Born in 1967 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
While best-known for her work as a photographer, Miriam Bäckström has also worked extensively with theater, film, performance, text and, most recently, textiles. Throughout, Bäckström uses her practice to examine the nature of images, an ongoing inquiry that has led her to explore the relationships between fiction and documentation, archetype and individual, public and private, experience and perception.
Bäckström’s early work as a conceptual photographer involved technically precise depictions of interior spaces — such as apartments, museum galleries and department store vitrines — where the human figure was eerily absent yet the human presence uncannily palpable, like stage-sets in search of their characters. Her theater-oriented work — dramas, films and videos and collaborative performances — often blurs the line between documentary and non-documentary narrative constructs. reversing the roles between author and subject, audience and performer, public and private, fact and fiction.
Bäckström’s recent work with photo-based tapestries has yielded large-scale abstract image-objects that immerse the viewer in an experience that is visual and spatial, perceptual and metaphorical. While grounded in digital photography, these shimmering works also revel in the tapestry’s essential nature as woven fabric; where the resolution of the photographic image ends, the yarns of the textile continue, drawing the viewer further into the image.
