Denmark

Kajsa Gullberg

Biography

Kajsa Gullberg (b 1977) is a Swedish Copenhagen based artist with photography as main media.

Her production is personally funded with an experience-based process and research

"If you have the resources to use yourself as a mirror, I think you are obligated to do this. To use yourself as a mirror that people can reflect themselves in. I wish my work to be a kaleidoscope or a prism for people to look through. I hope that my production generates new perspectives, angles, thoughts, feelings and questions in people".

She works on topics on human existence and is questioning structures and roles that our (western) culture puts on us. She is interested in shame and representation as a counter tool.

Even though her expression changes between the different series, the work always have her distinct visual language.

In Liminality II, I examine the concept of identity as a unique core in each human being.

The series consists of black and white portraits where only the face is visible to the viewer. It is an exploration of the idea that as life transforms us, as we grow and change, something in us remains constant. Even through profound changes such as marriage, childbirth or illness, we remain ourselves.

Liminality II examines the naked face as a physical statement of identity – a completely unique and highly detailed expression of self.

Social media sometimes has had a bad reputation of making people asocial, artificial and surfaced. That it makes us narrow in our views and isolated in our small bubbles. But it’s always up to yourself on how you use this kind of platforms I think and then I post an image of my leg with a big scratch and an update about my winter depression, an image from a dark forest and an update about creative blocks in my processes.

I am interested and sceptic to the distinction, the separation of the digital and the ”real” world. This project is a celebration of the complexity of life and it is a merge between the digital and the ”real”, between the private and official world.

To make photographs with my phone have given me as a photographer new possibilities and a new visual language. To be social on Facebook has made it easier for me to be social in physical rooms.

The project Unravelled is a personal journey started by the suicide of one off my friends. Confronted with death, life can stand so clearly out. I quit my work, left my husband and family life and started this project/process up. It was a search for who I was now, as an artist, woman and a mother.

Life can sometimes beat you up, it can feel raw and harsh and it is seldom what we expect it to be. It put traces on you. Traces we often are expected to hide. Therefore it is also an attempt to reconquer the non-valuing state of the child. Through our life we are taught to constantly value our self through the eyes of the others, the child look the other way; inside out, without being so self-conscious.

My hope is that viewing these images will leave the viewer with a little bit more forgiveness and love for themselves.

Unravelled was published by Dewi Lewis in 2014. The project also contains images off myself, my daughter and my mother who the book is dedicated to.

The project Liminality started in early 2014 and is developed through an ongoing discussion with a historian of religion (not to be confused with a theologian).

Liminality comes from the Latin word limen which means “a threshold”. In this context it is referring to the middle stage/state of the three parts of the rite of passage. The rite of passage can be divided into the first part: The Separation where the subject is been separated from its old context or identity, the second part: The Liminal Phase where the subject stands on the threshold of something new and the third part: The Incorporations Phase where the subject integrates and settle in its new context or identity.

Liminality is the dynamic, insecure and sometimes dangerous part of a transformation.

During life, we go through many transformations. Some are staged like the baptism and marriage, some are “natural” like contracting a serious disease or falling in love/breaking up. Common with all these transformations is that you can’t return to the state before the transformation and they all contain a time of confusion and irrational behavior.

This project is a study of this state of mind.