2023 – Björkö /Stockholm
Mai Keldsen
At this moment, it has been a year and a half since my visit to Björkö. The mosquitoes hadn’t quite arrived yet. The old bike which I used to ride around was not broken, but also not working very well. The horizon was broken everywhere (an island surrounded by islands) except from one place which Anna Viola took me to the day after my arrival, to see: the unbroken horizon. Other memories seem more distant, so I retrieve my notebook from that time, but it's mostly notes from the darkroom (“I actually liked the first copy, but I still want to try: - A version shadowing the highlights, - A version where the background is even darker, - A version with fake light”).
During my residency at BKN I worked mainly in the garden(s) around the building. They blended with the forest, though, and it was hard to tell where one started and the other ended. A mix of human and non-human organization which transferred to my darkroom studies.
Mai S. Keldsen (b. 1991) is a visual artist and photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2020), a Minor in art, writing and research (2020) and has participated in the Independent Study Program at MauMaus Escola des Artes Visuais (2016). Her work unfolds primarily as photographic works, artist-books and spatial installations.
Her practice connects historical or scientific aspects of specific landscapes to personal and/or imagined stories about the same places, and deals with questions of position, storytelling and sustainability. The work is attentive to both the visible and the hidden and, using photography as her medium, Mai deals with the tension that arises between what the camera can see and what intensification of this material she can conjure up in the analog recording process.
In 2018 Mai won The Caspar David Friedrich Prize and her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, most recently at The Royal Danish Theater in 2024. At the moment, Mai teaches at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography and is a part of the editorial team of Kulturo, a Danish journal for literature, art and politics.
