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.
Per capita Sweden is one of the world’s largest weapon exporters in parallel with the self-promotion of a peace-making nation worldwide. Intertwined in the narrative presented in the film, the authors are building a replica of one of Sweden´s most sold hand held weapons. The film Sicherheit (German for “Security”) made collaboratively by Saskia Holmkvist, Ellen Nyman & Corina Oprea stresses the construction of colonial modernity in the Swedish imaginary. Through a research process the authors seek to endow the image of Swedish weapon industry with a contextual agency. By linking it to people, places of importance to the production of weapons as Karlskoga, Luleå and Göteborg and events whose intersection within a wide variety of imagery gives rise to linking western security with paths of migration, the film tests History in terms of the present. The resulting trajectories effectively link established discourses, proposing transcultural and political re-readings.
The film’s title refers to the term Sicherheit used by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to describe how security solutions are built on a false sense of security, – which can only be compensated for with more security, since they create more fear out of which an escalation of conflict follows. In the work with the film connections are drawn between questions of security, migration and weapon export in order to approach a self-image of a country like Sweden.
Saskia Holmkvist´s work is concerned with exploring the limits of translation drawing from ways of practice within the domain of translation and how it shapes and forms relations and historical trajectories, in particular the impact on agency. The work combines aspects of ethnography and theatre to create films and performance that relate through past artworks, language, and contested history. Zooming in on gestures, fragments and distorting information so as to reconfigure histories, layered entanglements with performative translations is part of the aesthetic and theoretical fabric of her practice.
The practice builds on long-term research, where the art-making always comes out of working with a diverse array of people from a variety of backgrounds over long periods. Holmkvist considers these people, who often become friends, the main agents of the transformative potential in her work, creating non-linear narratives, suggesting alternative readings or possibilities, juxtaposing documentary with fiction and storytelling. She works in a circular mode of connectivity, bringing together themes of historic erasure and limits of translation through critical listening, oral speculation, repetitions into works of performance and film installation. Examples of this can be seen in works such as Margaret (Back Translation), Blind Understanding – New Commentary (2009-2019), Procession Action Tour (2018), as well in earlier video works such as System (2001) and Interview with Saskia Holmkvist (2005).
Corina Oprea
Corina Oprea is a curator, editor and educator, focusing on contemporary art, visual and performance culture. Oprea is the co-editor of the collection book Climate: Our Right to Breathe, she has served as Managing Editor of L’Internationale Online, the digital platform for research and arts of a network of over 15 leading European museums and arts organizations and as lecturer at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg. Between 2017 and 2018, she was Artistic Director of Konsthall C, in Stockholm, with a program on Decolonization in the North. Corina holds a PhD from University of Loughborough-UK, with the thesis ‘The End of the Curator – on curatorial acts as collective production of knowledge’ and is curator of Timisoara 2023- European Capital of Culture and of the large scale inaugural exhibition Chronic desire-Sete cronica. Born in 1981 in Bucharest, she lives and works in Stockholm.
