ENG
Marie Barthelsson’s work examines the way in which particular events can leave impressions upon a society and how these affect the people who witness these events. Over a long period of time such events create emotional images and fragments. Through an analysis and a presentation of facts sourced from archival material, Barthelsson creates work in order to interact with these histories. Her intricate photographs contain multi-layered meanings, achieved through interventions with the image and extracts from texts. These texts are linked to a police investigation concerning the motives for each event. They are presented as strips of paper pasted directly onto the mat of the photograph. This presentation gives the viewer extra information about the background of the images and allows them to become involved with the event. By pasting the texts directly onto the passe-partout, the space around the image becomes part of the work, the image itself is reduced to a seemingly routine and straightforward investigative document. In creating this juxtaposition between image and text, Barthelsson draws attention to an important issue that we all have at one time or another likely been negatively affected by. The viewer may be surprised by and the reality of her photos are intrusive in a completely different way than we expected.
Barthelsson writes as follows:
This project is based on a real crime from 1964 where a man with robbed his wife of her life by strangulation. After the event, he lowered his wife wrapped in barbed wire into a river. The crime had occurred in the place that I grew up in and was famously dubbed “the barbed wire murder”. I came across the original report by chance and I was captivated by the level of detail provided. After reading the report from beginning to end, I was so fascinated by this family tragedy that I undertook a photographic journey into the past. I followed the investigation by photographing the exact locations mentioned in report, right up to the place where the body wrapped in barbed wire had been submerged in the river. Photographing the landscape became my way of telling the end of a story about a woman, who for a large part of her life had endured abuse.
Excerpt from Galerie Rose Marie´s webpage
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In the midst of misery, small bright spots of humanity still break through. Marie Bathelsson’s series of photographs Protokoll exhibited at Galleri Rose Marie, examines the social phenomenon whereby often the person closest to you is the most harmful. Barthelsson points to the tendency whereby photography hides unpleasant truths. The environments she depicts with the camera are deceptively harmless but do not belong to the category of images that are hung on the wall above the sofa. Least not if you are aware of the dark story attached to these locations.
Excerpt from Konsten.net, Photo Biennial Photography-in-Focus (3 / 3-1 / 4)