Ann-Sofi Sidén’s art often takes us into rooms that we would prefer to forget. Places where the painful and the morally impossible occur. It is there that those people dwell whom we do not speak to, but about – those who are to one side, and seen only in passing. With unerring certainty Sidén seeks out the holes in our social fabric, the frayed, shabby places where we no longer want or are able to hold onto our ideals, our human compassion and our selves. 

Two of these places: The video installation Who Told the Chambermaid? from 1998 is set in a hotel. A chambermaid has installed an extensive surveillance system in her cleaning closet, from where she can watch what hotel guests are doing without being seen. She, who herself is not to be seen, monitors the guests with her all-seeing gaze. In her large-scale work Warte Mal! from 1999 Sidén abandons the staged to seek out the backstreets of the new geopolitical landscape of Europe after the fall of the Wall – the sordid trade in human beings along the borders of the new countries. The films are a series of intimate, disturbing portraits in which the women and men who we know as numbers in depressing statistics turn out to be people, whose lives are dictated by political upheavals that they cannot influence. The conversations are shown in a series of parallel events in the exhibition space. Viewers go from the large video projections to small booths containing TV monitors, where we sit down and are brought very close to the women’s testimony to their vulnerable lives. 

It thus seems logical that, in her latest work, In Passing, Sidén depicts a woman abandoning her daughter. This filmic work has its starting point in a controversial phenomenon in Germany, the so-called babyklappe (baby hatch). This is an incubator-like hatch installed in the outer walls of some children’s hospitals. The hatches are there for mothers who intend to abandon their babies. In order to avoid children being left out of doors and becoming ill, the mothers can leave them in a hatch without being seen. The use of the hatches, naturally, sparks debate. Another fact is that this practice has no basis in law and goes on without actually being legally valid. Like many of the rooms that Sidén takes us with her into, the baby hatch is a place that should not exist. 

Here Sidén returns to approaches that she has used in her earlier works, and turned into a recognisable style. A deliberately disjointed narrative with several concurrent projections creating a space in which moods and mental states are a greater driving force than a strong story line. The staged documentary style that gives the work a powerful presence. Details that might be seen as random or accidental are precisely planned visual clues to a meticulous picture construction that creates a variety of levels and depths in the apparently simply narrative. Here, too, is the surveillance camera that in Sidén’s work serves as an all-seeing eye that sees both the terrible and the trivial. As always, in her formally well-executed works the very spatial formation of the moving images is crucial. Here, the space is built around a dichotomy that splits the life of the mother and child into two. 

Sidén has constructed the film in parallel sets of events that portray the decisive moment when a woman and a baby are separated, and the moment after that, when their lives carry on without the other. The form has been reduced to the minimum – there are in fact no words and no gestures here to accentuate or explain this enormity. This is specifically shown in the incidental and unexpected details. There is an everyday inexorability here. The world neither comes to an end nor cares when something that should not happen does happen. 

The division of the work into two underscores the separation of mother and child. The mother’s world is shown in colour and her actions are seen by a more subjective, human camera. Here, too, there is a quiet yet intense sound that imbues the images with atmosphere. The child’s world is black-and-white and seen through the hospital’s surveillance cameras, and the sound is that of the hospital itself. It is the gaze of the clinic and the institution that registers everything that happens to the baby girl, from the moment she is abandoned and begins her new life without her mother. She is examined and checked. Her clothes are taken off and thrown away, and the last tie between mother and daughter is gone. From that moment on, she belongs nowhere, becoming one of a mass of abandoned children; a social problem that has to be solved. Like several of Sidén’s works, In Passing sets up an opposition between the private individual and the controlling care of the surrounding society. 

In the middle of the exhibition space is a monitor built into a pillar that divides the space in two. On the monitor we see the CCTV images of the baby hatch. An artificial womb that is intended to warm and protect those that nobody wants, a place between the mother and the clinic, between the human and the institution. The practical construction of the object itself and the matter-of-fact exhortation “open only in emergency” become horrible reminders of the way that people always try to use artificial methods to recreate tenderness, love and care. The shape of the hatch recurs as a motif throughout the film, in which the camera lingers on similar openings. The hatch can also be seen as a transition between different worlds, as another birth. Here we can see a link with the historical background: the special doors in convents and churches where women left unwanted babies. 

The pillar with the monitor in it is a direct physical reference to the actual space in the hospital. We not only watch a film of the baby hatch, but also experience a tangible object that gives us a physical sense-impression of a hospital. Sidén’s work with moving images always has a sculptural dimension to it. She does not place the viewer in front of a film, but constructs spaces in which we get to participate with more than just our gaze. This gives her installations a physical depth dimension, an experience that is not just that of the gaze. We cannot simply avert our gaze from the narrative, but are surrounded by it and experience it with more than one of our senses. 

Sidén’s art has influenced artists to work in their own time and to give it visible form. That intensity and presence are still there in her new work. In Passing cuts deep into our own time and into our lives with questions about where we belong, how we look after our children, and why we need baby hatches in our hospital walls. When the times have given Sidén’s work greater scope, then that which exists outside the present day stands out even more clearly. One such aspect is the formal one, in which her development of the artistic potential of the moving image has been pivotal. She has consistently and repeatedly chosen to employ and artistically refine certain techniques that actually have another, more profane use, such as the CCTV camera, and thereby created works that both express and see their own time. Something else that stands out even more clearly over time is the way her meticulous construction of spaces using moving images, sound and objects creates works that allow a multi-layered seeing from a variety of perspectives. The way she creates a visual architecture for viewers to spend time in, and while there to experience narratives in which nothing is simplified or made obvious. In Sidén’s works the viewer is not given an unambiguous image of right or wrong, cause and effect. She has the single narrative and the image split into a number of voices, situations, moments and stories. 

In the same way, the times have given her subjects a patina and allowed them to become part of a larger cycle outside of the topical buzz of the media, in which the momentary excitement rapidly subsides. Her figures rise with the times out of the specificities of the here and now and become more archaic; like people in every age, their lives are shaped by events bigger than themselves, and their lives speak to us, irrespective of when we meet them. In Passing is equally much a calling into question of our human failings in the present moment, and a test of the strength of the bond between children and parents, the vulnerability of the abandoned, and the pain of separation. She gives contemporary form to these recurring, eternal questions in the art of humanity, thus breathing new life into them and making them accessible to us right now. In a heated, CCTV-monitored hatch in a hospital wall in Berlin she finds all the abandoned children in history.