LISEN STIBECK
UNDERTOW
11 MAY - 18 JUNE

in Swedish

It is with great pleasure that we present Lisen Stibeck's first exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition Undertow consists of a series of works where the human hand and not just technology has played a major part in the creation process. Stibeck has consciously sought and chosen the imperfect, and she allows human presence and the certainty of the passage of time to be important factors in the creation of these suggestive and dreamlike photographs.

“Dreams are not sharp, they disappear. You only have fragments left.” And so it is. Throughout our lives, we create, we do and we act and create memories and make an impression - in ourselves and in others. Going down memory lane, looking for emotions, smells, tastes, sounds and images can be both painful and extremely gratifying. But it is also what defines the deeply human, to actually be aware of time and the passage of time. Memories and dreams can seem like other realities, other worlds, and it can be an incredible comfort to be able to move into those places - to be able to rest in them and see what they do with us. Do we see ourselves as someone else in these dreams of the future? And do we become our child-self again when we instead walk back in time, to the domains of memories? Regardless of which direction the mind brings us in Stibeck's pictures, Sören Kierkegaard was right when he said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Stibeck's images give us the opportunity to both.

The special technology that Stibeck has refined over the years is one of her hallmarks. Among other things, she works with the collodion process, which was invented as early as 1851. It is a slow and analog darkroom work, unlike the digital image's search for the perfect, the fast click that can then be edited until we are satisfied with the image's "created image" and the image's created moments ”. Stibeck's work is far from these daily, conscious and highly "created" images of what we want to be reality. She allows the photographed moment to be an untouched sequence of time, which in itself reflects a reality but just as often turns into a magical realism. This is also evident in her Polaroids. Time is of the essence. Time is life.

Lisen Stibeck lives and works in Stockholm. Her perhaps most formative years as a photographer was during her mentorship with Mary Ellen Mark in New York, between 2010 and 2014. Her exhibition Daughters at Fotografiska in Stockholm made her famous also for a wider audience. The exhibition travelled not only in Sweden, but was also shown at, among others, the Alvarez Bravo Centro in Oaxaca, Mexico.