Room 6

Cindy Sherman, Ingrid Orfali and others

Narrator: Photography-based art was emerging in all the Nordic countries, as a result of changes in international contemporary art in the shift from modernism to postmodernism.
 
A key figure was the American artist Cindy Sherman, who had begun using found images and motifs in the 1970s, to comment on how the fictions of mass media and popular culture turn into new realities. She was her own model, dressing up to play all the characters in her photos. In the 1980s, she started making colour photos in larger formats. In the series “Fairy Tales”, she builds scenarios that look like low-budget horror movies.  
 
Meanwhile in Sweden, the semiotically-trained artist Ingrid Orfali emerged in the second half of the 1980s, with a series of Cibachrome photographs on feminist and surrealist themes. She disappeared from the Swedish art scene in the 1990s, but had a huge impact on art history. She was born in Egypt, studied in Paris and London and has PhDs in semiotics and French. For the past two decades, she has lived on a farm outside Sydney. In both art and writing, she explores the postmodern condition, including the debate on original and copy.