Maja Daniels

In 1667 a 12-year-old girl, Gertrud Svensdotter, was accused of walking on water in Älvdalen, Sweden. This event marked the beginning of the Swedish witch-hunts, a period of mass hysteria and horror in Älvdalen and its neighbouring regions. The exhibition and book Gertrud by artist Maja Daniels uses photography to reconfigure the history and myth of these events, igniting a contemporary dialogue around Gertrud.

Daniels —who has family ties to the town of Älvdalen— grew up hearing her grandmother speak of the stories surrounding Gertrud Svensdotter. The resulting witch trials claimed the lives of over 300 people across 8-years. Centuries later, these events, almost incomprehensible to modern sensibilities, are still viewed as one of the most macabre and dark periods in Sweden’s history.

Most of the photographs in Gertrud were created by Daniels through interventions in the forest. Utilising the landscape, a cast of characters and seemingly talismanic objects, she has drawn upon a surrealist desire to ‘re-enchant the world’. In reaction to the present-day view diminishing the value of forests to mere ‘resources’, her work re-envisions them as once more places of stories, myth and magic. Interspersed with Daniel’s photographs are those from the archive of Tenn Lars Persson (1878-1938) whose work she engaged with in her previous book Elf Dalia. As the book Gertrud unfolds the intertwined sets of photographs disorientate the viewer, unsettling ideas around place and linear time.

‘Within this series I use photography as a tool for mythmaking. Myths are open to interpretations but refuse to be fully locked down. Photographs function in a similar way. The core of what is expressed in an image lies somewhere in the unseen or in its silent associations.

The act of shaping my own rituals and creating new myths that draw on the elements of already existing ones, becomes a way for me to expand on and challenge certain historical constructs and to show how a visual narrative can recreate our relationship with the past, present and future.’

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Maja Daniels (b. 1985) is a Swedish photography-based artist. Her work is influenced by her studies in sociology and can be described as a multi-layered academic and artistic practice that includes sociological methodology, sound, moving image and archive materials, aiming to further explore each medium’s narrative and performative functions.

Currently based between Malmö, her work has been exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam and Bilbao. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships and since 2020 she holds a senior lecturer position in film at the Institution for Film, Photography and Literary Composition at Gothenburg University (HDK-Valand).

Her first book Elf Dalia was published by MACK books in 2019. The book won the Swedish Photo Book of the Year Award 2020, and was nominated for the Aperture-Paris Photo First book Award 2019 and was listed as one of the best books of the year by The Guardian, The Financial Times Magazine amongst others