Tuija Lindström (1947–2017) is one of the most influential photographers in the Nordic countries and a key figure in contemporary photography. Born in Kotka, Finland and based in Stockholm from the early 1970s, her work explores the body and human experience, engaging with questions of representation and gender.

Over the course of her career, Lindström developed a distinct visual language marked by a charged, often unsettling atmosphere. Her carefully composed images move between the intimate and the symbolic, shaped by a strong poetic sensibility. Light — subtle yet precise — plays a central role in shaping these atmospheres.

This exhibition focuses on her most iconic works from the 1980s and early 1990s, a period in which her practice reached a particular clarity and intensity, including intimate portraits and carefully composed images of landscapes and places. The title Perhaps a Dream reflects an in-between state, where reality and imagination, presence and absence, are held in suspension.

She gained wide recognition in the early 1990s with Girls at Bull’s Pond, presented here through a video work. Figures float in dark water, held between rest and threat, presence and disappearance. The women do not pose for the viewer, but seem enclosed within themselves, inhabiting their own bodies and inner worlds. Shown alongside images of iron soles, the works introduce a quiet undercurrent of violence. The dense, almost liquid darkness brings to mind the developing fluids of the darkroom and the material conditions of photography. Questions of life and death, and of the relationship between humanity and nature, are central to the series and recur throughout her work.

The exhibition also includes works from the later series Nepenthes Laughing (2010), where enlarged carnivorous plants suggest a meeting point between attraction and entrapment, marking a shift from capturing moments toward a more conceptual construction of the image. Rooted in something deeply personal, Nepenthes Laughing evokes a nature that seems to turn against itself.

Her work is held in major public collections, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, among others.

With thanks to the Tuija Lindström Association.