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.
If a serious expression is connected with a playful, one starts to question the trustworthiness of what is beeing presented. This is what happens in the film Eight Martini. During the entire 4 minute film the viewer is put to correlate an image and a story that do not have any evident connection. Not until the end when we are to get the answer it is revieled that it’s three different expressions that have points of contact but no evident connection; a historical documentary, a didactic narration, and a party game.
Eight Martini was an internal expression within the CIA and the coming into being of it is told to us in the film. The expression was synonymous with successful results and external acknowledgement which was something the remote viewers within the CIA did not have. So how did they present their results to the sceptics so that they would find them successfull in order to get acknowledged? This leaves us with the question, when is a presentation of a result believable to us?
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).
