In Sandra Vaka’s VÅRT SUG we are met by contemporary still lives of flowers, all fresh and colourful in the sunlight, held in a tight grip by a group of soft hands.

In the growing photo series VÅR, plastic straws are used as vases for cut flowers found on morning walks to the artist´s studio. What first appears as a romantic and aesthetically pleasing natural bouquet, takes a 180-degree turn. The straw, being dependent on the human suck mechanism and a wet source, collapses in its function.

Straws not flooded with liquid,

flowers will burst in thirst,

beauty for the sake of short-lived pleasure,

only what’s dead will last for years.

Suge 2, the biggest photo on display, comes from a longer series of Suge works portraying plastic straw-ends, photographed through the computer screen. Here Vaka is repeatedly pouring water on the screen, in an attempt to ´watering´. Not filling the open holes instead liquid teasing on top of the closed-off surface, pulling layers of materiality op on materiality - straws, - water, - machine.

The two-dimensional works are “paired” with Have we met before? sculptures, a juxtaposition of rose stems and straws, connected by a hard cover of silver. Connection is put there by force through chemical baths and electric wires, in a technique called electroplating. Both alluring and intriguing, yet, without direction, looking for somewhere to grow and connect. Where is my human, where is my flower, where is my electricity?

Alas! What would Baudelaire have said about these flowers of evil?