Lotta Antonsson

One of Sweden’s leading contemporary photographers, Lotta Antonsson, is coming to Fotografiska with I Am Everything. In this exhibition, the artist explores themes of gender, identity, and objectification within a visual world that both unsettles and beautifies. Opening on April 25, the exhibition moves fluidly between photography, collage, and spatial installations.

Three Decades of Exploring the Image

Lotta Antonsson is among Sweden’s most significant contemporary photographers. She first gained widespread recognition as a student at Konstfack in the 1990s and has since achieved major international success. For more than three decades, she has examined how the female body is depicted, desired, and consumed within visual culture. Now, in I Am Everything at Fotografiska, Antonsson presents an extensive exhibition where past meets present, the analog meets the sculptural, and the political intersects with the personal. The exhibition title also echoes her well-known photographic project and book, I Am a Woman.

Material, Body, and Altered Images

The exhibition brings together photography, collage, and installation, where natural materials such as shells, amethysts, and corals play a central role. These elements are placed over faces, covering eyes or replacing mouths—subtle interventions that both disrupt and embellish. The familiar is transformed into something strange, creating a presence that is as physical as it is visual. Drawing from an extensive archive of magazines from the 1960s and 70s, Antonsson revisits the imagery that shaped her own upbringing, examining how these visual languages continue to influence how we see—and are seen—today.

“I Am Everything primarily focuses on my more recent work, as well as entirely new pieces created specifically for this exhibition. With this show, I hope to create a space where images are not only observed but felt—where material, memory, and the body intersect,” says Lotta Antonsson.

Challenging the Gaze and Reclaiming the Subject

Since the 1990s, Antonsson’s artistic practice has revolved around questions of gender, identity, and the male gaze. By covering, fragmenting, and repositioning the female body, she reveals how it has historically been shaped by desire and observation, while simultaneously opening up space for a new subject—an “I” with its own voice and form.

“With a sharp edge and a boldly defiant attitude, Lotta Antonsson creates work that not only exposes the objectification of women but also challenges the very space—and the gazes—that have sought to control it. She has an extraordinary sensitivity to materials and detail, and it is the choice of objects and their precise placement that shifts the viewer’s experience. I find it difficult to fully articulate what happens within me as a viewer. A kind of force field emerges—a near-physical charge that both draws you in and unsettles you at the same time, impossible to resist,” says Sofia Liljergren, Exhibition Producer at Fotografiska Stockholm.

I Am Everything will be on view at Fotografiska Stockholm from April 25 to November 29.

About Lotta Antonsson

Lotta Antonsson (b. 1963, Varberg) is a Swedish artist and photographer working across photography, collage, installation, and object-based art. She is based in both Berlin and Falkenberg. Antonsson studied at Konstfack in Stockholm and continued her education in Copenhagen. She belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who developed photo-based art during the 1990s. Her work often takes a feminist and political perspective, exploring issues of identity, the gaze, and the objectification of the female body. Antonsson has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in international exhibitions across Europe, North America, and Asia. She has also been active as an educator, including as Professor of Photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Her work is represented in several major public collections, including Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Hasselblad Foundation, and Magasin III, as well as in private collections worldwide.