Johan Österholm was born in 1983. He lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
Österholm uses photography as a medium for reflecting on evolving conceptions of what constitutes a nightscape and what counts as “darkness.” He approaches the subject of light pollution and nocturnal illumination as a kind of historian of light, carefully combining archival material and archaic photographic processes with the glare of artificial city lights as well as the more enigmatic light of the full moon, which conceals details even as it reveals contours. His work is often influenced by the history of photography and archaic photographic processes, which he adopts for their ability to speak to something that lies beyond the present day: of the traces that previous generations have left behind, and those that we ourselves will leave. Formally, he adopts different approaches and modes of depiction, but cosmological and civilisatory aspects are always interwoven in them.
In his Lunar works – a series of moon-related works starting in 2014 – he uses naturally occurring nocturnal illumination to activate obsolete objects by exposing them to the glow of the full moon. This system was first used by Österholm to bring new life to glass negatives and positives that were created by his great-grandfather in the early 1900s, which depict the night sky. Next, he collected shards of glass from abandoned greenhouses, coated them in silver gelatin, and transformed them from collectors of sunlight into moon gatherers. These glass plates were later installed in the photographic sculpture Structure For Moon Plates and Moon Shards.
Beginning in 2018, during a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Österholm shifted his focus to include artificial illumination and its impact on the night skies. Urban illumination means that a star-filled night sky becomes inaccessible to more and more people all over the world due to light pollution, or the fading of our collective night sky. In Österholm’s works Antique Skies and Untitled Lantern Pieces, he uses the light fitting of a street lamp to make analogue prints from historical negatives in his studio, reproducing such sections of the night sky that have become invisible as a result of light smog of the 20th century. The artist uses archive negatives produced at the end of the 19th century and exposes them with the help of the aforementioned street lamp onto pages torn from 19th-century books about astronomy, prepared using a light-sensitive emulsion.
News
Moon Plate Prints
Structure for Moon Plates and Moon Shards
Luminous Reign (Toppled)
