Thirteen Healed Bodies, 2011
Book and exhibitions.
In the project Thirteen healed bodies I have sought out people who claim and feel that they have been healed by God, and the result is a series of photographic documents of their body parts. The aesthetics and method has a positivistic approach and relate to hospital and institution photographs and the belief in the photographic image as objective evidence. In this case, however, the believing in the photographs as proof is reduced to a question of faith. The project has resulted in a book and exhibitions.
“To me, there was nothing strange about the healing of my sister in the early 80s. I was raised in an environment where the possibility of health coming from the hand of God was a realistic one, a parallel healthcare system to the standard institutions. My sister was healed at a tent meeting in Fjärdsjömåla, a small town in the eastern part of Blekinge in Sweden. The preacher conducting the meeting was a specialist in healing back pain attributed to the different lengths of one’s legs. According to my sister she was asked to lie on a special kind of barrack-bed on the stage and had her legs measured by the preacher’s own tape measure. He stated that one leg was shorter than the other and that this was the cause of her back pain. Then he prayed to God and laid his hands on her legs. My sister, still on stage on the bed, felt something happening in her body and when the intense but calm prayer was over, the preacher measured her legs again. Now they were the same length!”
Release Göteborgs Konsthall, Göteborg, och Rönnells Antikvariat, Stockholm 2011.
