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Susanna Majuri
Nordic water tales
22
January to 5 March 2011
“I
want to show that one can find the fantastic from nearby.
Fiction blends into our life. The imaginary is in fact
actual.”
Stories are a wonderful thing! You can lose yourselves
in them, assume a different form or personality – and yet, in
every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.
Finnish photo artist Susanna Majuri
(*1978) is the storyteller of the North. In her pictures, her
thoughts always return to Iceland, the land of her dreams. The
wondrous island with its glaciers, waterfalls and geysers has
long held her in its thrall. She takes inspiration for her
work from the land of legends, fables, stories and music,
weaving together her impressions to create picture galleries
that tell of her own life and emotions.
Majuri portrays people living not only in Iceland, but
also in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, because to her mind,
there’s a little bit of Iceland in every Nordic country. She
finds the common features of the landscapes just as
captivating as the diversity of tongues spoken in the various
countries. Her works therefore bear titles in different
languages, as a way of opening up various ways of accessing
the images. One might even say that Majuri illustrates stories
as if they were images that form a common language shared by
all the Nordic countries.
Naturally, her pictures are pure fiction, just as
people like to make up stories about their lives. But one
sometimes has the impression of encountering there figures
from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, from Hans
Christian Andersen or Selma Lagerlof.
The
photographs resemble film stills lifted from the movie version
of a fairy tale, or perhaps from a thriller, or a romance
without a happy end. The many associations evoked demonstrate
the enormous narrative potential that hallmarks her work,
which is joined by a finely honed sense of composition and
staging.
In
her photographs set outside the water, Majuri creates
panoramas that convey the state of mind and feelings of her
figures, even though she never shows us their faces. Their
mysterious behaviour seems to lend the landscape a deep
emotional resonance. Water then either adds a protective and
inviting quality, or it can seem to menace the figures or
swallow them up.
For
her latest works, Majuri produced wax fabric printed with
motifs, in widths up to six meters, which she lowers to the
bottom of a swimming pool. Her models dive down into the
water, with Majuri acting as director. In these scenarios
she’s not interested as much in the backdrops as in the secret
stories her girls carry within them. She reveals in her
photographs the whole spectrum of what it means to be a girl,
from sister to girlfriend and then onward to becoming a lover,
usually portraying her figures at the moment they discover
their own bodies. The protagonists always play a dual role –
they are heroines of the story but also the objects of sexual
desire. The models are scantily dressed and often appear
unconscious, or perhaps even dead and drifting. The dark
currents of the sea wash around them, or they are enveloped by
the crystalline transparency of a swimming pool. Water also
becomes a pla ce of danger here, where the protagonists lose
their earthly gravity and are robbed of the air to breathe.
Majuri lets the bodies blur, the surface of the water
dissolving into what looks like myriad brushstrokes. She uses
water as if it were paint, deliberately deploying its
properties of absorption and its metaphorical
dimension.
Majuri condenses all the strange tales, the yearnings
and hidden secrets into pictorial atmospheres that somehow
seem plausible despite all their magical
qualities.
Ultimately, it is the viewers who take on the role of
storyteller here, projecting their own notions and emotions
onto these pictures to bring to life the “tales of the
North”.
Image:
Susanna Majuri
Tuhka (Ash)
2010
C-Print
on Diasec
35.4 x
55.1 in - 90 x 140 cm
Edition
of 6 + 2 AP
Courtesy
of Galerie Adler, Frankfurt
GALERIE ADLER
Hanauer
Landstraße 134
60314
Frankfurt
T +49 69
43053962
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