This text incorporates excerpts from conversations between Grace Johnston and Martina Hoogland Ivanow held between April and June 2024, first published in the book Shadow Works, Living the Dream.

Dorothée Nilsson Gallery is happy to present the exhibition Shadow Works, Living the Dream by Swedish artist Martina Hoogland Ivanow. For her third solo exhibition at the gallery Hoogland Ivanow is presenting selected images from her new book Shadow Works, Living the Dream, alongside a selection of her films looking at the complex and contradictory in contemporary life. A site-specific piece consisting of overexposed photographic material complements the exhibition.

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. 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 – 2005), Far Too Close (2002 – 2007), Elephant and Castle (2009), Satellite (2009 – 2010), Circular Wait (2010 – 2014), Early Reading (2016 – 2018), Re- enactment (2016 – 2019) and Second Nature (2019 – 2024). It also features fashion editorial work from 1994 to the early 2000s, originally published in Dazed & Confused, The Face, and Another.

Hoogland Ivanow began experimenting with different photographic techniques while studying at Parsons in New York. While photographing people in the Lower East Side, she played with the idea of where your eye goes in search of light. She says: “How your eye is drawn to the lightest point, and then you find other things in the darkness – forming narratives with the surreal and the gruesome”. She has a keen interest in the role of the shadow. “It’s always there, in the wrong place, or the least expected”.

Often working with subcultures that explore the archaic Hoogland Ivanow asks herself, “What sort of breed are we? Perhaps we are supposed to live like herd animals, but won’t make the individual sacrifices involved”. Hoogland Ivanow views that subcultures, despite their perhaps individualistic manifestation, also carry a message of something that is missing in society at large. They are created as a reaction against the norm, according to the artist. She sees her work as an exploration of the incongruity of our capitalist society and the fragility of human life. New works are often inspired by the behavioural patterns that she perceives dominate contemporary thinking, such as different ways to process climate change or the social impact of technological advances.

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. She says: „I’ve been thinking about what comes before and after, about repetition and the potential of abstraction. Certain themes emerge, irrationality, theatricality, and the ways we play with identity. It’s multi–layered and interspersed. I see humans as the rare species, the odd ones. We know what to do, but are incapable of doing it. We are the parasites of the earth. We are also extraordinary. 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.”

The exhibition was be accompanied by a book release and conversation between Martina Hoogland Ivanow and Adam Broomberg, artist, activist, and educator, on December 13 at 5 PM.

Martina Hoogland Ivanow works primarily in photography and film, with a practice centered on the interplay between filtered light, sound, and image. Her process-based approach explores the irrational undercurrents of contemporary life, emotional responses to climate change, and the social and spatial effects of emerging technologies. Her structures are non-linear and associative, unfolding through documentary modes in which information is intentionally obscured, removed, or transformed. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg; Aperture, New York; Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala; the V&A Museum, London; The Swedish Institute, Paris; Hermes Foundation, New York; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; MONA, Tasmania, and the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Her films have been screened at o.a Rotterdam International Film Festival; Filmform, Milan; Image Forum, Tokyo.

Martina Hoogland Ivanow | Shadow Works, Living the Dream