Ulla Schildt: Solid Structures

This way of thinking of photography is also recurrent/ underpinning Ulla Schildt’s practice and works. In several works presented in the exhibition, photography is used to explore what lies beyond the edge of current knowledge. Some images appear almost forensic in nature: documenting objects of science, fragments of history, ambiguous artifacts that resist easy interpretation. Others evoke more speculative terrain: imagined landscapes, technological visions, or environments altered by climate and crisis. In both cases, the photograph becomes a portal — a structure that does not only record but also anticipates.

One might think of these images as thresholds between the known and the not-yet-known. They are visual conjectures, models of future memory. Their solidity lies not in what they depict, but in their persistence — their insistence that something is there, even if it cannot yet be named.

This orientation toward the future is both hopeful and unsettling. On the one hand, it affirms the image as a witness, a companion, a vessel of continuity. On the other, it reveals the instability of all meaning: what we see today might look entirely different tomorrow. Scientific paradigms shift. Cultural values evolve. Technologies collapse and are reborn. The image, once solid, may become ghostly and presive other meanings when looked at other perspectives.

So, what, if anything, remains solid when everything appears to be in shifting?