Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff is one of Sweden's most influential photographers. Since rising to prominence in the 1990s, she has exhibited her subtle yet powerful feminist photography on an international scale, including at the Swedish Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999.
Read MoreVon Hausswolff was born in Gothenburg, Sweden. Growing up, she became very interested in Nordisk kriminalkrönika, a Swedish crime magazine, which inspired her later practice. Beyond the visual arts, she also spent time as a punk rock singer in the late 1980s, before turning her focus to photography and creating her now iconic images in the early 1990s.
Von Hausswolff has undertaken ample study of her craft as a student at the Sven Winquists School of Photography, Gothenburg, at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts between 1987 and 1996. She continues this academic engagement today as a professor of photography at the University of Gothenburg, alongside her active artistic practice.
Annika Elisabeth von Hauswolff's photography principally features carefully staged photographs investigating patriarchy, capitalism, criminology, and the subconscious. Crime photography has been an important inspiration; her 1992–1993 series 'Back to Nature', for example, features female corpses in beautiful landscapes, creating imagery at once unnerving and idyllic. By combining Nordic landscapes with crime scene aesthetics, von Hausswolff subverts the traditional image of women in art, making the viewer into a voyeur to the continual violence and vulnerability women often face.
Her artwork rarely permits the viewer to meet the eye of their subject. In Alone with Bubble (1995), the artist's portrait is covered by a large bubble of chewing gum. Von Hausswolff returned to this theme in 1997 with the series 'Attempting to Deal with Time and Space', in which similarly translucent balloons cover the artist's face and body.
Although von Hausswolff continues to explore themes of the human psyche, her later works have evolved beyond analogue photography. Her method of choice has moved from the film camera to more experimental techniques such as UV-printing on acrylic glass, screen printing on enamel, metal printing on aluminium, and even painting on photographic prints. Rather than staging her haunting or striking images, she reworks found archival photographs.
Von Hausswolff has been awarded the Swedish Arts Grants Committee Ten Year Grant (2002), The City of Stockholm Artist Grant (2001), and the Edstrand Foundation Art Prize (1998).
She has been an artist-in-residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Stockholm (2001); Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Helsinki (1999); and at the Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco (1997).
The artist's solo exhibitions include Alternative Secrecy, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2021) and Moderna Museet Malmö (2022); Grand Theory Hotel, Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg and Swedish Institute, Paris (2016); Time Out Photography and About, Helsinki Contemporary (2013); Annika von Hausswolff – It All Ends With a New Beginning, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2013); The Black Box is Orange, La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Murcia, Spain (2010); and Room for increased consciousness of the parallel day, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2003).
Group exhibitions include Working on it, Helsinki Contemporary (2020); Nouvelle génération, FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkirk (2014); Malmö Konstmuseum@Malmö Konsthall, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2014); Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007); Whisper Not!, Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam (2006); and Near and Elsewhere, The Photographers' Gallery, London (1999).
Von Hausswolff's artworks can be found in significant collections in her native Sweden and internationally, including at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Astrup Fearnley Collection, Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Fonds national d'art contemporain, Paris; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
