A decade ago Daniel Birnbaum introduced Annika von Hausswolff’s photographs in the pages of this magazine, writing about the symbiosis they present between scopophilia and sadistic violence. Simple in conception, von Hausswolff’s early work was bare-bones, iconic, and an artistic success. As her work gained momentum it became more intricate, flirting with the inscrutable, but ultimately delivering the image of desire divided by loss. By the time of her 2005 show at Sweden’s Baltic Art Center, “The Construction of a Breakdown,” she was immersed in a flagrant affair with phenomenology; banal

Peter Johansson argues for the inclusion of vernacular Swedish folk art as yet another of society’s “Others,” but in the same gesture sets inclusion at cross-purposes with itself; he problematizes it as deftly as Fred Wilson does. But where Wilson instrumentalizes rude ceramic pickaninnies as divining rods locating lost African-American histories and masked racial attitudes, Johansson scans day-tripper souvenirs such as Dala horses for traces of Swedish National Romanticism, a cultural movement that began in the late nineteenth century.

The “otherness” Johansson reawakens is regional authenticity