Katja Frederiksen is a Norwegian stage and costume designer, based in Oslo.
Education:
Costume design from The National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. (BA)
Stage design from the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. (BA)
Works:
She has been working as a costume designer in Norway, Sweden, Belgium and France, doing freelance work for institutional theatres and theatre companies.
Her latest stage design was for the performance “The beginning of a new end” for the Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern in Stockholm in 2010.
The project was created through improvisation and research on the theme of the freelance situation of artists today, and particularly in the theatre. The skills needed for making a career as an artist are those of flexibility, business sense and efficiency more than the artistic skills themselves or the crafts involved. Social intelligence is the most important tool in building your business as an artist. How does this form us as artists, as persons? How does it affect our work and the art of today?
She created also in 2010 together with costume designer Bente Rolandsdotter, “The Third Island” a site specific, installation work researching the meaning of the craftsmanship of a set designer. The installation focused on creating a narrative space without actors or manuscript; it was assembled in a 10 metre by 10 metre space from disposable elements, second hand clothes and throwaway paper plates, building caves and surfaces into an underwater world of strange plants and corals. A magical environment in which the spectator drifted between the fulfillment of a fantasy and the revelation of the simplicity of the materials used.
In 2005 she worked with Robert Wilson on his “Peer Gynt”, at Det Norske teatret, in Oslo, and as a drawing assistant for his exhibition of Les Fables at the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris.
Her work resonates on the theatre stage as well as in more unconventional spaces, moving as it does from the traditional theatre to installation art with ease. Her present work continues this dialogue between the sculptural and the theatrical, between the event and the narrative.
