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.
In Liminal Beings, the artist films herself sculpting a life-sized doll made of skin, flesh and hair, drawn to the act of burying it and digging it up again. What begins as an artistic process gradually unfolds into an evolving narrative between creator and object.
The film lingers on states of transition. Mushrooms – organisms that evade simple classification – become quiet markers of this liminal terrain, inhabiting the threshold between life and decay and hinting at other ways of seeing. Rather than serving as symbols, they suggest a condition: a space where categories begin to loosen.
The act of excavation carries a curious attraction. To dig is to disturb what was settled, to approach what might have been repressed. Yet the deeper the film moves into this territory, the less certain such categories appear. Attraction and discomfort coexist; the grotesque becomes unexpectedly tender. From this liminal space emerges an ephemeral narrative, revealing brief glimpses of a wonderland within the realm of the unreal.
Sonja Nilsson (b. 1977) is a visual artist based in Berlin and Ljusdal, Sweden.
Nilsson’s artistic practice spans across installation, video, writing and performance. Her work explores themes of social psychology, subjective experience of reality, and the transient and ephemeral. The place or state that is in between – the liminal – has consistently been recurring in her works. She constructed a corridor of mirrors, a piece that examines the surveillance gaze in the Panopticon. The 150 square meter installation has been permanently installed in Avesta Art’s premises in Sweden since 2006. In a solo exhibition at Färgfabriken in 2013, she made a video installation made up of dioramas that told the anatomy of the course of events surrounding an evening of an erotic adventure that ended in violence. Between 2017 and 2021, she exhibited a series of works under the titel “Visibility is a Trap” that dealt with a theme around the phenomenon of Passing (sociology). The exhibition was shown on eight different occasions in Sweden, Germany and Belgium. Her work is represented in the collection of Gothenburg Museum of Art, she has received grants from the Art Academy’s prize committee and Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation.
