Swedish photographer Pernilla Zetterman’s first monograph Behave opens with two stark images. The first is a tabletop photograph of a mouthguard – the type used to prevent teeth grinding – glistening against a solid black background. The second is a seated figure tightly wound in a garment with its arms wrapped around its back. These images function as the dramatic prologue to an intense visual exploration of behavioral patterns, origins and contours of identity, performance, control and regimentation.

Using two powerful battlegrounds for identity making, the home and the sports arena, Pernilla Zetterman (*1970 in Stockholm) explores how the details of a discipline, a behavior or a sport, act as the grammar for a language to be studied and learned, taught and passed down to future generations – of daughters or athletes. 

Exhibition schedule: Fotografins Hus, Stockholm, Sweden Spring 2010 | And futher venues