Lotta Antonsson

Lotta Antonsson (Sweden) lives and works in Sweden and Berlin, Germany. She belongs to a generation of artists shaped by the post-structuralist approach to identity and its formation: the self is not an essence but a signifier – a social, cultural and historical construct in flux. Her work is a meditation on the metaphysical tension between presence and vision – both within the individual and the social body of women. Using analogue processes of photography, collage and assemblage, she dismantles and reconfigures the visual language that has historically framed femininity, revealing the gaze as both a mechanism of control and a tool of liberation. Drawing from a personal archive of vintage lifestyle and erotic magazines, she examines how women’s bodies have been represented, desired and consumed. Cutting, layering and recontextualising found images, she creates a fractured, ironic space where clichés are exposed and the authority of representation is momentarily suspended.

Removing the images from their context, cutting away identifiers such as printed names or backgrounds,leaves them open to interpretation. Faces are covered with broken seashells, a sharp mask, protecting the figure while they stare at the viewer, defying the viewer's gaze.