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.
For her graduation project, Billing invited her fellow graduating students from various disciplines at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, to take dance lessons during the spring of 1999 together with the choreographer Anna Vnuk. In the final film that deals with learning and becoming, the pedagogical aura of the art school is pitched against the more rapaciously aspirant desire witnessed at a talent show. Students hastily run through corridors and staircases from their respective departments to the art school’s auditorium to perform a rehearsed dance routine to the soundtrack ‘Moody’, 1981, by ESG.
Jönköping, Sweden, 1973; lives and works in Stockholm
Johanna Billing has been making video works since 1999 that weave together music, movement and rhythm. Merging the production modes of collective live events and workshops with a cinematic language, the films often focus on aspects of learning and how time plays a key role in that process. Billing in part directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private as well as the individual in the society as a whole. Billing often addresses political climates and cultural specificities. She transforms through a documentary method, her filmmaking in a fictive space to examine actual and contrived events and how that filmed compression illuminates their overlap. Billing’s videos often feature modified scores and music composed by the artist or in close dialogue with participants, using sound as an essential device for collaboration and communication.
Henry Moore Selder
Born in 1973. He studied at the Stockholm Film School 1995-96. Active as Filmmaker/Director since 1996. He makes his own short films but has also collaborated with artists such as Johanna Billing, Eva Gunnars/ Love & Devotion and Sara Lundén.
