“Astrid Jahnsen’s works ask us to reconsider the visual culture of everyday life and to locate the alternative stories therein. The stories, or the pictures, are not just merely about the overlooked, they are elegant and nuanced in their own right.”

Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography; Interim Head, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museum

“This kink in the order could well reveal itself to be of major theoretical importance. Its discreet singularity distances us from the world of women imprisoned by pornographic staging. But what does it bring us closer to? Astrid Jahnsen resorts to various formal techniques – cropping, degrees of focus and blur, the minute attention paid to the margins or broader contexts of the specifically pornographic, snatches of text, differences in grain, photographic materials – to introduce, into this iconography of the perverse contract, the critical dimension of a breakout space (non-figurative, consequently: neither narrative nor iconographic).”

Didi-Huberman,G.(2022). On “Decaptivating” Images. In Jahnsen, A. (2022). On your Knees (pp.25-28) ed. by Franziska Kunze, exh.-cat. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich 2022..

“ I was extremely taken with her work series "On Your Knees" because it is so multi- layered. Astrid Jahnsen works with found footage, in this case with a volume of handcrafted pornographic booklets from the 1950s, with glued-in images she photographed as close-ups. She focuses on touches and gazes and develops a new narrative with her camera view. She also exposes passages of text from the booklets, hence the title of the series. The out-of-focus moments of the close-ups resonate with a strong media reflection, and she also intelligently expands the feminist discourse.”

Franziska Kunze Chief Curator of Photography and Time-based Media, Pinakothek Der Moderne, On Photonews Magazine, Edition April 2021.

“(…) Only a while later, once Jahnsen began to work on “On your Knees”, “The Lost Gaze” and “Backdrop”, would I begin to understand the meaning of this device as the creation of a metaphor: what the device does is to reveal the weft of which the image is physically made (the grain , the matrix of dots). In doing so- if one reads the idea of revealing the weft as referring to the conceptual plane - it unveils the ideological weft of which the image is a part. In doing so, Jahnsen finds a powerful tool for a critical re-signification of the images.”

Carlo Trivelli, Independent Curator of Photography. On FOT Magazine, 8th Edition November 2022.