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.
When we see the title Interview with Saskia Holmkvist we expect to see an interview with the artist Saskia Holmkvist but few minutes into the film it is revield to us that the situation is another. Saskia Holmkvist has hired a media relations expert to train her to deliver a short statement about her work with apparent sincerity and authority. The short statement that Saskia Holmkvist repeats in their training describes her practice with direct reference to this process.
It’s about how we comprehend something as being honest and true, states Saskia Holmkvist. Over the eight minute film, Holmkvist is instructed in body language, posture, voice timbre, eye contact, in a process more associated with political careerism than artistic development. The revelation of the performance is itself carefully constructed. Shot in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, from several angles using hand-held and fixed cameras, the film’s visual language of authenticity is itself a construction, a language created by media such as reality television. So, our supposed access to reality never quite resolves itself.
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).
