- Jan 14
- 2 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
ARCHIVO LAB | Visual Artist 2026
MAJA DANIELS
Sweden
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Maja Daniels is a photography-based artist and filmmaker. Her work includes sociological methodology, sound, moving image and archive materials, aiming to further explore each medium’s narrative and performative functions. Her work has been exhibited and published world-wide, she is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships and is a senior lecturer in film at Gothenburg University (HDK-Valand). Maja’s first book 'Elf Dalia' (MACK, 2019) received international acclaim. It was nominated for the Aperture-Paris Photo First book Award 2019 and won the Swedish Photo Book of the Year Award 2020. Maja's second book 'Gertrud' (VOID) was published in 2024. It was nominated for the Swedish Photo Book of the Year Award 2025 and is currently touring as an exhibition including installation works, film and still photography. Daniels’ made her first short film My other Half in 2015. Her most recent short Her Little Reds premiered in 2025.
LAB PROJECT
ARCHIVES AND DEADWOOD
ATTEMPTS TO LISTEN TO THE LIVING DEAD
Dead trees have become an important symbol within environmental activist movements in their fight against the forestry industry.
A dead tree represents a loss in monetary value, yet, they become “nurse logs” for their surroundings, creating ideal environments for new life to grow. Deadwood is thus a sort of living dead within the forest, a vital part of a system relying on its decay. It has also become important within inventory activities since it often provides shelter for red listed species that can help protect a forest from being felled. The presence of a dead tree is thus a prerequisite for other life and ushers the question: Can we draw lessons from these providers of live by death as we try to navigate our own shift within the context of history? This project will focus on deadwood as part of the forest’s ecosystem, but also as a symbol, centering parts of the research around a renegotiation of the human through mourning processes, rituals and a queering and recontextualizing of significant archival materials. The project will investigate the role of the image in relation to representational constructions (the visible vs. the invisible, opacity vs. transparency etc.) and their impact on the ways we see, understand and imagine concepts such as time, the future and the archive. If the prospect of future becomes an improbable promise to rely on, how do we un-learn what being human is and what kind of imagery and what kind of time can help us in this process of undoing?
This proposed project will be the third iteration building on two previous works ‘Elf Dalia’ (Mack 2019) and ‘Gertrud’ (Void 2024) (photobooks and touring exhibitions) where I work site-specifically in the community of Älvdalen, Sweden. These works were made using archives and historical documents in combination with my own imagery to investigate how my intervention with, and activation of an archive can evoke questions around representation, language, time and the very notion of history-writing. I engage with archives not from an evidentiary or documentary standpoint. Rather, I am interested in the performative function of the image; an understanding that aims to develop the phenomenological ties and performative potential between historical events and the current political climate.
