Annika von Hausswolf

Annika von Hausswolf is internationally renowned for her photographically based practice and has responded positively to this invitation to experiment within the framework of the new production programme at BAC. Through this opportunity to expand her practice, the artist has begun working with a larger three-dimensional construction.

This new construction is intentionally difficult to fully grasp. It is an irregular structure that creates different rooms within the exhibition space. It is an object that shows its surface, its skin, as a cross-section. It is an open model that will engender new definitions through the interaction between the viewer and work. When having a conversation with Johan Pousette during the development of the new piece, Annika von Hausswolf comments:

"In one way it is still an image. The first impulse for this piece was that I wanted to see the drapes behind glass. I think this has a connection to a photograph that I took in 1999 titled "Now You See It, Now You Don't". The frontally shot image is of a very large window where the light that comes in from behind bleaches out the middle of the image. I consider this photograph to have caused a change of direction for me. In the early stages of my project here at BAC, I thought a lot about how the construction would act as a type of model for the way my photograph works. I wanted to communicate how my images operate on different levels, reflective, a kind of concealment, a becoming, and so on. Yet the more I have thought about it, and now when I have seen the work emerge like this, then I see that it is something else too... I have always talked about this construction as a body. That in turn relates to the piece "The Memory of My Mother's Underwear Transformed into a Flameproof Drape" and its direct reference to my mum and her body. So there is a reality there that I may have tried to ignore but which I believe is not possible to bypass.

The artistic work is both consciously and instinctively made, and I think this corporeality is impossible to get away from. As I now see it, I almost read this sculpture, or whatever it is, as a form of portrait. It is an encounter with a face that can be simultaneously inviting and rejecting, it may act as a mirror and one becomes emotionally struck through this exposure."

Hausswolf continues by referring to the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and his theories about "the potential space" that is about the realm between people, neither subject nor object but something in-between. Without intending to illustrate a specific theory, Annika von Hausswolf's images carry a generous invitation, an opportunity to be engaged with what one encounters.

Annika Von Hausswolf has been invited by the Baltic Art Center Visby to participate in the new programme "Production-in-Residence" during 2004-2005. BAC offers individual artists to support the production of a new piece of work. The projects are long-term and cover the production and the public presentation. They have the individual artistic practice as their starting points and build upon an active dialogue between the artist and the institution. BAC is a risk-taking producer as the invited artists are encouraged to experiment and try something new that has the possibility to develop the future practice and to generate an innovative work to the wider art world.

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Annika von Hausswolf