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 News from New York, an artist is assigned to be an extra shooting video during a large-scale film production in a replica of the American Museum of Natural History constructed in Brighton Beach. She wanders through the museum and sees filming equipment camouflaged as surveillance cameras and hidden lenses in the props. All the supporting characters are visitors who have been instructed to just walk around and look at the staged museum. A month later, the artist is back to film the main character as she delivers monologues directed at the hidden cameras. In parallel, the artist tries to find out what the movie is really about.
The work of Swedish-Swiss artist Sara Sjölin is centered on the affective dimensions of comedy as it emerges in aestheticized forms of tragedy, mundane observation and spontaneous imagination. Enacted in film, speech, performance and installation, Sjölin’s work fictionalizes partial truths, creatively resituates them and brings them into view through processes of tentative sense making, gradually revealing the multifaceted and dynamically shifting nature of meta-narrative and poetic worlds. Sara Sjölin has presented her work at Uniondocs (US), Lagune Ouest (DK), Kunsthaus Zürich (CH), Konstnärshuset (SE), CPH:DOX (DK), Copenhagen Contemporary (DK), Galleri Susanne Ottesen (DK), Krukan Sportsbar (SE), Østerbro Stadion (DK), Kunsthal Aarhus (DK) and SALTS (CH). She has been an Artist in Residence at the Danish Institute in Rome and at ISCP in New York. Sjölin holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
