Photograph

Untitled, Spain (2005), digital photograph by Swedish artist Per Hüttner (born in 1967), found its way into the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin after the artist's individual exhibition tundro organised at the museum in 2006. The key element of the display was a series of staged photographs, where Hüttner metaphorically referred to the painful memories related to his father's untimely, tragic death. Conscious processing of such a traumatising experience and mourning was impossible for a then four-year-old child. Many years later a series of untitled photographs was created, taken in various places around the world, during Hüttner's artistic journeys, through which the artist symbolically returns to the experience of loss through the dramatic death of a loved one, by arranging fictional places of memory. Hüttner's project touches upon one of the most sensitive aspects of the human psyche – coping with loss. Contemporary culture shortens and suppresses mourning, marginalises death and affirms life that is abstracted from its experience. Starting with Sigmund Freud, who – with the publication of Mourning and Melancholia – introduced the concept of ‘mourning work’ into psychoanalytic considerations, the notion of working through mourning is required for returning to psychological balance, according to psychologists and psychoanalysts. In his works, Hüttner visualises this complex and difficult process Hüttner's photograph was created at a time, when – according to one of his commentaries – he focused mainly on the sensitivity and fragility of the human body, which at key moments of life experiences extreme emotional and physical states - joy, pleasure, suffering and violence.

Magdalena Lewoc