About the programme:

AV-arkki’s screening presents experimental short films by Iranian-born artists and filmmakers. The works in the screening explore memory and place, inviting reflection on the role of art as a keeper of personal and collective memory, as well as a creator of new (sense of) space.

Shauheen Daneshfar’s Scented Rooms takes the viewer to Tehran’s oldest theater, once a vibrant cultural space, but forced to close its doors after the 1979 revolution. Through poetic imagery, archival fragments, and reenacted scenes with actors, Daneshfar’s film aims to capture – and release – the spirit of the past era and the forms of resistance smoldering in the theatre’s depths, thus reviving the dormant theatre.

In Azar Saiyar’s Helsinki–Tehran, a narrator born in Finland reflects on and dreams of Tehran. Saiyar skillfully weaves together various cinematic narratives, seeking to capture the (affective) knowledge of migration that passes from generation to generation.

In Sepideh Rahaa’s In Transition, we hear poetic monologues exchanged between two women. In the two visually elegant and melancholic images side by side, the women knit words and meaning into existence, generating space and significance in the world for each other.

Behzad Khosravi Noori’s film On the Dermis of History centers on a monument located in the middle of the Palestine Square in downtown Tehran. The sculpture is a memorial to the Palestinian struggle and, in particular, to the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987–1993. Khosravi Noori uses the monument as a starting point to explore the relationship and history between two hyper-politicised countries through artistic research.

The screening is a collaboration between AV-arkki and Swedish Filmform, both of which are part of DINAMO – Distribution Network of Artists’ Moving Image Organizations. The title of the screening is a passage from a poem by Rumi, translated by Muhammad Ali Mojaradi.

AV-arkki

Om verket:

Leif Elggren är en av Sveriges mest egensinniga och visionära konstnärer. I över fem decennier har han utforskat gränser mellan konst och politik, kropp och makt, verklighet och dröm. Dokumentärfilmen skildrar Elggrens mångsidiga konstnärskap som omfattar dans, performance, installationer, ljudverk och berättelser. Vi får ta del av hans konstnärliga vision och ett livslångt ifrågasättande av hierarkier och normer – allt med svart humor, skärpa och ömhet.

Om filmprogrammet:

Då experimentfilmaren Gunvor Nelsons (1931 – 2025) Stockholmslägenhet tömdes hittades cirka 150 rullar film. Materialet, vilket gåtts igenom sedan 2023, består av negativ, tester, kasserade kopior och privata filmer, och det innehåller såväl nyupptäckter av tidigare okända filmer som sådana som ansetts förlorade.

Filmerna ger en unik inblick i Nelsons arbetssätt och sammanhang: Betydelsen av hemmet i Muir Beach, Kalifornien; hennes dotter Oona; maken Robert Nelson, vännen och filmarkollegan Dorothy Wiley, samt det idoga arbetet med filmlaboratorier.

I programmet Gunvor Nelson Revisited kontextualiserar professor John Sundholm och filmarkivarie Julia Mettenleiter Nelsons filmgärning utifrån de återfunna rullarna samt två sällan visade filmer av Robert Nelson och Dorothy Wiley. Programmet avslutas med den unika dokumentären Oona is my Daughter’s Name (1974) om Gunvor Nelsons besök på Carnegie Art Museum 1972, samt filmen Moons Pool (1974), vilken var under arbete då hon bjöds in till konstmuseet i Pittsburgh.

Last week at Oona’s bath. 1961, USA, 7 min, utan tal, 16 mm, tillåten från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Svenska Filminstitutet.

Muir Beach. 1969, USA, 5 min, utan tal, 16 mm, tillåten från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Svenska Filminstitutet.

Letters. 1972, USA, 11 min, utan tal, 16 mm, tillåten från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Canyon Cinema.

Penny Bright and Jimmy Witherspoon. 1967, USA, 4 min, utan tal, 16 mm, tillåten från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Canyon Cinema.

My Name is Oona. 1969, USA, 10 min, utan tal, 16 mm, barntillåten. Visningsmaterial från Svenska Filminstitutet.

Oona is my Daughter’s Name. 1974, USA, 13 min, engelska, utan text, 16 mm, tillåten från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Svenska Filminstitutet.

Moons Pool. 1974, USA, 15 min, engelska, utan text, 16 mm, tillåten från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Svenska Filminstitutet.

Sixties Surreal is an ambitious survey reimagining American art from “the long 1960s” (1958–72), encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, prints, film and video, and large-scale installation, this revisionist exhibition looks at the ways artists took permission from Surrealism to explore fundamental and underrecognized aesthetic currents, including psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies.

Sixties Surreal recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. The exhibition gathers a range of works by artists including Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Linda Lomahaftewa, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. In the 60s, many of these artists sought new strategies for connecting art back to a lived reality that seemed increasingly unreal due to rapid postwar transformation and the social, political, and technological upheavals of the later part of the decade.

Organized thematically, Sixties Surreal offers a sweeping panorama of the era, juxtaposing contexts and forging new linkages across different communities and ideologies from the East Coast to the West. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue structured chronologically from 1958 to 1972.

About the work:

Diakité originally got the idea for the story of FOR PERSONAL REASONS from a newspaper article. With its theme of police brutality, its relentless voice-over and unseen Black Panther footage, the film is a rare gem that deserves its place in the canon of African-American films.

About the programme:

RPM Festival and MFA Boston co-present a special screening program Gunvor Nelson: Call & Response, honoring one of the highly acclaimed Avard Garde filmmakers Gunvor Nelson. This program features a total of four films from different decades of her long lasting career. Curated by Sarah Keller, Sara Jordeno, Shira Segal and Wenhua Shi, the event will take place at the Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium on Sunday, October 5th at 2:30 PM.

GUNVOR NELSON (1931–2025) was a prominent figure in American and Swedish avant-garde cinema. Born in Sweden, she studied painting before relocating to California in 1953, where she became involved in the Canyon Cinema collective, encountering filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Chris Strand, and Bruce Baillie. Nelson’s deeply personal yet shockingly universal films embody extensive experimentation—including animation, stop-motion, scratching, or painting on film, lens inventions, sound manipulation, and exploration of interiors, framing, and nature –processes that served to explore her experiences related to family and identity, her life as an expatriate, and the cycle of birth and death.
Her debut, Schmeerguntz (1966), co-directed with Dorothy Wiley, was a feminist classic blending humor and grotesque imagery. Nelson’s deeply personal films often drew on her life, exploring themes of womanhood, family, and identity. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Nelson began focusing on her roots, creating films about Kristinehamn and her family including Red Shift (1984).
Between 1983 and 1990, she produced five experimental collage films, including Frame Line (1983), at Filmverkstan in Stockholm, known for their innovation and complexity. Returning permanently to Sweden in 1992, Nelson embraced digital video and received renewed recognition in the Swedish art world.
Trace Elements (2003) from this period will be included in the program. She also influenced generations of filmmakers through her teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970–1992).

Om verket:

Leif Elggren är en av Sveriges mest egensinniga konstnärer. Elggren har varit verksam i över 50 år och blivit internationellt uppmärksammad för sitt genreöverskridande, samhällskritiska och humoristiska konstnärskap. Elggrens verk rör sig mellan performance, dans, installationer och ljudverk. Fokus ligger ofta på makt, tillhörighet och kroppens förfall – alltid med skarp ironi och djupt allvar.

Med Lauri Perelä och poeten Bruno K. Öijer drev Elggren ett fanzine som fick Säkerhetspolisens ögon på sig. Tillsammans med Kent Tankred bildade han performancegruppen Guds Söner. Han är också medgrundare av Elgaland-Vargalan – ett fiktivt kungarike som annekterar världens mentala, geografiska och digitala mellanrum.

About the programme:

Gunvor Nelson (1931–2025) was an acclaimed Swedish experimental filmmaker who made the Bay Area her home for nearly four decades. Born and raised in Kristinehamn, Sweden, she originally came to California in 1953 to study art and art history, first at Humboldt State College, then the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), and finally Mills College, where she earned an MFA in painting. Between 1970 and 1992, she taught at SFAI, where she influenced generations of filmmakers. In 1993 she returned to Sweden and shifted her practice from 16mm filmmaking to digital video.

Over the years, Nelson made personal films that explored her own life and experiences. She thought deeply and freely about film editing and about when to use sound or allow a film to be silent. She collaborated with Dorothy Wiley on five films, three of which are included in this tribute: Schmeerguntz, Fog Pumas, and Before Need Redressed. BAMPFA holds Nelson’s 16mm camera originals and copies of her films in our film vault. In 2019 My Name Is Oona was named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.