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.
Installation: Total Eclipse of the Heart. An installation at Filmform, Stockholm. It consists of three parts: one looped short film on a monitor, one video projection, and one recital on an old fashion Revox tape recorder.
The monitor (part I) shows silent black and white scenes: tunnels, reflections of light, the setting of a table… drafts of narrations that can take form. The projection (part II) shows a monumental circle shaped red solid which to a large part hides the b/w moving images behind it. From the tape recorder (part III) comes a male voice monotonously reading the text 117 of 146 Instamatic pictures, which meticulously describes a series of photographs which have been sewn in.
In Total Eclipse of the Heart I wanted to investigate the nature of a hidden room in the image, its ‘hiddenness’. Imagine yourselves a staring into your own blind spot… In Total Eclipse of the Heart the black and white moving images are to a large extent blinded by a monumental circle shaped red solid. On the one hand the red solid meets the gaze of the beholder as an eye of its own and sends back the gaze, on the other hand a relation (an insecure exchange of meaning…) is formed between the red solid and the two other parts of the installation: the smaller film and the voice that monotonously chants descriptions of perforated photographs. I wanted to explore the black or blind field, that which does not become image, and its relation (bleeding) to other stations in an installation, to other parts of an image.
Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lina Selander’s films and installations can be read as compositions or thought models, where ideas and conditions are weighed and tested. She examines the relationships between memory and perception, photography and film, language and image. The precise, rhythmic editing and use of sound create their own temporality and a strong inner pressure. Selander’s oeuvre recurrently explores a fascination for the phenomena and technologies that make images possible, thereby enabling history to be documented. Montage is used in the films to juxtapose images, while entailing a potential loss of content. Image meets text in a flow where meaning arises from the ostensibly unrelated, like echoes through and between the works. Selander’s works constitute a dense archive of observations, occasionally in dialogue with other films, art or literature. Their subject matters often stem from historic or ideological junctions, where one system or physical place collapses and something new begins to emerge.
Selander’s work has been shown at Kunst Haus Wien, Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal and in international group shows such as Venice Biennale 2015; Kyiv Biennale 2015; Seoul Media City Biennale 2014; Manifesta 2012 in Genk, Belgium; Bucharest Biennale 2010; and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
