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.
The Offspring Resembles the Parent relates to the observation that memory is inextricably connected with economy – in the sense of a capital that we manage or hand down. The title is from Aristotle’s Politics, which argues that it is unnatural for money to earn interest, because, unlike animals and plants, money cannot breed: ‘Money exists not by nature but by law’.
In focus here, are images used to imbue life into dead capital, specifically emergency money printed in the 1920’s. These banknotes, used during periods of economic depression or in informally-organised en- claves such as ghettos, concentration camps or colonies, are often visually dramatic and charged with the revanchist propaganda of the inter-war period. The softly-coloured colonial bills conjure up another era, one whose fatal imperial projects helped lay the foundations for our own welfare society. The work can be seen as a contemplation on fictive economies, dormant power, blind subordination and a hyperinflation of values – human and monetary.
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.
