Past Residents Helga Härenstram
I’m a photographer/artist from Sweden, now based in Gothenburg where I got a masters degree from the University of Photography in 2008. I work mostly with exhibitions, mainly with photography, but also to some extent with video and installations. I teach at the Art college in Gothenburg and I also work partly as a freelance photographer.
In my works I often take interest in the relations between memory, photography and autobiography and how those subjects interfere with each other and their balance between fiction and reality.
The residency is organised in collaboration with Photographic Gallery Hippolyte
Photography is to me a way of telling and constructing more or less autobiographical stories. My latest project, on which I’m going to continue working during my residency in Helsinki, is a fictitious documentary titled “The society”. In this project I’m looking for and/or constructing environments scenes and events, that are based on memories from the small society where I grew up. The people I photograph in this series are myself, my family and people that I’m close to. I see the work as a puzzle of pictures that deals with the borders between the documentary and the staged, the real and the unreal, the past and the present.