Anna von hausswolff stockholm
A few years ago, the artist was rumoured to have said that she had produced her last exhibition.
Anna von Hausswolff releases epic new track The Truth, The Glow, The Fall
She was done. Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff has also been invited to make a personal selection of works from the Moderna Museet collection. In the early s, a new generation of young photographers emerged who worked with and developed what is called photo-based art. The period is well documented and has been described in a range of articles and books about Swedish art history.
Postmodern art became the object of heated theoretical and philosophical debate, inspired by French poststructuralism.
Two institutions that played a pivotal role in this were the programmes in photography at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm and the School of Photography in Gothenburg. Under the direction of Hans Hedberg, head of the Academy of Photography at Konstfack between and , the educational programme was revised to make it more theoretical, including elements of philosophy and art theory.
Tuija Lindström and Hans Hedberg had both studied at Konstfack. Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff moved to Stockholm in to start attending Konstfack. Born in as Annika Söderholm, she grew up in Gothenburg with her parents in the district of Stampen. As a teenager she came into contact with the photographer Tom Benson, who was a pioneer when it came to working with staged photography and montage.
She subsequently majored in photography at Sven Wingquist High School. She also has a background in music and the cultural circles around the record label Radium One of them was the singer and actor Freddie Wadling and for a few years von Hausswolff was a member of and singer in the punk band Cortex. The encounters with artists and musicians and the DIY attitude that von Hausswolff took with her from the punk scene were crucial in her decision to enrol in art school.
She was accepted into Konstfack and studied there for three years until The students at the Academy of Photography had a clear need to push further. Their photographs left the walls and several of them experimented with making sculptures and installations.
Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff
Looking back and summarizing this period, it becomes clear just how crucial and strategic these choices were not just for her personally but for the entire general discussion and direction of art photography. From the s onwards, Swedish photography underwent dramatic changes. In the early s a group of photographers formed around the legendary photographer Christer Strömholm, gravitating towards a more poetic, private, and dramatic aesthetic — towards art.
Fotograficentrum Centre of Photography at Sankt Paulsgatan 3 in Stockholm became a gathering place for photographers and photo enthusiasts, and some of the aforementioned photographers had exhibitions there. In the gallery changed its name to Galleri Index and a few years later, in , liberated itself completely from its origins and instead became Index — The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.
When, after a while, she lost control over the context in which the images were shown, she chose to withdraw the work, and it no longer exists today.
On Photography in a World of Images
Contemporary Swedish Photography , which was presented in at Moderna Museet. In the s, von Hausswolff had several gallery shows in Sweden and abroad and she became a prominent and evident part of the Swedish and Nordic art scenes. In the series, von Hausswolff staged victims, in the form of raped and murdered women. Bodies lie naked on the roadside, in bushes, or a forest glade — in nature.
The images are very disturbing and reminiscent of crime scene documentation by the police, newspaper images, and crime films. Her method of recreating crimes and presenting them in large format was very timely, yet the brutal contents shocked many who saw the subject matter for the first time. In the early s, Swedish society had not yet been flooded with the explosion of crime fiction and crime novels we experienced in recent years.
However, photo and film history are full of images of crime, violence, and war. At the time, the title of the series and the tableau-like staging gave rise to comparisons with Nordic landscape painting from the turn of the previous century. Once again, we see a lifeless prostrate woman, this time on a beach, with a German shepherd waiting by her side — the depiction of a crime that will never be investigated or solved.
The image is pale and matt, which is amplified by the fact that the large chromogenic print, type C, is covered with a dense laminate. The dog recurs in several of her works and represents some sort of security, a witness, who sees but cannot tell.