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.
Man sees himself as nature’s interpreter and tamer. But nature does not care about meaning, and its power cannot actually be controlled. It therefore remains silent in the face of man’s increasingly reckless experiment, the catastrophic effects of which will ultimately afflict man himself. The camera follows a panda at Schönbrunner Zoo surrounded by pictures of the Great Wall of China. Silently the panda holds a bamboo brush to paper, makes some marks with ink and is rewarded with carrots. How shall we interpret this artistic gesture?
The video proceeds to a control room at a never-used nuclear power plant that illustrates yet another despotic panorama, one with the same silence and latent violence. The images are transferred from one context to another, created and recreated in relation to one another. To question what it means is only human, but in the long run probably irrelevant.
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.
