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.
Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut BY Lina Selander
The installation Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut tells the story of the modern human’s influence on the Earth, and the ecological consequences.
Here, the relationships between energy extraction, enlightenment, radio activity and film are investigated as tools in the construction of society.
The utopian dream of the first decade of the Soviet state is connected to modern society’s infinite energy needs. Here you see a plaque of polished steel with text that reflects the film in the installation. Different spatialities blend together.
In the film there are images from, among other things, the forbidden zone around the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in Ukraine – and images of plant fossils, as a kind of first images, without human involvement – and drawings of prehistoric forests, as anachronistic witnesses to how human history has ended, and nature has been left to heal itself.
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.
