Svekrva / Mother-in-law – Anna Ehrlemark

I took this photo of two women and a baby on the beach of Playa Flamingo on Lanzarote in March 2022. It was the first holiday after the pandemic, Russia had just attacked Ukraine, and we still had to wear masks in the hotel buffet. The resort was half empty because it was early spring and corona-restrictions, mostly families and pensioners – Vamos a la playa. I was spying on my fellow tourists. Snapping photos of my kids and zooming in on the people in the background. Then I used these photos for drawing, and I have continued to draw the beach since then, as a kind of meditation over the chaos and devastation that is being released upon the world by the world’s richest and most powerful against its weakest citizens, with the beach Gaza  as ground zero.

I draw freely, humans in this unnatural state of idleness, uselessness, well deserved rest. Whenever I’m stuck I return to this motive, the two women on the beach, the older smoking woman with a bandage on her leg and the young beauty in a gold bikini. The older woman is in focus, I call her mother-in-law (or svekrva in Serbian). This is a book of drawings of a shy paparazzi photo, frozen in time. Thank you, unknown women, and excuse me for reproducing you in this way, but I fell in love with your silhouettes.

Anna Ehrlemark, Belgrade July 2026

Published by Matrijaršija and printed together with Anna during an artist residency in July, 2026. The residency is a part of our publishing project ZOO Bindery with support from Creative Europe and Kulturrådet.