Dana Sederowsky

Dr Dana is the instrument of the artist Dana Sederowsky. A nurse who inspires confidence, but can also exercise power. Since her debut in 1998, Dana Sederowsky has consistently worked with photography and video performance using her own voice, body and face. Who is the nurse who moves through these beautiful and uncomfortable environments loaded with stories? A saving angel or even an angel of death? Perhaps the answers lie within ourselves.

This is how Sederowski's artistry was described when she exhibited at Fotografiska in Stockholm in 2014. The exhibition 'Selected works, 1998 - 2013' showed a selection of works from her entire career. She herself is the actor, director and artist who has worked consistently, always starting from a conceptual framework with her own texts and experiences.
Already during her studies at the School of Photography, she established her alter ego Dr Dana, a nurse in a 1950s uniform who appears in both photography and in her video works. She says: "When I created Dr Dana, I was looking for a clear, neutral symbol where there are expectations of what the person stands for, what she says and does."
Dr Dana first appeared in 1998 in various settings from New York. When Dana Sederowsky travelled as a Hasselblad grant holder to Capri and Axel Munthe's Villa San Michele in 2005, Dr Dana reappeared. Here she interacts with her surroundings, turning her back on the camera to look at her surroundings, wrapped in beauty.
Sederowsky spent a long time looking for a new place for Dr Dana to act. In 2013, she found the Beelitz Heilstätten, an area of abandoned buildings outside Berlin built in 1897 that served as a military hospital during both world wars. In this series, the unpleasant, yet beautiful, environment speaks of a ruined and barricaded place where nature begins to take over.

Dana Sederowsky lives and works in Gothenburg. She was educated at the School of Photography and Valand Art Academy in Gothenburg. Her work has been shown in several places in Sweden and internationally, such as Museo de La Ciudad, Querétaro, Mexico, BALTIC Newcastle, Centre for Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg and Moscow Russia, Kaunas Biennal Lithuania, Borås Konstmuseum, Studio 44 Stockholm and Göteborgs Konsthall. She has also had solo exhibitions at Gothenburg Art Museum, Borås Art Museum and the Hasselblad Centre. She is represented at the Hasselblad Foundation, Danderyds Sjukhus, National Centre for Contemporary Art Collection, Ekaterinburg Russia, Gothenburg Art Museum and Dunkers Kulturhus Helsingborg.