Miriam Bäckström

Since the mid-1990s, Miriam Bäckström has been one of the most influential artists in the contemporary art scene in Scandinavia. Her work focuses on the staging of life and on the shifts between what we call reality and fiction. In 1995 Miriam Bäckström started the project Set Constructions, a series of photographs depicting sets built for television productions, film commercials and feature films. Her documentations of staged presentations in museums, such as the IKEA museum in Älmhult and the museum apartments of the Stockholm City Museum, started in 1999 and include a photographic series entitled Museums, Collections and Reconstructions. Miriam Bäckström works with photography, text, sound and film. The unspoken and the implicit are strongly present in her works, where different realities often coexist in the same image. We can never be entirely sure of what we see in Miriam Bäckström’s motifs.

Miriam Bäckström participated in the 1999 Venice Biennale, curated by Harald Szeemann, and since then she has gained wide international recognition. Miriam Bäckström represented Sweden in the 2005 Venice Biennale, creating the installation Amplified Pavilion together with Carsten Höller in the Nordic Pavilion. She contributed to the publication Voice Over for this year’s Venice Biennale, an IASPIS project examining staging, theatricality and performative strategies . Miriam Bäckström´s contribution consisted of a text based on the characters in Mirrors.

‘Communication today is largely happening in the photographic image, in the still and moving image’, says Miriam Bäckström. For her film and theatre are meeting-places for the images we call reality.