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.
Notes during the work with the film: Beginning with the picture on the title page of Rudbeck’s Atlantica, in which Rudbeck tears a piece off the soft earth’s crust, revealing Sweden as the sunken Atlantis, and in the same audaciously unscientific way freed from reality’s hold, in layer by layer of time and film, identities, histories and places appear and are concealed, like cities, abandoned or yet to be built: Tutankhamen’s crypt and unbroken seal, Bredäng and the grave of Caspar Hauser, the strange entrance to the old Stasi headquarters in Berlin, other places, other prisons, bound together by subterranean passages.
This little film actually would like to be understood as an act of resistance, a tentative breaking out of an order where maximum speed and movement’s hyper synchronized time cannot be expressed other than in a stagnated and timeless flickering present. Does it not feel sometimes as if we were cut off from both the past and the future? Encased by machinic processes that want to destroy us? As if the future is no longer a promise of emancipation, but rather a more or less vague threat of an approaching disaster, one that we ourselves have caused?
The uncertain hope that might counter the loss of experience and community is admittedly voiced on a stage that is other and with gestures that remain abstract – but still, with another rhythm: an alien, unknown time, incompatible, turning endlessly into itself, but that reveals itself and disappears.
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.
