Bristningar.

(Rupture).

By Katinka Goldberg. Translation by Richard Casebow, Victoria de Leon Born & Maria Morris.

Journal, Sweden, 2021. English/Swedish, 152 pp., 8¾x12¼".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by:

Gerry Badger

Bristningar (Rupture) is the middle part of Katinka Goldberg's trilogy of works, in which she is ‘exploring the tension between closeness and distance’, trying, no less, to locate herself both within herself and within the world. The trilogy began with her book Surfacing (2011) which examined the relationship between herself and her mother, in a complex and highly poetic way. In Bristningar, she is making collages, which, like Hans Bellmer's, deconstruct and reassemble the body, but do so with a very different aim, a healing rather than a destructive or pathological purpose. And also a process of add and subtracting, or rather, of adding in order to subtract.

‘I am trying to answer the question; how much can you take away of yourself without disappearing? How close can you get before the closeness becomes a distance?’

Her intentions are both formal and psychological. On one level, she is pushing at the medium’s boundaries, pushing beyond the imperative of the camera and provoking a clash between photography, sculpture, and painting. On another, she is exploring different aspects of her psyche, using the same kind of allusive approach, but very different formal means to those deployed in her previous book. In Surfacing, it seemed to be a matter of trying to make peace with what seemed to be an obviously close and sometimes difficult relationship, a letting go perhaps. Bristningar seems more of a reaching toward, not to her mother but to herself. By making fragmented collages from the human body Goldberg would seem to be fashioning a visual metaphor, no less, for the process of psychoanalysis, tearing the soul apart, examining the pieces and the data, then reconstructing a more complete whole. In these fragmented and highly abstract collages, Goldberg is utilizing ‘the amputated and then reconstructed body as a way to visualize a fragmented identity that has been mended. Forming a reconstruction of oneself to be seen. Seeing as a way of belonging’.”

—Gerry Badger

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