Hasselblad Center is proud to present, for the first time in Sweden the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi.

Rinko Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga, Japan, and is one of the most significant photographers of the new Japanese generations. Despite her relatively young age she has greatly impressed national and international audiences. Her carrier started, according to the Japanese tradition, with presenting her work in books.

Rinko Kawauchi sees her work as a vast archive of images with a neverending potential.  She photographs her everyday life, whatever is around her, and it is through her selection and composition that she creates a magical feeling from her own environment. Pictures of a baby being born, portraits of wounded or sick people, instantaneous and magical moments like fireworks, create an entirety that give us her visual poetry.  In some of her books she presents her images with her own poems.

The exhibition Aila + the eyes, the ears, is a combination of two of Kawauchi’s projects.  “Aila” – from the Turkish word for big family is about the beginnings of life. Pictures from Kawauchi’s own daily life compose the project “the eyes, the ears”, and the name is related to all the elements we can perceive using our senses.  Through the combination of these two projects, Kawuchi gives us new meanings and different interpretations of her work.

The video work Cui Cui contains over 200 images and was taken at momentous family events over a period of 13 years. It is considered to be Rinko Kawauchi’s most personal body of work to date, and has also been presented as a book.