We have the great pleasure to present the photographic series Interceptedby Nadja Bournonville at Market Art Fair 2019 and at Galleri Flach, Stockholm. The series portrays an interior and an external reality, viewed through a story from the artist’s own family history. Eva de Bournonville, an aunt to the artist’s grandmother, worked for a period as a spy for the Germans during the First World War. However, she was soon revealed, sentenced to death penalty, but managed to convert her sentence into a life sentence. When the war was over, Eva de Bournonville could return to Sweden where she let go of her punishment and instead became a respected language teacher until her death, 108 years old. The artist Nadja Bournonville did her own research on her relative in London in 2016, which laid the foundation for the series Intercepted. The remarkable story runs like a red thread through the works as an associative reference. In the photographs, individual and peculiar details emerge which together, in their entirety, create a rich and comprehensive image flow. The artist approaches her family history through freely formal and psychological expressions as if she is trying to capture an idea of a person’s inner and outer personality in a pattern of poetic and personal associations.
In the photographic works of Nadja Bournonville, a fascinating visual world emerges through abstract, concrete, expressive and experimental forms. She explores her surroundings through various photographic, organic and psychological processes in an imagery world that expresses both beauty and discomfort, strength and fragility. The relationship between the images is enhanced by being presented in room installations where they are woven together through different vertical and horizontal directions. In 2017 she was awarded a scholarship from Olympus Fellowship for young photographers and in 2018 she recieved Claes Lewenhaupt’s scholarship. Nadja Bournonville is educated at the Glasgow School of Art and at the Leipzig Visual Academy. She has had residencies in Austria, Norway, Ireland and Germany, she lives and works in Berlin.