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.
A 19th-century French hand-painted wallpaper from Medborgarhuset, the house for the citizens in Stockholm, forms the basis of this piece. It was filmed using 16 mm film transferred to DV-tape and processed through a broken post-production machine from the 1990s. The installation explores a variation of the Endymion mythology, where the god Hypnos falls in love with Endymion, causing him to keep his eyes open during sleep. This allows Hypnos to continuously gaze at the young man’s face. The installation embodies a technological sedimentation or a pastoral utopia, representing the moon as a gigantic pixel. It explores the dimensions of a square, representation, subject, room, limit, surface, and the definition of front and back.
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.
