What happens if the one who sees an image, all of a sudden seems to be seen by the image?
In this respect a visit to Lina Berglund's studio may turn out to be an unsettling experience. It weakens one´s confidence in some of the more indispensable misunderstandings that may characterize the way we confront an image, how we have learned and unlearned to handle even the most bizzare reflections of a self, as well as those of others.
The regime of pictorial re-presentation, no matter how complicated one may comprehend it, how paradoxical one may have conceptualized it - this more or less peculiar relationship becomes twisted, inverted, turned around, and maybe in a split second, turned upside down: What one could see in the image appears unreadable, and what one thought one could read, becomes invisible.
It is a mirror that is half blind and, in fact, it is not more than half of a mirror. Left on the other side of oneself is the residue of some other imagination, that is only loosely connected with what one can experience in the actual space. Slowly one begins to realize that this space is populated by an uncanny flora and fauna of still lifes: plants and animals who might possibly have escaped from other spaces, other paintings; are they now silently seeking asylum in a less hostile environment?
One is standing in front of what on the surface turns out to be a mirror. Several voices from the past are whispering: "I saw me seeing myself..." One could even continue the tautological argument of "The Young Fate", Paul Valery's alter ego: "Sinuous, and/ From gaze to gaze gilded my innermost forests."
One would only have to obey one condition, that one should follow the idea of the mirror-image like the direction of the one-way-street and not turn around. It is not that one would not be able to resist such temptation, to turn one´s eyes somewhere else; on the contrary, it happens rather unintentionally, but with an unescapable certainty.
It is only a glimpse, a blink of an eye, and in that moment, when one´s gaze leaves the mirror-image, suddenly one realizes that rather than having been seen by someone else, eventually the other, one is being seen by an image.
It is that moment in which the image takes possession of what one has considered for such a long a time to be one's own image. One sees that rather than seeing oneself seeing oneself, one is seen by another image.
Florian Schneider, April 2009