Release
Book Release: Patrik Elgström – White City
Welcome to the book launch for White City by Patrik Elgström
Time
17:00:00 - 19:00:00
White City is a photographic work produced over ten years in cities that carry the history of modernism. The book moves between architecture, memory, and exile.
5:00 PM: Conversation between Niclas Östlind and Patrik Elgström.
White City was photographed between 2015 and 2025 in Athens, Berlin, Dessau, Gothenburg, Paris, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, and Vienna. In the book, Patrik has selected locations that hold significance for him. In a reverse hermeneutic spiral, Patrik sought out Dessau and Prellerhaus, the former student residence for Bauhaus students – not to confirm what he already knew, but to allow the site to renegotiate his understanding of his work.
The title of the work comes from the part of Tel Aviv called White City – an area with nearly 4,000 modernist buildings constructed in Bauhaus or International Style, what we in Sweden call funkis. Examples of corresponding areas in Sweden are Södra Ängby in Stockholm and parts of Örgryte in Gothenburg.
The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius. The school operated until 1933, when it was closed under Nazi pressure. Its international and thoroughly modernist orientation stood in direct conflict with the emerging National Socialist cultural policy.
In the work White City, Bauhaus serves as a model for questions about the future – about how fear of the multicultural can force exile and flight instead of collaboration and innovation.
–During a residency in Vienna, I stood looking down into the brown waters of the Danube. It struck me with full force – like a punctum in Roland Barthes’ sense – that this is perhaps what my grandmother did, dreaming away in the river’s rushing current. Cities function as memory machines. Today, when cities are being leveled to the ground in several places around the world, this is more relevant than ever.
Boken har 128 sidor och är i formatet 240x152mm (ett halvt 24×30 fotopapper). Jag har använt en Toyo 4×5-tums storformatskamera. Bilderna i boken har samma storlek som negativformatet, 99 × 125 mm. Filmen jag använt är Ilford Delta 100.
Patrik Elgström (born 1966 Lund) Based in Gothenburg. Educated at the School of Photography and Valand Academy 1989–96, 2020. Selected exhibitions: Galleri Jochen Hempel and Künstlerhaus Bethania (where he was an IASPSI scholarship recipient 2014–15). Värmland Museum of Art, Ystad Art Museum and Skövde Art Museum. Blue Star Contemporary San Antonio Texas 2016. Riss(e) Varese Italy 2017. Royal Academy of Fine Arts 2019. MIEC Santo Tirso Portugal 2020. Das Weisse Haus Vienna 2021. Galleri Format Malmö and Dorothée Nilsson Gallery Berlin 2024. Residencies at numerous locations including Athens, Berlin, Vermont, Sopron Hungary, Sala Diaz Texas, Vienna and Paris.
Most recently featured in “A Day at Kummelholmen #14” together with Jenny Magnusson in the duo SKYMMER OCH SER 2026, and for CFF, the exhibition GIHON RIVER 2020 and Varberg Wallstreet 2025.
