My mother didn’t know that I had…
I didn’t know that I had…
My sister didn’t know that I had…
I didn’t know that they had…
They didn’t know that they had…
I didn’t know that you had…
You didn’t know that they had…
Leena Holmström’s exhibition At the kitchen table in Photo North – Northern Photography Centre’s foyer gallery is about silence. The exhibition consists of performative, staged self-portraits in which the artist describes the memories and traumas of the body and the mind that emerged after the death of her father: memories of humiliation and oppressive atmosphere. Holmström has captured the invisible emotional memories through constructed photography using staging and digital image processing techniques.
The exhibition features a series of eight works from 2022 and 2023 named At the kitchen table. They focus on different psychophysical spaces with conflicting emotions drawn from memories of childhood, of things that happened around the kitchen table. In Stroker (2022), a person lost in life irons a red thread into her hair. Internal roles and beliefs perpetuate negative emotional experiences, as in Pseudohelper (2022), where the individual is simply unable to help herself.
Leena Holmström
At the kitchen table
Photo North – Northern Photography Centre, foyer gallery
10.2.–7.4.2024