Profiles

Ane Hjort Guttu (1971, Norway) is a filmmaker, visual artist and curator based in Oslo. She works in a variety of media, but has in recent years mainly concentrated on film and video works, ranging from investigative documentary to poetic fiction and exploring issues of power and freedom in the Scandinavian post-welfare state. Among recurrent themes are the relationship between freedom and power, the economy and public space, social change and the limits of action. Guttu is also a writer and curator and a professor at the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo. An anthology of her written works was published in 2018 and another book is forthcoming.

Ane Hjort Guttu’s film Manifesto (2020) will be shown at CAST in 2026. The film speculates on the aims and purposes of institutional art education. Newly migrated into a university and an open-plan campus building, an art school feels cornered by a suffocating culture of surveillance and administration. Staff and students find ways to subvert control through secret operations. Drawing on her own experiences as an art teacher, Ane Hjort Guttu explores what is lost when creativity is replaced by order and provides action plans for how to be the playful rebel.

Manifesto (2020), Ane Hjort Guttu, courtesy the artist