Steidlville

Derived from Miesenberger's private family album the darkly, evocative images of the Sverige/Schweden series create a narrative of epical proportions. Simultaneously sinister and sweet, they disclose and conceal, confront and evade their apparent content: the dreams and nightmares from the memory banks of a childhood. By re-presenting her father’s images of her childhood in Austria and Sweden, Maria Miesenberger transforms these images to another order of speech. The photographed persons are no longer recognized as individuals. They are set afloat as dark hollow shapes in the image. As the detail and nuances are darkened they become trapdoors in the pictorial surface, leaving us alone with our projections and associations. In these innocent looking images of the small nuclear family an inherited memory is hidden but present, the father’s childhood in Austria in the presence of war and genocide is hiding behind the shadows.