With Our Backs to Time

Nygårds Karin Bengtsson has drawn attention for her paintinglike and staged photographs of human beings in austere, almost bare rooms and desolate landscapes. Staging as a method of working with photography is for her a means of making a moment more intense; to rather capture the experience of what has happened than the happening itself. Her working process can be more likened to that of a theater or film director's; she begins with an empty scene and carefully builds her motif. The finished photographs, however, are more reminiscent of a painting. This is also where she finds her greatest inspiration, especially from turn-of-the-century Nordic painting by painters such as Hammershøi, Munch, Bergh and Gallen-Kallela. A lonely person in a room or a landscape characterizes her photographic work and bring the viewer to melancholy rooms and secluded places. The everyday is mixed with the solemn in a drama of silence, in which the drama itself take place in the viewer's reflection on the image. Nygårds Karin Bengtsson's concern is life’s gradual transition from present time to memory: What remain of all the ones that we have met, of all the places we have visited and all the stories we have amassed? What remain of the time we have turned our backs to? Nygårds Karin's work is a lifelong ongoing project about passed time.