Even if some of her large-scale images are, technically speaking, self-portraits, in the sense that the artist herself has indeed, at one stage in the production process, been positioned in front of the camera or has at least been somehow photographically registered; the portrait genre in the sense of having something to do with identification or personhood, is only a distant reverberation in Yotta Kippe’s intriguingly anonymous and positively uncanny images.

Perhaps the introduction of the artist as model, then, serves to supply that particular tension which comes from auto-biographical linkages, even if ever so tenuous, suggesting the presence of a person somewhere behind the disappeared features. However, more central is the face as source, as origin of imagery, as even the origin of images, but, in this case, then treated as infinitely malleable raw material.

by Jan-Erik Lundström