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 professional surgeon removes the skin from a toy panda meticulously in an operating theatre, situated in a large hospital in Sweden.
Are humans fundamentally different from machines? Can machines ever be humanlike? We all carry within us the potential for both goodness and spite. None of us can be sure how we will act in an exposed position. Does the capacity for care as well as cruelty have a common origin in the human psychological constitution?
If the entire human set of rules and regulations, the layers that have been added since the embryonic stage, are taken away and isolated from the individual and we reach the core, where the original humaneness is, do we find a machine or an animal?
Tove Kjellmark received her M.F.A. at The Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2009. Since then her work has been exhibited all over the world as well as in Sweden. Over a longer period of time she has dealt with techno-animalism, giving rise to another type of animality, another type of nature but above all very delicately playing the effects of the involved audience. In her latest practice she has experimented with glitches in transformations between digital and organic; gaps in the experience when you move from one world to another, the changeability of time and how it shapes our perception of our own and others’ bodies, the human and the non-human. She is not looking for the fixed and stable, but the actual interplay between the inner and the outer vision – not just her own and others but also the machines. She examines the sublime gaps around the edges where technology fails to freeze time because she is interested in the ways that technology can fail to capture life – and what the poetics of that failure might look like.
A selection of exhibition venues from the last few years include: Katarina Church in Stockholm, (2017), Manchester Art Gallery (2016), The Royal British Society of Sculptors in London (2015), Stockholm Central railway station (2015), Bohusläns Museum (2015), Geijutsu Kouminkan Tokyo (2014), Andersson/Sandström Gallery (2014). Video-works: IDFA Amsterdam, Transmediale Berlin, Oberhausen film festival, and Tempo documentary festival in Stockholm, among others.
