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.
I found an old tape, recorded by chance in my mother’s kitchen in the 80s. Why is it Always about You? takes us into an authentic family situation that is in a state of emotional decomposition. The elder daughter asks her mother to go and get the scissors for her. The mother neither wants to nor can give her the scissors since she’s late to a party, but can nevertheless let go of the absurd conflict that comes up around these scissors. On the contrary she drives it further to give free rein to her own frustration, the mentally elevator takes her up and down between the childish level and the adults. During the fourteen minutes we follow this drama we hear about a pair of blunted, left handed, small, pointed, sharp, orange, big and kitchen scissors. But no one can find the scissors, except the mother who says: I can see the scissors but I won’t tell where they are.
Tove Kjellmark received her M.F.A. at The Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2009. Since then her work has been exhibited all over the world as well as in Sweden. Over a longer period of time she has dealt with techno-animalism, giving rise to another type of animality, another type of nature but above all very delicately playing the effects of the involved audience. In her latest practice she has experimented with glitches in transformations between digital and organic; gaps in the experience when you move from one world to another, the changeability of time and how it shapes our perception of our own and others’ bodies, the human and the non-human. She is not looking for the fixed and stable, but the actual interplay between the inner and the outer vision – not just her own and others but also the machines. She examines the sublime gaps around the edges where technology fails to freeze time because she is interested in the ways that technology can fail to capture life – and what the poetics of that failure might look like.
A selection of exhibition venues from the last few years include: Katarina Church in Stockholm, (2017), Manchester Art Gallery (2016), The Royal British Society of Sculptors in London (2015), Stockholm Central railway station (2015), Bohusläns Museum (2015), Geijutsu Kouminkan Tokyo (2014), Andersson/Sandström Gallery (2014). Video-works: IDFA Amsterdam, Transmediale Berlin, Oberhausen film festival, and Tempo documentary festival in Stockholm, among others.
