Annika Hausswolff von
The Legacy of Beige
The Legacy of Beige, 2002
C-print, 128 x 100 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur
2002-007-001
b. 1967 (Göteborg, SE), lives and works in Stockholm, SE
Annika von Hausswolff’s photographs explore ambiguous situations. Shot with a bright flash in crime-scene colours, they show, for example, a group of women in a night-time setting, turned away from the camera, busy with something unknown that is encroaching on them from outside or within. She followed these luridly coloured nocturnal scenes with a series of enigmatic, almost surreal interior scenarios. Bearing titles such as “Everything is connected, he, he, he”, “The petrified couple”, “Now you see it, now you don’t”; they show, respectively, a woman sucking her thumb, a couple lying stock still on one another, Mom-and-Dad-like mannequins balancing to form a cross that places the primary sexual organs at the centre of the image while covering them up modestly, in a twee, almost doll-like way. These dreamy, unsettling, sometimes menacing situations together tell of a life that seems to be slipping and flowing away.