The Fictional Road Trip

Niemi (b 1976) studied at the London College of Printing and Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York. She resides and works on an island across from Oslo.
Niemi always works alone. Photographing, staging and acting out the characters in all of her photographs.

Since her first solo exhibition in London at The Little Black Gallery in 2015, she had gallery exhibitions in Oslo, London, Paris and New York and has been shown at Art Fairs (Photo London, Photofairs San Francisco, AIPAD).
She will have her first retrospective museum show at Fotografiska Stockholm in February 2019, together with the publication of a book at Thames & Hudson. Her work is highly collectable – including being part of the Nion McEvoy Collection, the Hudson Bay Company Global Art Collection, and the Susanne von Meiss Collection (exhibited at C/O Berlin in 2016 with the accompanying book published by Kehrer). Her works have very successfully sold at auctions, including the Christie's Photographs sales in London in May 2018.

In her latest series, Anja Niemi continues her investigations of the self. This time she turns the lens to a life lived under the constraints of conformity. Every day her fictional character finds herself trapped in the same pink dress, but what she really wants is to be a cowboy, dressed in fringe and leather, riding horses in the Wild West. Through this series of photographs with multiple layers and possible interpretations, Niemi delivers her most political work to date.

"The story is not really about being a cowboy. It’s about wanting to be another."