LOCATION: Landskrona Foto, Kavallerigatan 4 DATE 26.9.2025-22.2.2026. PREVIEW 25 september at 6-8pm. Register for our preview is now closed.
Sweden’s most celebrated and most controversial author and playwright in the decades around 1900 was at times deeply absorbed by experiments in physics, chemistry, alchemy, photography, painting . . . Every scientific and artistic discipline captivated August Strindberg to some degree, occasionally provoking euphoria, sometimes resignation, at worst psychotic episodes.
The Japanese artist and photographer Hideyuki Ishibashi, born in 1986, can also be described as being absorbed. By August Strindberg in general and in particular by his unique celestographs, i.e. the photographs in which Strindberg, without camera or lenses, believed he had captured the undistorted night sky above the Dornach estate belonging to his wife Frida Uhl’s grandparents in Austria in 1893–94. Only sixteen unfixed paper copies from glass plates exist today – inexorably doomed to blacken over time.
Based on the celestographs, in an exhibition that is as intricate as it is poetic, with diaries, prints, drawings, photographs and dioramas, produced with the help of bygone photographic processes along with computer power and GPS, Hideyuki Ishibashi raises subtle questions about the essence of photography, about truth and delusion, about the past and the future. After encountering the mysteries of the Milky Way, the visitor returns home, if not more or less obsessed, then in all probability fascinated with man’s never-ending thirst for clarity.
© Hideyuki Ishibashi – Stars (1893-1894)