer oral histories archive, as a workshop organiser, designer and researcher, I work within GSA Library Services as student technical support, also designing and running workshops, student exhibition programs and book displays, and I sit on the GSA Archives and Collections Advisory Group. Through these roles I continue to engage with and contribute towards: archives, collections and institutional knowledge infrastructures.
Forthcoming
Tricia Blakstad: Perspectives
November 2026 – February 2027
The Arc, Winchester
Queer Mapping and Timeline Workshop, UK AIDS Quilt with OurStory Scotland
September 2026
Tramway, Glasgow
Ballroom of Memory
Ballroom of Memory is a moment of remembrance and an opportunity to locate our individual and collective histories. This immersive, interactive workshop explores exhibition-making and archiving – asking you to use care and vulnerability to connect. In sharing an object, a story or engaging in conversation, this project invites participants to take part in creating a democratic, community-built archive. This project, run by Curatorial Master’s students at GSA, seeks to create a living archive within the timeframe of the workshop which will be subsequently immortalised through an online and physical archive generated by the histories recorded today and throughout our research. This archive will include oral histories and a zine publication including photography of the artefacts brought into the space today as well as the written responses to them.
The ephemera of this transient, experimental workshop will create the basis for a permanent collection which tells the stories of lost and changed spaces in Glasgow.
We invite you to interact throughout this workshop: whether through presenting an object on one of the plinths, or responding to one of the objects you see before you in the guestbooks provided. This workshop is intended to create space for conversation and sharing, whether you feel comfortable sharing in the written form, talking to one another or simply having a drink and observing – please feel welcomed to the ‘Ballroom of Memory’.
Ballroom of Memory is a collaborative project initiated by students from Glasgow School of Art, with contributions from the wider Glasgow public.
With thanks to: GSA Archives, GSA staff, the MLitt Curatorial tutors and our collaborating artists Coire Simpson and Zhongyang Sun
This project was curated in collaboration by: Alex Howey, Bjorn Blakstad, Jem Staples, Ruihan (Sherry) Wang, Hannah-Faith Salmons
Collections of Collections (Vol .1)
Collections of Collections is an artist anthology exploring why and what contemporary artists collect. The project brings together ten artists with ties to the Glasgow School of Art as students, staff and alumni, documenting their collections through in-person interviews, photography and collaborative arrangement. These became (Vol .1): The GSA Edition.
The project emerged from an ongoing artistic, curatorial and archival investigation into collection and accumulation in contemporary art, particularly from the question: “When does a collection become an archive?” The resulting publication takes the form of a C4 manila string-and-washer envelope containing individual interview texts, collection image cards and artist information. It is unbound, allowing its contents to be collected, arranged and re-curated. The publication becomes a collection in its own right, extending the project beyond documenting the artists’ collections and into questions of how information is organised and encountered.
Collections of Collections is also a project about systems. The selection and communication of artists, interviews, photography, editing, indexing, printing, assembly, distribution and audience participation all required systems for managing information at scale. These systems are underpinned by an ethical and curatorial framework of care: considering the objects being collected, and how knowledge is stored, accumulated, shared, accessed and interpreted.
The project launched at The Glad Café on 24 July 2026, featuring a discussion panel with five contributing artists and the curator, alongside a participatory collections table where audiences could select individual pages and build their own publication, extending the collection into a material and social act. The publication was then shown again at the Glasgow School of Art 2026 Postgraduate Degree Show, including a video of the collections table, and transcript of the artist discussion panel in the raw form. This was shown alongside the full publication contents and artifacts contributing to the making of the 120 final editions of Collections of Collections (Vol .1) which is going on to become publicly available online at www.colectionsofcollections.co.uk.
I hope to continue the project into a second edition exploring queer collection and accumulation in 2027.
INDEX 2.0: Text as Form
INDEX 2.0 : Text as form (July 2026) – Glasgow School of Art
By: Blakstad, Bjorn.;Lannigan, April.;Ferguson, Elaine.;Hadril-Selman, Esme.;Kavanagh, Valerie.;Leslie, Hillary.;Lochhead, Andrew.;McAuley, Ross.;McIntyre, Rory.;Murphy, Correy.;Waterton, Frank.
Published 2026
“Curated by April Lannigan and Bjorn Blakstad. From calligraphy to digital typography, woodcut to the printing press, text operates across countless functions and contexts. This exhibition invites viewers to consider text, type and writing not only as tools of communication, but as form, artform and subject in their own right. Bringing together a diverse and flavoursome array of talent from GSA Library Services staff – artists, designers, curators and writers, the show celebrates the creative breadth within the library community. Expect a rich mix of practices that explore language, materiality, and the visual power of the written word.” – April Lannigan
All photographs of the exhibition were taken by Esme Hadril-Selman.
