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.
Set in the open-air museum Seurasaari in Finland, the piece addresses the tradition of this kind of museums, existing in several places around the Nordic countries. Embodying a longing for solitude and contact with a contrived idea of a pastoral and serene natural landscape, these museum parks supposedly represents the way things used to be, satisfying a nostalgic longing for something that has in fact never existed. It is not unusual to see costumed individuals around Seurasaari, Skansen and places of their like. Museum guards, wear costumes mimicking attire from previous centuries. In this video we encounter two cosplayers that appear as medieval cyborg-esque personas, enacting their idea of the past.
Annika Eriksson is originally from Malmö and lives in Berlin since 2002. At the center of her artistic practice is an interest in social interaction: how do we live together, what kind of societies do we create, and what happens in the margins or in the transition from one social order to another? In her work, the social has always involved a key emphasis on the slippages between the one ME into others – with a return to questions of interaction and exchange, circular forms of communication, self-abnegation and empathy. Her project also engages with the relations between humans and animals; of our interdependence, slippages and connection, but also registers of violation, and the animal as a distinctively human projection surface. She has been exhibiting since the early 90s in various biennales and institutions, for example the biennales in Istanbul, Venice, Sao Paolo, Shanghai and Vienna; in institutions such as Bonner Kunstverein, Tate Liverpool, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Hayward Gallery, London and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Stockholm.
