ABOUT
Maren Dagny Juell (Kristensen) is an artist working with moving image, installation and VR/AR.
Maren was born in Oslo, Norway where she currently has a studio. She received her MA from Chelsea College of Art (London) in 2004. The most recent solo shows have been at Oslo Council Kunstcontainer (2026) Trondheim Center for Electronic Arts (2023), Tenthaus (2021), Atelier Nord Oslo (2019), Trafo Kunsthall (2018), Podium Oslo (2017) and Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst (2018).
Work has been included in group shows at Bergen Center for Electronic Arts (2021), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (2008) and Stavanger Kunstmuseum (2015) amongst others. Moving image works have been screened internationally at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2023/2024), ZKU Berlin, The Australian video Biennial in Melbourne( 2017 and 2019), AMIFF Harstad (2022) and National Museum of Art Norway (2025). She has participated in and made new works for various biennials including; Riga Photography Biennial (2020), Meta.Morf Trondheim international biennale for art and Technology (2022) and Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara Romania (2023).
In 2024 she won the Lumen Prize, Nordic Award. An international award for artists working with technology.
In addition to her art practice, she lectures in the history of video art, teaches courses on fine art practice and tutors students at Einar Granum Kunstfagskole, Oslo.
She also co-ran the artist-run gallery She Will Artspace 2018-2022.
STATEMENT
I work with moving image, installation and VR/AR, examining how technology shapes the way we see, understand and position ourselves in the world. I am interested in images as language and structures of power. I explore this in my narratives; it can be historical and personal – everyday and speculative- but always fictional. There is freedom in fiction.
My work engages with visual languages drawn from entertainment culture, computer games and information videos. These are not neutral forms; they are designed to instruct, guide and capture attention. They tell us how to look, how to act, and what to desire. By working within these formats, I try to shift them slightly by introducing friction and working with my own doubt or ambiguity into systems that otherwise present themselves as seamless and inevitable.
We tend to understand the world through inherited images and narratives. Today, these are increasingly mediated by technological infrastructures that are owned, developed and controlled by a small number of actors.
I am interested in what lies beneath these surfaces. The more I look into the structures behind contemporary image production, the more they seem to return to questions of capital and power to the organisation of labour, attention and time, and to how human bodies and behaviours are measured, predicted and instrumentalised.
My practice often involves working with the same tools, software and visual styles that shape this landscape. Not to reproduce them, that is also difficult on an artist’s budget, but to stay with them long enough to expose their logics. It is difficult to step outside of these systems because they define the visual language of the present. Instead, I try to work from within to reframe and allow other readings and experiences to emerge, often with humour and ambiguity and intended ignorance. Like Byung-Chul Han, I see the child-like naivety as a resistance against optimisation and control. In Psychopolitics, Han says: “In light of compulsive and coercive communication and conformism, idiotism represents a practice of freedom.”
Artists have always engaged with the material and visual conditions of their time. In a moment where technological systems organise perception, behaviour and belief, this is where I choose to position my work inside these structures, but not aligned with them.
A couple of reviews can be read here (some only norwegian):
Multisensorisk Innlerning, Art Scene Trondheim 2023
Art Encounters Biennial 2023 Review: ART REVIEW Against Doomism 2023
Milleniumgenerasjonens baksider, Minerava, review by Oda Victoria Reitan 23/08/2019
Den mørke motivasjonen, Tommy Olsson, Review Klassekampen, 02/05/2018
Ornamentering som overlevelsesstrategi, Nora Joung, Kunstkritikk 24/01/2017