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.
On Hospitality is a necromantic documentary where the Iraqi artist Layla Al-Attar returns from the dead to tell the story of how a Swedish company built a luxurious hotel in Baghdad, ordered by Saddam Hussein for the 1983 summit of the Non-Alignment Movement. War changed the plans. Layla made a mosaic at the entrance of the hotel, depicting George Bush’s face, and her house was hit by an American missile.
Behzad Khosravi Noori, Ph.D is an artist, writer, educator, playgrounder, and necromancer. His research-based practice includes films, installations, as well as archival studies.
His works investigate histories from The Global South, labor and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter narration to the east-west dichotomy during the Cold War. By bringing multiple subjects into his study, he explores possible correspondences seen through the lenses of contemporary art practice, proletarianism, subalternity, and the technology of image production. He analyses contemporary history to revisit memories beyond borders, exploring the entanglements and non/aligned memories. Behzad Khosravi Noori uses personal experience as a springboard to establish, through artistic research, a hypothetical relationship between personal memories and significant world events between micro and macro histories. His works emphasize films and historical materials to bring the questions such as what happens to the narration when it crosses the border? What is the future of our collective past? In his practice, he reflects upon the marginalia of artistic explorations in relation to art, the history of trans-culturalism, and global politics.
His ongoing artistic research project, The landscape of Imagination, analyses archival photographs captured with a camera known in the Urdu language as the “Soul Catcher” in relation to backdrop painting in the context of the Global South.
The search to propose a transdisciplinary practice point to the complexity of the subject and context of the inquiry and how substructures perform in creating connections between seemingly irreconcilable arenas and forms of urban life and its transnational characteristics.
Khosravi Noori’s works have been shown at Kalmar Museum, Malmö art Museum,
Venice Biennale,Timișoara Biennale, Ural industrial biennale, 12.0 Contemporary Islamabad, Tensta Konsthall, Sakakini art institution Ramallah Palestine, HDLU Zagreb, WHW Zagreb, Botkyrka Konsthall, CFF (Centre of Photography, Stockholm), Marabouparken, Stockholm, Centre of Contemporary art, Riga, Arran Gallery Tehran, among other venues.
He is a member of the editorial board of VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research.
Magnus Bärtås
Born 1962 in Jönköping, Sweden. Currently based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Magnus Bärtås is an artist and author. His installations and video essays are often investigating in the fields of marginal architecture, biography and storytelling. He is a professor of fine arts at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm since 2008. His PhD in practice-based research was presented in 2010 (You Told Me – work stories and video essays). His video essay Madame & Little Boy won the grand prize at Oberhausen International Film Festival. He has published three books of essays together with Fredrik Ekman. Their latest book (Alla monster måste dö) was nominated to the Swedish national book prize (Augustpriset). He participated in ‘Reshapes’, the IASPIS contribution to The Venice Biennale in 2003, “Modernautställningen” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2006 and 2010 and the 9:th Gwangju Biennale 2012 among other exhibitions.
