Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
What makes us believe in something? Make believe deals with this question. The credibility of a system and what we choose to rely on or understand within a framework, with a magician as example.
Magic is without doubt a manipulative situation. But also a practice based on an agreement on entertainment between the magician and his audience. An entertainment that sums up in questions on illusion and trustworthiness. ‘What is illusion and what is reality?’ says the magician.
The magician or illusionist fools our reason and juggles with understanding and logics. He deliberately puts our rational sorting out of order. One thing is said and another done. Poses to have honest intentions and turns to our logics in words, but does the opposite in practice. The collision between them becomes a mental somersault for the viewer.
Saskia Holmkvist´s work is concerned with exploring the limits of translation drawing from ways of practice within the domain of translation and how it shapes and forms relations and historical trajectories, in particular the impact on agency. The work combines aspects of ethnography and theatre to create films and performance that relate through past artworks, language, and contested history. Zooming in on gestures, fragments and distorting information so as to reconfigure histories, layered entanglements with performative translations is part of the aesthetic and theoretical fabric of her practice.
The practice builds on long-term research, where the art-making always comes out of working with a diverse array of people from a variety of backgrounds over long periods. Holmkvist considers these people, who often become friends, the main agents of the transformative potential in her work, creating non-linear narratives, suggesting alternative readings or possibilities, juxtaposing documentary with fiction and storytelling. She works in a circular mode of connectivity, bringing together themes of historic erasure and limits of translation through critical listening, oral speculation, repetitions into works of performance and film installation. Examples of this can be seen in works such as Margaret (Back Translation), Blind Understanding – New Commentary (2009-2019), Procession Action Tour (2018), as well in earlier video works such as System (2001) and Interview with Saskia Holmkvist (2005).
