Ann Sofi Sidén: In Passing

Bonniers Konsthall starts off the autumn season with Ann-Sofi Sidén's latest video installation, In Passing (2007), which receives its premier presentation in Sweden. In Passing is an urgent and visually stunning story of a young woman who leaves her newborn baby at a "baby hatch" at a hospital in Berlin.

In Passing is a spatially complex video work in which the viewer is encouraged to move through the installation in order to experience all parts of the narrative. On two monitors and four large projection screens, we follow parallel stories featuring the woman and the child after their separation at the hospital. As in many of her previous works, Ann-Sofi Sidén makes use of surveillance cameras. The black-and-white, documentary-feel images are interspersed with sequences in the style of cinéma vérité. In Sidén's works the viewer is not given an unambiguous image of right or wrong, cause and effect. She has the single narrative and the image split into a number of voices, situations, moments and stories.

In Passing is equally much a calling into question of our human failings in the present moment, and a test of the strength of the bond between children and parents, the vulnerability of the abandoned, and the pain of separation.

Ann-Sofi Sidén has been one of Sweden's most prominent contemporary artists since the mid-nineties. Sidén's art has influenced a young generation of artists with the ability to cut deep into our own time and depict both the human psyche and people at the crossroads, or in passing. As in Warte Mal!(1999), where she portrayed prostitutes in the new Europe, she often sets out from extreme situations, depicting them in an undramatic way.

Ann-Sofi Sidén (b. 1962) has participated in major international group exhibitions, including Manifesta 2 and Carnegie International, as well as the biennales in Sao Paolo, Venice and Berlin. Sidén has held solo shows in Seccession in Vienna, Museé D'Art Modern in Paris and the Hayward Gallery in London. Ann-Sofi Sidén was educated at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she is now Professor of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Stockholm and Berlin.

Ann Sofi Sidén
In Passing