In my relationship with the camera, I have developed methods involving visual displacements and the manipulation of shadows to create a visual language characterised by reduction and abstraction. In this respect, analogue photography and the darkroom have been useful, as the opacity or transparency of the negative, when exaggerated, creates the possibility of absence. I find that a camera often captures more information than the human eye can register, and therefore explores the possibility of showing less.” —Martina Hoogland Ivanow
For her second exhibition with the gallery, Martina presents selected images from her new book and edit, Shadow Works, Living the Dream, alongside overexposed photographic material in a site-specific installation. In today’s image-saturated world, photography is often taken for granted, its poetic essence overlooked. This exhibition, also titled Shadow Works, Living the Dream, features framed analog works and a video piece exploring the balance and imbalance of everyday existence.
Between 2016 and 2018, Martina investigated different structures and relationships to fear, questioning how it is met—with aggression or empathy. Her photographs engage in an associative dialogue, examining their connections. A central sound piece complements the exhibition, weaving together themes of reenactment, contemporary narratives, and the irrationalities and absurdities of modern life.
Martina Hoogland Ivanow is an artist working primarily with photography and film, exploring the interplay between filtered light, sound, and image. After an acclaimed early career as an international photographer in New York, Paris, and London, she established her art practice in Stockholm in 2002, where she continues to live and work.
After many years working mainly with photography and filmmaking she has recently started to include more sculptural elements through multi-channel or directed sound, animation, and various forms of light montage. An interest in what is complex and contradictory in the life of the contemporary runs like a common thread through her work in which the process becomes an investigation into our often dualistic nature and how the self relates to the outside world. New works are usually inspired by the behavioural patterns that she perceives to dominate, such as; different processing around climate change or social and spatial impact through new technology. The structure is based upon non-linear associative documentation where much of the process circles around removing or altering information through the extremity and limitation of the specific technique.
Her most recent work Second Nature (2021-24) I, II, III, Gyda and Signal-Absence Teaching Drum (2021) as well as Original-Play (2018-19) and Circular Wait (2010-14) all examine the irrational and often contradictory in human behaviour in relation to nature. Hoogland Ivanow has exhibited and shown at the Moderna Museet and Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, The Hermes Foundation, New York and Rotterdam International Filmfestival among others.
Martina's newly published book, Shadow Works, Living the Dream, published by Livraison Books in 2025, presents a newly edited selection spanning thirty years of photography. The book includes images from her series Speedway (2002–05), Far Too Close (2002–07), Satellite (2009–10), Circular Wait (2010–14), Early Reading (2016–18) and Second Nature (2019–24). It also features fashion editorial work from 1994 to the early 2000s, originally published in Dazed and
Confused, 10 Magazine, The Face and Another.
In recent work, Hoogland Ivanow has deconstructed documentary imagery, revisiting her extensive archive of negatives. This process led her to rediscover and rework past photographs, ultimately inspiring the creation of this book:
In today’s image-saturated world, we often take photography for granted, overlooking the poetic essence that the medium holds. The publication features 180 images printed on uncoated paper, with book design by Sandberg & Timonen and an extensive text by curator Grace Johnston, based on conversations with the artist between April and June 2024.
