Marc Johnson (France, 1986, lives and works in Stockholm and Paris) is a French artist, trained architect and filmmaker with ancestors in Benin, Togo, Ghana and Congo. His work has been shown extensively around the world. Important individual exhibitions include The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti-Shrem Museum of Art (2017), UC Davis, United States (in collaboration with the Kramlich collection); La Maréchalerie, contemporary Art Center (2016), Versailles, France and The Zentrum fur Medienkunst, Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. (2016), Halle, Germany.
Johnson has participated in the Sundance Film Festival (2016, 2018), the Biennale of Moscow for Young Art (2017, 2018), The Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale Shorts (2015), the Yvonne Rainer Project at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (2014) and more than 50 International Film Festival worldwide.
Major group exhibitions include “OLHO“, Museo de Arte Moderna (2018), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; “constellation•s, new ways of living in the world”, arc en rêve centre d’architecture (2016), Bordeaux, France; “trans(?)duction“, CNEAI= Centre National Edition Art Image (2015), Chatou, France and “ATM tempo I/II/III” (2017), Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, Japan.
He received the LVMH Young Artist Award in 2009, was awarded the Best Short Film Award from the Las Palmas International Film Festival de Gran Canaria in 2016, the Cornish Family Prize for Art & Design Publishing from the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2017, the Best Short Film Award from the 10th Annual Milwaukee Film Festival in 2018 and receive the i-Portunus, European Commission’s mobility scheme for artists in 2019.
Marc Johnson is currently a PhD candidate (2021-present) in the Film and Media department of the Stockholm University of the Arts, in Sweden. Johnson is investigating artistic research strategies to re-think archival materials — through a series of experiments — within the tradition of archival film practices — focused on re-reading formations of violence within natural history film archive(s) from the silent film era. Johnson is practicing modes of attending and re-configuring such as re-filming, re-montage, re-framing, and reading film as text through laying out image sequences to decrypt their his/her-stories and meaning.