Museum of Contemporary Art – Ludwig Museum Budapest
Project Room
Miriam Bäckström (Stockholm)
22 June – 25 July 1999
Opening: Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 6 p.m.
Miriam Bäckström photographs empty spaces. She records sites where no human being or any other living creature appears.
In her first series, she photographed empty flats whose owners have recently passed away (Estate of a Deceased Person, 1992–94). Bäckström documented the situation in front of her eyes without a sense of sentimentality. At times the “warmth” of the late person is almost palpable in the recorded flat, as if the person in question had left home for just a few minutes. In other cases, we can see that somebody has already been to the emptied living space, as in some locations the furniture has already disappeared from the flat. A mysterious emptiness permeates the photographs.
We can feel the same emptiness when viewing the series of film locations (Set Constructions, 1995–99). Their coldness derives from a different source that that of her previous ones. Although no long before Bäckström’s shot was taken, people moved in the space, they merely imitated real life. The “true-to-life” pictures of bars, streets and sitting-rooms are of non-existent living spaces. The artist takes her pictures exactly from the same position as the camera of the previously recorded film. In her composition, however, she also includes a detail that does not figure in the film: the perimeter of the set where the set-construction ends and its supports are visible.
In pronounced sections of Miriam Bäckström’s photographs, seemingly authentic spaces are recorded. And they are reality, as the world created by a person is the flat of a deceased person; but at the moment of exposure, it is already an empty, negative living space. The scenography pictures duplicate reality, as the director establishes fictive spaces based upon people’s common experiential material. It is not by chance that one of Bäckström’s photographs depicting an empty flat has been employed in the creation of a film set.
The viewer can cast a glance into these empty spaces, whose mystery only increases by means of their imagined stories.
Miriam Bäckström studied art history and subsequently photography at the Stockholm Academy of Applied Arts (Konstfack). She lives in Stockholm.
This April, her newest series of photographs, taken in Swedish ethnographic-type museums, was presented at the Moderna Museet Projekt in Stockholm.
She is currently featured in the Apertutti exhibition of the Venice Biennale with the same series, Estate of a Deceased Person and Set Constructions
While the exhibition is on view, a catalogue in Hungarian and English, including a text by Maria Lind (Stockholm), will be published.
