RESEARCH NETWORK

MAJA DANIELS

Researcher / Visual Artist

HDK-Valand Gothenburg University, Sweden

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A Swedish photography-based artist. My work is influenced by my studies in sociology and can be described as a multi-layered academic and artistic practice that includes sociological methodology, sound, moving image and archive materials, aiming to further explore each medium’s narrative and performative functions. The aim of my practice is to recontextualize historical events and explore counter-hegemonic narratives. I am a senior lecturer in film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My work is grounded in a critical and creative engagement with the politics of aesthetics at its core, looking at societal aspects and frameworks that relate to questions of heredity and identity construction. I am interested in the function of the image; what images do and what they offer to us as individuals as well as a society. However, I have been searching for alternative ways to employ images to comment on contemporary issues. By conjuring up new ways of relating to and looking at the world, my aim is to go beyond that which is initially considered “given” and to engage with the visual in ways that challenge and expand its narrative potential. This, I argue, is necessary both in order to challenge the deep-rooted stereotypical ideas of photographic (still and moving) representations and to try to further understand how deeply images are affecting us today.

In 2019 I published the photobook “Elf Dalia” (Mack), the first iteration of a multidisciplinary project that quickly received international acclaim and expanded into an internationally touring exhibition. In ‘Elf Dalia’, the mystery of the preserved language Elfdalian, a language spoken in my family for hundreds of years, is depicted. Using my own photographs in combination with pictures taken 100 years earlier by the local profile Tenn Lars Persson, a visual dialogue is created that makes the language visible. ‘Elf Dalia’ explores themes of language, history, ritual, mystery and the strangeness of the everyday, navigating the world through photography, sculpture, film and sound. The aim with this body of work has been to enter into conversation with established knowledge (local history, linguistics, sociology) whilst producing a subjective response, tied to heredity and personal experience that shows the multiple, fragmented and slippery, where thoughts relating to resistance, magic and timelessness stand in relation to so called fixed ideas such as archive, history and language. As the very idea of community becomes ever more fluid and complex, this project seeks to engage in a deeper understanding of our place within it and, as I restage the act of looking through the reappropriation of archival images, “Elf Dalia” unsettles the idea of the singular, given and fixed and creates new positions, new ways of relating to the past and thus also to the future which connects to my broader research interests. The exhibition ‘On the Silence of Myth’ (2023) and my second book ‘Gertrud’ (Void, 2024) is a kind of sequel that picks up where ‘Elf Dalia’ left off. In 1667, the 12-year-old girl Gertrud Svensdotter was accused of walking on water in Älvdalen. The event marked the beginning of the Swedish witch trials, a period of mass hysteria and horror. The exhibition ‘On The Silence of Myth’ and the book ‘Gertrud’ bring the history and myth of these events into the present, resurrecting the world in which Gertrud lived on new terms, where the outcome of the events is not yet clear. Here, language gives way to myth and the question of how the communicative and performative functions of the image - both still and moving - can be applied to reflect on both the peculiar role of history in how we see and understand our present, but also how it affects the way we imagine our future. Still locally rooted in Älvdalen - my focus is on history and mythology, this time using the image - still and moving - as a myth-making tool. Myths are open to interpretation but refuse to become completely fixed. The photographic image works in a similar way. The essence of what is expressed in an image lies somewhere in the unseen or in its silent associations. The aim of my practice is to recontextualize historical events and explore counter-hegemonic narratives. Using the image as a starting point, I create work that challenges linear and chronological notions of time and established knowledge in order to push the boundaries of the world as we traditionally see and know it. My work often takes place in the shadows, in what is less visible. Working site-specifically with a focus on local history and with different types of archival materials has become an increasingly important strategy for me to connect the small with the large and draw parallels between the personal and the political. My personal connection to Älvdalen has become an important and recurring piece of the puzzle in my work, and has come to guide my artistic expression over the years. I have also expanded from working primarily with the still image to include moving images (both in installation form and in the cinema room) and to work with various forms of site-specific, sculptural installations.