Biography
Mathilde Jansen graduated from the Royal Academy, The Hague (KABK) in 2006, following which she undertook several residencies and exhibited her photography internationally, as well as carrying out commissions for the media as well as for companies and organizations. Dar es Salaam has been a second home and source of inspiration. In 2016 she completed the postgraduate studies Education in Arts (Beroepskunstenaar in de Klas) at the Amsterdam School of the Arts.
Her primarily photographic practice seeks the universal value of natural resources and minerals as a means of tracing the complex relationship between people and the global economy. She aims to create new perspectives from which to examine social structures and the connections between the local and global, which, for Jansen, form the basis of human attitudes, social positioning and intercultural communication. In her practice Jansen consciously interweaves market-driven ways of thinking with an integrated holistic vision of nature, teasing out the borders between the two. Using experiments in analogue photography, incorporating awe-inspiring constructions on location and manipulating medium format negatives, she creates a dynamic interplay between subject matter and representation, navigating areas as diverse and all encompassing as nature and ecology, spirit and community.
Jansen envisions the mind as a psychological force shaping the outlines of physical dimensions. Her current project represents this interplay and interaction between modernization, wilderness and consciousness.–
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Jansen creates an interrelation between documentary photography and contemporary art. Over the past few years her projects have delved more into the psychology of individual and collective life stories in relation to organic structures. Mathilde increasingly situates her work on the borderline between poetry and art.
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“The experience was an exciting one for me. It illustrated that writing was about risk – about risking everything. And that the value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences. If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality.”
– Ryszard Kapuściński
