In an effort to lay bare the conflicts that sear her subjectivity, Swiss photographer Cornelia Hediger takes multiple images of herself and combines them into segmented compositions in which her personae engage in dialogical confrontation with one another. Hediger’s several selves are dominated by a pair, one of which is passive, creative, and skeptical—verging often on victimhood—and the other of which is more assertive and, if not confident, then at least determined. Incipient violence, agony, severe judgment, imminent death and an undercurrent of terror shoot through Hediger’s scenarios, never consummated and always renewed and unresolved. In one of her most telling studies, Hediger’s passive and, in this case, childlike self sits hunched in a corner, having scrawled an unkempt tangle of chalk marks on the floor, as she looks up apprehensively at her would-be dominating double who stands before her holding an empty bird cage. For many feminist photographers, imprisonment is a condition to be borne or battled; for Hediger, it is an ever-present horror and threat, continually deferred. 

-Michael Weinstein, NewCity