Foreshadowing

About the exhibition:

Foreshadowing by Sanna Håkans is a series of works based on photographs taken in the 1950s in rural Ostrobothnia. The images come from Sanna’s family archive, black-and-white medium-format photographs. Each photograph is cast into a layer of wax and paraffin blended with color pigment, creating a semi-transparent surface that both conceals and reveals.

The works investigate memory as a shifting, material process that changes over time. Sanna looks at how an image from the past is affected by the present. She looks at her grandfather’s old undeveloped negatives, at how time has altered it. The underlying post-war optimism in the original photographs feels like an unsettling dream in relation to the uncertainty of our contemporary moment. Much like the way memory functions, she brings forward details in the images. They are gestures and gazes that the artists wants to rescue from oblivion.