Eva Stenram’s Latest Position

Swedish artist Eva Stenram is known for her delightfully unsettling and nostalgic manipulations of vintage pin-up photographs. With skillful reworking, the images become reminiscent of a mannequin shop, full of sexy limbs ready to come alive with no brain to direct them. Her new show, “Positions,” at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios in London through March 22, represents a new context for the artist. “The primary purpose of the exhibition would ideally be to inspire the dancers,” Stenram says. Her work is an intriguing match with contemporary dance in that both break down “very simple everyday movements into their components,” she adds. For the exhibition, Stenram created new work based on found images by Irving Klaw of Bettie Page and other pin-up models, manipulating them in the darkroom or digitally until they resembled an instruction manual for a glamorous dance number. “Photography is always this oscillation between presence and absence—what was within the frame of the image and not, what has been and is no longer,” Stenram says. “I am interested in the viewer somehow completing the work imaginatively.”