In her photo series titled Strude Trine Søndergaard portrays women and girls in traditional costumes. The images are much more than portraits of modern-day individuals in historical costumes. The impersonal and standardised manner in which the costumed women and girls are rendered creates an irritating distance and a sense of foreignness. This distancing effect is reinforced by the face covers that some of the sitters are wearing. Called „strude“, these face covers were used by women on the Danish island of Fanø to protect their faces against wind and weather while doing outdoor work. Around 1900 they went out of fashion and with time the old garb ended up being an item of folklore. Trine Søndergaard’s photographic stagings of veiled and averted faces manifest the multilayered transformation of visual signs. As the face covers of old trigger associations in the viewer linking them to the niqab worn by Muslim women, historical and cultural foreignness are intertwined: clothes make people and may give rise to false conclusions. Trine Søndergaard (b. 1972) ranks among the most important Danish photographers of the present. The Strude photo series was created between 2007 and 2010 on the North Sea island of Fanø.
A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition (price 19 €).