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.
Ambidextrous Performance – No. 5 of 8 BY Lars Siltberg
To see all sides, take in everything, one thing and another, and still manage to say something…? Siltberg’s film writer uses his right hand, his left hand and both feet. The white text is incomprehensible but more and more resembles his wings.
Lars Siltberg is an artist based in Stockholm. He has been working since 1999 to develop a filmic language that can be described as haptic, that is, something that the body perceives and understands. His interest in rituals, trials and states of mind emerges form his work with performance-video. Through his unyielding examination, humans are on a par with animals and things in an effort to free ourselves from the object-subject dichotomy (see Merleau-Ponty). Suggestion and repetition are key characteristics of his video work that meditate on our vegetative side and perceptions and associations based in the body.
Lars Siltberg was born 1968 in Stockholm where he lives and works. Siltberg works foremost with video. Recent commissions and exhibitions include: Extras, permanent photography- and videoinstallation at the University Collage of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre in Stockholm, Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Beauty of failure/failure of beauty by Harald Szeemann, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturene, San Sebastian, Effort by Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, 49:th Venice Biennale, Plateau of Humankind by Harald Szeemann and Milliken Gallery, Stockholm.
Siltberg’s works consists of researches within the broad field of human existence where an interest in psychological driving forces like willpower and cognitive needs is merged with physical challenges and bodily reconstructions. This is indicative of Lars Siltbergs analytic approach, his way of choosing a subject and studying it within the parameters of a strictly defined set of circumstances.
His method has been called artificial empiricism. The subject can be seen as the phenomenology of experience – the way in which we engage with the world through our senses. In Siltbergs work such an equilibrium can exist for just a fleeting moment. Whatever synthesis the artists aims for, his artificiall constructs cannot retain it. This gives his work the character of an infinite struggle. In the end this might be the best way of approaching it: as an attempt to investigate a set of empricial ”What if?” – questions imagined by the artist. After all, empiricism can be the method of advanced scientific (and in this case artistic) research – as well as the most basic form of human interaction with the world.
