Ann-Sofi Sidén
Video and installation.
Ann-Sofi Sidén works with video, performance and installation on surveillance, the body and power.
Ann-Sofi Sidén was born in 1962 in Stockholm. She studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and at the art academy in Berlin in the 1980s. She works with video, film, performance, sculpture and installation, and has long been one of the most internationally active Swedish artists.
Her first well-known character was Queen of Mud, a figure covered in clay whom she played herself from the late 1980s. Queen of Mud appeared in unexpected places, such as city streets and museums, and behaved like a creature from another world. She also became the protagonist of the 1990s film QM, I think I call her QM, in which she is described through the eyes of a psychiatrist.
Surveillance and observation are central themes. In Who Told the Chambermaid? of 1998 she filmed with hidden cameras in a hotel and showed footage of the rooms and the chambermaid on many screens at once. In Warte Mal! of 1999 she portrayed prostitution in a Czech border town near Germany through long interviews and diary entries. The work was shown at the Venice Biennale and attracted great attention for its seriousness and its closeness to the people involved.
Sidén combines documentary work with fiction and explores the relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at. She has received several awards and has had solo exhibitions at museums in Europe, including in Sweden. Her work has been very important for the development of video and installation art in the Nordic countries.