The Bandung Photography Triennale is a triennial event that debuted in 2022. For the second edition, September 2025, the Bandung Photography Triennale has prepared a theme that builds on the previous one while responding to current global geopolitical conditions. The main theme, “Synthetic Vision: The Age of Fictionalizing in Our Culture,” will be broken down into several sub-themes. Through this theme, the Bandung Photography Triennale aims to serve as a platform for photographers to map their responses to contemporary geopolitical realities using various artistic methods, territories, perspectives, and critical reflections.
In the project Best of Sweden (2023), Ulf Lundin has photographed the same scene from early morning before dawn until it gets dark again in the evening. The final image is composed of different parts from a selection of exposures he took during the day. It can be night in one corner of the picture, noon in another and a small detail can be illuminated by the early morning light. A whole day compressed into one image.
The title of the project alludes to the subjective choices Lundin makes when deciding which parts of the photographs to use in the final composition, but also to the places he chooses to photograph. Photography is in many cases used to confirm our view of the world around us. Lundin has chosen common and unremarkable places, which we may not usually associate with the image of Sweden. They are not made for the eye, but here they are presented in an idealized light. The project raises the question about what a photograph is and how we perceive it, but also about the environment surrounding us and how we influence, and are influenced by it.
When I first started the project I thought that the images would be more difficult to read and accept as photographs. Even if every work in the series consists of between 50 and 200 fragments from different photographs I think that we read them as photographs, not as a painting or a more obviously manipulated image. It says something about how we relate to photography. Even if we know that a photographic image is no evidence of truth we look at them and understand them in a unique way. They are, as André Bazin put it ”a hallucination that is also a fact”. Photography is good at capturing a brief moment. It is of course interesting to try to do the opposite.
Ulf Lundin was born in Alingsås, Sweden in 1965 and trained as a still photographer at the School of Photography, The University of Gothenburg (MFA, 1997). He now lives in Stockholm and works as an artist, primarily in the field of video and photography.
Recent solo presentations are ”Best of Sweden” Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Sweden (2023). ”Day by Day”, Stockholm City Museum (2020), ”From Darkness”, Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen, Norway (2020). Recent group exhibitions include ”Darkrooms”, Hasselblad Center, Göteborg (2022). ”OOH! Urban Video Art Festival”, Varg e vi, Kosovo (2019). ”VAFT”, Turku, Finland (2018). Lundin is represented by Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm. He has published four books, Best of Sweden came out in 2023 and Pictures of a Family 2024.
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