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.
In each moment, the body is hopelessly fragmented, but over time a spatial shape is un- veiled. The camera’s forced look oscillates between a voyeuristic and sculptural relation to the body, a frightening and intimate such.
In the video installation Inside, the viewer will be guided through a journey starting from within the empty shell of a human body. When you exit through the head, the perspec- tive changes and you are forced to inspect a body from the outside. Only the parts that are in focus are visible, the rest of the image falls into a dark void, the viewer is forced to follow the gaze of the camera. Enclosed by organic sounds and music you can’t escape the intimacy. With the help of this forced, controlled gaze the duality of the expression is brought forward. This visually expressive work poses questions about the fragmentations of our existence and the experience of our bodies within the context of the digital and hyper-technological society we live in.
I filmed myself with a 3D scanner to study the female body as an object and the sen- sation of feeling skinless when being watched naked – being exposed. But this is also about taking control. Since the camera directs the gaze, the viewers are ultimately left to the image presented; they are forced to hand over the control.
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.
