Fotografiska, Stockholm, 2021

It is nighttime and I receive a message of great importance from an unknown source. I wake up and write down the following words on a piece of paper: “Like a toad under the winter sun, that’s how you shall live”. (Like a toad)

A message received at night. Loud and clear, with its very own logic. After waking up, it lingers, sometimes long throughout the day. Sometimes as a purely physical sense, a touch still felt on the skin, other times as experiences that in the light of day seem reprehensible, but that the dream left unjudged. It’s not long until we start to dissect and question the levels of truth, and after a few rounds in the control room of the awakened mind, the message and experience are often placed in the curiosity cabinet of dreams. A recurring theme in Lovisa Ringborg’s work is these parallel states of consciousness – how dreams create a new way of seeing and experiencing your surroundings and your body. With photography as a base, she stages painting-like works, where depth and surface work interchangeably.

In the work entitled The Mirage, the floor of the stage is narrow and mostly taken up by decor. The carefully painted landscape is exotic and tempting – the romantically idealized nature appears as a mirage that speak of bygone times and great adventures. But around the edges, real, unconquerable nature has started to take over. The darkness is greater, and the constructed world and the foundation for our understanding, is at risk of being overturned, just like that. The stage where the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, between reality and the force of nature, is taking place, slowly starts to pull back. Where our control becomes a prop, darkness and forces we cannot master stand quietly waiting to take over.

The sculpture group Stray Dogs, specifically created for this exhibition, is made up of a group of animal bodies that render an unsettling presence in the room, and also function as observers. As a mythical creature, dogs mediate between life and death. In Ringborg’s work we meet the dog as a reflection of humankind and her characteristics, as an animal bred to be our companion. At the same time as it represents the essence of faithfulness and loyalty, it seems both vulnerable and frightening when it’s a stray, contextless, and unable to be identified through its owner. Here, dogs symbolise both the wild and the domesticated sides of us.

With her art, Lovisa Ringborg scratches through layers of experiences that can be inherited through generations – not as oral tradition, but as physical and psychological reminders that are often difficult to separate from your own personality. What is the truth? is a question that echoes in several of Ringborg’s works, and she explores the answers via photography, video works, and sculpture, through a peephole that is both created and filtered by personal experiences, memories and dreams, as well as a multitude of art historical references, and research into the human psyche.

Text by Lisa Giomar Hydén, Director of Exhibitions, Fotografiska Stockholm