Tuija Lindström has been a legend in Swedish Photography. She first became known for her sensual studio portraits of pale bodies and faces that seemed to emit their own soft light. In parallel with these portraits, in the 1980s she took carefully composed pictures of landscapes, places and plants. This exhibition is based on these artworks and the line that can be drawn through all of her work: Tuija Lindström as a soothsayer and a morphologist – an artist who studies and works with shapes, an interest that grew increasingly strong in her last 10 years.
Tuija broke away from the documentarian code. Her photography practice came to be about the material, about the presence of the photographic image in the room, about what happens during the compilation of pictures, about the social use of photography, about the female subject, about feminism, about seeing in general.
Lindström was an incredibly form-conscious artist. But her semiotics, her work with shapes and patterns was never a goal in itself. Her shapes are connected to the physical influence on mental states. She thought a great deal about moving in time, about time travel and about gaps of time. Photography offers the promise of such a time gap. It represents a piece of frozen time, but also the dissolution of time. At the end of a person’s life, such a correlation is not a paradox. Life plays out before you; the past arises in the present. This exhibition, 'In Memoriam', is in honor of Tuija Lindström who passed away in December 2017.
Tuija Lindström (1950–2017) was born in Kotka, Finland and lived most of her life in Stockholm. She graduated from Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts & Design in 1984 and was appointed professor in photography at the University of Gothenburg, Academy of Film and Photography, as the first woman in the position, where she came to teach until 2002. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally since the 1980s and are represented in collections including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Finnish Musuem of Photography, Helsinki, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and Houston Art Museum, USA.