Eva Klasson

Spirituality permeates Amiteera Birina’s entire production, which focuses on the body (usually her own). She is, nowadays, recognised as a central figure in the history of Swedish photography (receiving international acclaim, at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, as early on as in 1975) and represented at several national, and international institutions, including Hasselbladstiftelsen (the Hasselblad Foundation), Gothenburg, Sweden; Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art), Stockholm; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Birina grew up on a small family farm in Brämhult, outside of Borås, in Sweden and was (from an early age) drawn to art and spirituality. Her first photographs, however, were not taken until her late teens when her first boyfriend, who had a camera, taught her about aperture and shutter speed. After seven years at a girls’ school in Borås, Birina worked as a photocopier at Hasselblad’s photo studio (in Gothenburg, Sweden) between 1968 and 1969, where she (amongst other things) copied the famous images from the moon landing. Birina later recalled her stint at Hasselblad’s, as well her ensuing first trip to Paris, in an interview with Pontus Dahlman (‘Eva Klasson - fotostjärnan som försvann’, article in vi, 25 July 2022):

‘At weekends I was allowed to stay behind and take my own pictures. I had bought my own camera,’ she says, explaining that it was a Nikon F, one of the most advanced so-called system cameras of the time, popular with press photographers because it could handle almost anything. ‘I took portraits, of my friends, moved into a commune, started assisting another photographer who worked in fashion and interior design. And I remember so clearly when the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s came out, how everything opened up and I don’t know how it happened, but I met a guy with a military jeep, and we went to Paris in that car without a roof … Everything was so new, we lived out under the bridges, people just turned up there in the blue hour. I had never tasted a camembert.’

Upon returning to Sweden she went to Stockholm and briefly attended the school of, internationally acclaimed photographer, Christer Strömholm (1918 - 2002, Swedish photographer known for his intimate black and white street photography portrait series, particularly his portraits of transgender women in Paris. Recipient of the 1997 Hasselblad Award) for a few weeks in the late 1960s, before returning to Paris (the city that would prove to be her salvation as well as her curse) with a Nikon camera over her shoulder when she arrived in the French capital.

Back in Paris she eventually made her debut, in 1975, with Le troisième angle (The Third Angle), a collection of extraordinary self-portraits exhibited at the Centre George-Pompidou. The self-portraits have been described as intimate (as well as repulsive) close-ups of the body in the form of an ‘undulating landscape.’ Further exhibitions followed, in New York and Rome. Her two series of images in the late 1970s were on the themes of pain and food/digestion respectively. However, only a few years later, in 1984, she gave up photography and moved to the United States. Her marriage to a French poet had led to a divorce and her approach to creative photography had been negatively influenced by her consumption of hashish. Birina explained the situation in the interview with Pontus Dahlman:

I hadn’t smoked hashish until my late twenties. But wow, then all the tension was released! But it took up all my time and I lost my grip. Finally I felt I had to go home, to Brämhult. I cleaned and threw away a lot of negatives and pictures, saved some and packed everything in my bag. It was so nice in the small apartment. Out in the street, someone was playing their musette accordion. Paris wanted to keep me there! But I came home and my mum said: ‘Now you’re going to work at the old people’s home’, and the old people sat there looking so sad. I went out into the woods and took blurry pictures of lingonberries and blueberries, they looked like little fairies ... And I felt: God I have to go away again.

What happened next, in the words of Pontus Dahlman, is a:

long chain of events, starting in Venice where she is invited to give a talk. A time in Geneva leads to the beginning of a long period of spiritual searching and a farewell to the art scene. She makes contact with a spiritual organisation and movement in Africa. Eventually she manages to give up alcohol and drugs. Changes to her new name, nine of them, Amiteera Birina Simantiye being the first three. Long stops along the way: Washington, Quebec.

Having travelled, and shed drugs, Birina is now, since the late 1980s, part of a group of people following the teachings and visions of the guru Bambi Baaba; studying ‘The Science of the Soul’. She currently divides her time between her house in Uganda (where her husband and daughter lives) and a small apartment in Borås, Sweden. She takes photos (in colour) with her smartphone (sometimes a self-portrait and occasionally pictures of flowers), she paints (semi-abstract in bright colours) and organises practical things around the recently reawakened interest in her photography.

In 2024 the Hasselblad Foundation initiated Arkiv Eva Klasson (the Eva Klasson Archive Project). This project enabled researcher Lotta Granqvist, PhD (born 1980, Swedish art historian at Stockholm University) to organise and digitise Birina’s archive. Granqvist’s 2024 doctoral thesis (at the department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University) En konstnär träder fram. Situeringar och blivandeprocesser i Eva Klassons konstnärskap under 1970-talet (An artist emerges. Situations and processes of becoming in Eva Klasson’s oeuvre in the 1970s) was the result of having studied, over eight years, Birina’s artistic practice through her archival material. Arkiv Eva Klasson ensured that the material was made available to future researchers, and other interested parties, before it was donated to the Hasselblad Foundation.

In conjunction with this project, the exhibition En konstnär träder fram (An Artist Emerges) also openedatBorås Konstmuseum (Borås Art Museum), Sweden in October 2025. The exhibition, showing works as well as archival material, from private and public archives and collections, was based on the research results presented in Granqvist’s thesis.

Despite her internationally recognised work and unique methodology, there had been surprisingly little research on Birina previously, which made Granqvist’s thesis particularly important and unique. Like many female artists, Birina had collected material about her artistic practice over several decades, but it had neither been archived nor deposited at any institution that could manage it under expert and climatically suitable conditions. Granqvist’s research work, aided by the Hasselblad Foundation, thus not only helped to make Birina’s work more visible, but also secured, for the future, a female oeuvre that had long been, sadly neglected, on the periphery.