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Installation conceived and created by the artist Hanna Sjöberg, Berlin, based on amateur photographs originating from a private collection. Accompanying texts by Dorothea Bjelfvenstam, Stockholm.

The installation occupies an entire room whose walls are hung with large sketches of period interiors and whose floor carries a faint outline map of the Baltic. Over a hundred photos from the private collection of ‘D’ have been assembled to mark the changing phases of an individual’s life, starting with images of family life around the beginning of the last century and moving through until today, linking up with D’s own digital pictures from visits she made recently to the important places of her childhood and youth.

The installation’s structure is based on a unique and personal set of remembrances but it is also an attempt to recreate a European life that is typical of the past hundred years. One could say that D’s story is representative of that of millions of Europeans in the 20th Century, with people’s experiences of war, of being forced to leave their homes and of having to live as migrants in a new country or region.

The purpose of the exhibition is not to tell D’s life story but to encourage visitors to reflect upon their own experiences. The exhibition room thus becomes a place to meet and discuss, as well as to contemplate.

Since D’s first footsteps were taken in Königsberg, the exhibition’s first showing is in Kaliningrad. But it is intended to be shown in other places associated with D’s life such as Potsdam in Germany and Stockholm in Sweden.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Swedish Institute and forms part of 55 days of Swedish Culture in Kalingrad organized by the Consulate General of Sweden in Kalingrad. It opens on 15 June at the Art Gallery Kaliningrad and runs until 31 August 2007.

Hanna Sjöberg

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