Mads Nissen to make the Peace Prize Exhibition 2016

The award winning Danish photographer Mads Nissen will, together with the Nobel Peace Center, create the Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition 2016 about Juan Manuel Santos and Colombia. The Peace Prize laureate will open the exhibition in Oslo on 11 December.

Friday 7^th of October it was announced that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2016. As soon as the announcement was made, the team at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo started their work with the Peace Price Exhibition 2016, which will be opened by the laureate himself on the 11^th of December. The award winning Danish photographer Mads Nissen is the photographer for this year’s exhibition. He will travel to Colombia in the coming weeks to photograph the President and the people in a country that has been ridden with civil war for half a century. For Mads Nissen, this task has a personal dimension:

-South America has had a special place in my heart ever since I lived in Venezuela as a teenager. I was by the culture, but also deeply by the social injustice and the violence my friends there could not escape, he says.

- It was here I realized the unique power a photograph has to document important stories, but also to create intimacy and empathy. And that will be my mission here. For some people, Colombia and peace in Colombia can seem far away. My mission will be to bring it close. Past the eye and into peoples’ hearts.

Mads Nissen (born 1979) lives in Denmark where he works as photographer for the daily newspaper Politiken. He is an experienced photographer of international format and has received more than fifty prizes for his work. In 2015, he won the World press Photo’s title Best Press Photo of the Year, with a photo of a gay couple in Russia.

He has worked with projects in Colombia before, and he has made the photo series No Shelter from Fear, which is about the country’s five million internally displaced. http://www.madsnissen.com/no-shelter-from-fear-idp-in-colombia/

-We are proud and happy to have Mads Nissen on board as our exhibition photographer, says Liv Tørres, Executive Director at the Nobel Peace Center. – As a photographer, he has shown an exceptional ability to get close to people. His strong, visual profile, combined with his knowledge of Colombia, will give the Peace Prize Exhibition a unique strength.

Mads Nissen will be available for interviews with the press at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo on Monday 17 October from 13:00 to 14:00. For interview, please contact Ingvill Bryn Rambøl on + 47 924 52 944 / ibr@nobelpeaceprize.org.

For more information about Mads Nissen, see his biography (enclosed) or his http://www.madsnissen.com/

About the Peace Prize exhibition:

The making of the official Nobel Peace Prize exhibition is an annual occurrence that spans a mere two months, from the Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee announces the new Peace Prize laureate, to the exhibition is opened by the laureate in December. This is the twelth consecutive Nobel Peace Prize exhibition.