Beginning with her early photographic chronicle of her family and home in Melide from the late 1970s, works by the Swiss photographer and video artist Annelies Strba have consistently focused on the themes of time, history, and memory. In addition to highly personal images of her domestic life, she has also created expressive photographic and video portraits of places she has visited, including historical sites of trauma like Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Auschwitz. Since 1997, Strba has adopted video as her primary medium, and creates pigment prints on canvas that are based on still frames in her films; these are often hallucinatory in effect, seemingly set in another reality. She is known for the fantastic mix of intense, fluorescent colors—which are rendered digitally—that imbues her distinctive prints with an otherworldly ambience. This is particularly evident in My Life's Dreams, in which the artist's daughters and granddaughters, like characters from a fairy tale, wander through and fall into a slumber in a mysterious forest. In these softly-focused dreamscapes constructed by superimposing multiple layers of photographic images, the ethereal bodies of her subjects seem to blend into and become one with nature.

Born in Zug in 1947, Strba currently works and lives in Melide and Richterswill, Switzerland. Solo exhibitions of Strba's work have been held at the Frith Street Gallery, London; Galerie Anton Meier, Geneva; Tate Gallery, Liverpool; Museum Langmatt, Baden; Kinderbuschmuseum Burg Wissem, Troisdorf; Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth; and Museum Valchava in Switzerland; among others. She has also participated in group exhibitions mounted at the Ringling Museum of Art, Florida; Barbican Centre, London; Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Kunsthaus Wien; Les Rencontres d'Arles; Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; and other venues. Her work is represented in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou; Bern Fotomseum; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Bosshard Kunstmuseum; and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

TL