Tova Mozard
Thunder and Oblivion

Series: Contemporary Swedish Photography

March 31–May 20 2012 

A sense of fiction and staging exists strongly in the work of Tova Mozard, while at the same time the intention is to document actual people and places. This often involves persons who find themselves on the fringe of conventional life: devoted science fiction fans, professional clowns, eccentric nightclub singers and extras. She utilises theatre in her self-portraits to investigate and portray her life and create situations of an almost therapeutic nature. She appears on stage, in the audience or behind the scenes, while simultaneously directing the performance.  

This exhibition features a selection of Tova Mozard’s photographs, from the early 2000s to the present day, as well as a number of key video works. The exhibition also involves the Bio Roy cinema, where the critically acclaimed film The Big Scene (2010) will be shown. This is in collaboration with MAP (Mobile Art Production).

Tova Mozard (born 1978) lives and works in Stockholm. She is a graduate of the Malmö Art Academy and UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, Los Angeles. Mozard has participated in shows including the first Moderna Exhibition (2006), as well as the group exhibition Unstable – New Directions in Swedish Photography at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, 2004. She is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, Malmö Art Museum and the National Public Art Council Sweden among others.

In conjunction with the exhibition, an artist’s talk with Tova Mozard will be held and a lecture by Magdalena Holdar, senior lecturer at the Department of Art History at Stockholm University. More information about other lectures in the program and the film showings at Bio Roy will be available shortly.

This exhibition at the Hasselblad Center is the first major presentation of Tova Mozard’s art and is part of a series of exhibitions that surveys contemporary Swedish photography. During the 1990s and 2000s, the agenda was strongly characterised by gender-orientated issues and feminist theories. Many of today’s younger practitioners consider this discourse a natural starting point, which provides a basis to pursue other issues. Recent years have seen a change concerning staged photography. This series of exhibitions highlights artists who further this development in interesting and relevant ways. They investigate photography’s media-specific characteristics, bring together fiction and reality and work with existential issues in a conceptual manner. The first exhibition of the series was Antichambre by Marie Andersson, shown in autumn 2011.

Curator: Dragana Vujanovic

Tova Mozard
11 minutes 45 seconds
Production: Egerstrand & Blund
Idea and direction: Fredrik Egerstrand & Tova Mozard
Photo: Conny Fridh

Talk with Jörg Heiser and Tova Mozard. From april 4, Hasselblad Center.