Anna Ekman lives in Stockholm and is educated at Malmö Art Academy. Her photographic world of images consists of precisely composed scenes with reminiscences of ancient myths. The lighting, known from the chiaroscuro paintings of the seventeenth century, outlines the forms in a dark room. The photographic series The black pond, which is previously exhibited at Kiasma in Helsinki, is based on the myth of Narcissus who fell in obsessed love with his own reflection. Five color photographs depicts his face that oscillate between stillness and dissolution in the moving water. Like many of the other works Anna Ekman shows it is in a border zone between the physical and the mysterious

The Spanish Baroque poet Calderón described life as a dream. Dreams also appear to be profoundly significant – but coded. The meaning is always other than that which is obvious one. Anna Ekman employs the most reality-bound of all imagery techniques, analogue photography, in order to demonstrate the dream likeness of life.
Gertrud Sandqvist