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.
När solen går ner är den alldeles röd, sen försvinner den BY Lina Selander
Lina Selander’s work When the sun sets it’s all red, then it disappears takes Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise as its starting point. Examining the relationship between political, utopian and emotional expressions in words and images, it explores the revolutionary zeal of a time and the desire to start all over again.
La Chinoise is a film in the making, a film that tells the story of a revolutionary and truth-seeking common narrative while at the same time trying to be a part of it, sharing its inherent expressions and problems. Lina Selander’s film is also a work in the making, engaging and evolving around Godard’s film and the questions it addresses and responds to. But it is also an installation about photography and storytelling.
Most of the photographs in the series of stills are from the 1968 student revolts in Paris and Stockholm, taken at meetings and demonstrations. But they also show other motifs, such as a close-up of a growing blob of moisture on a news reel showing Chairman Mao swimming in the Yellow River, personal photos and some stills from La Chinoise. All the images have been photographed with flash and all the photos have a white circular reflection on them which may represent or constitute a common space where the spectator’s space and that of the motif overlap, but where they are also defined as separate – a blinding dazzle or hole in the image which ultimately blocks any final narrative and forces itself into the motifs and events that are being documented.
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.
