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Last night, a giant wasp creature, straight from the depths of hell, buzzed around our lounge room, blocking out the view from the TV as it tried to find the source of the light. Mirinda tried to shoo it out of the room and into the garden but it blatantly refused. Eventually, we turned off all sources of light and went to bed, assuming it would return from whence it came.
Then, this morning, I woke to find it asleep on the kitchen floor. Employing the old glass jar and piece of paper trick, I transported it to the deck where I left it. I had bigger fish to fry. My Oz passport needed renewal and, while my appointment at the embassy is slotted in for later, I had to obtain a couple of ghastly photographs to go in it. That was my mission for today.
Obviously, this had to be done in Stockholm and equally obviously, I decided I would visit a couple of exhibitions in order to justify the bus fare.
The first exhibition was at the maritime museum. It was of the sinking of the SS Hansa on the morning of 24 November 1944.
As can be seen from the rather grainy photo above, she had been painted white, an agreed upon wartime strategy to indicate a civilian vessel. Regardless of this effort, a Russian submarine decided to torpedo it in the middle of the Baltic, early in the morning, as it headed towards Gotland with a full complement of passengers and crew.
The Russian torpedo struck the Hansa at the bow and she sank within a minute. Only two people survived and they were both called Arne. They spent eight hours in a life raft before being found by a light aircraft, bobbing about in the chill winter waters.
There were stories about the two Arnes (Mohlin and Thuresson) and how the event impacted their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Some of it quite harrowing. I didn’t, however, see anything regarding the coincidence of their names. So I am pointing it out here. Of course, there is no record of how many other Arnes there were among the 84 people who died.
The exhibition was excellent, leaving the visitor with the impression that there are still secrets to reveal about both the boat and Sweden’s neutrality in the Second World War. As well as being a sad reflection of humanities disdain for life, it was also a shame the book of the disaster was only available in Swedish.
The other exhibition I visited was at the Kulturhuset. It was a retrospective of the amazing photography of Elizabeth Ohlson, the woman who, almost single-handedly and at great risk to her own safety, changed the LGBTQ+ attitudes of the Church of Sweden.
Ohlson, having been raised a Christian, decided she wanted to create her own Passion of the Christ series of images. She named it Ecce Homo and showed it in a disused fire station in Stockholm. One of the visitors to this low-key exhibition (during Pride) was Tuulikki Koivunen Bylund, the dean of Uppsala.
Tuulikki wanted Elizabeth to show her work at Uppsala Cathedral, a proposal to which she happily agreed. This, however, did not make a lot of Swedish Christians very happy. They were thrown into total turmoil as they tried in vain to get the show shut down. I’m not sure that Jesus would have reacted in quite the same way.
Following on from Wednesday’s image of the last supper, here is Ohlson’s amazing version, with apologies for the reflection in the glass.
But that wasn’t all in the retrospective. Her other works are adequately represented as well. She was an amazing photographer. I say ‘was’ because, sadly, she died of cancer in 2024. Not that that stopped her. Included in the exhibition is a series called Dead, featuring her own final photographs of herself. Sobering and, while beautiful, very, very sad.
I loved the exhibition and recommend it for the sheer beauty of her work and the emotional impact of the short documentary shown with it.
Of course, I also managed to squeeze in getting my photographs done as well as a few other things before heading home where Mirinda informed me that the giant wasp creature from hell had returned. She repeated the glass and piece of paper trick and sent it back outside.
Sadly, there isn’t a photograph of the giant wasp creature so here is one called Hands instead.
Anyone reading this, close enough to go, really should see this exhibition. It is deeply moving. And so beautiful.
