One of Sweden’s most innovative filmmakers, currently exhibiting both at the Venice Biennale and at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Lina Selander’s work contrasts temporal images to explore the territories between fight and flight, boundaries and ownership.
Functioning as collage works, Selander’s oeuvre is built upon a vast archive of documentary images and recordings, so that each individual work often builds upon a previous work as well as linking to outer influences – be these filmic pieces, fine art or texts. Often her works take place within periods on the edge of ideological or political collapse, and in this interest in history comes another aspect of her work: the fascination for the technologies that make archiving, documentation and media records possible.
Selander’s upcoming solo exhibition in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm features three works three works: 2007 installation, The Hours that Hold the Form (A Couple of Days in Portbou); The Offspring Resembles the Parent, 2015 and Around the Cave of the Double Tombs, 2010). With each work touching upon war and in particular, religious conflict, this exhibition reveals a darker side to the artist’s work but is an inevitable moment for her practice which has continually analysed the notion of utopia and its collapse. It is also a timely show, having been influenced by growing tensions in Europe at the present.
The first of Selander’s works celebrates the life of famed German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, and laments his tragic suicide in the town of Portbou in 1940 – having found the France-Spain border was closed, only to have it open the following day. The second chapter to the exhibition meanwhile, links memory to the economy – looking at memory itself as capital inheritance. Her final work is autobiographical, documenting her own travels through the West Bank with a focus upon the turbulent city of Hebron, using emblematic images and texts to symbolise the city’s seemingly unending conflict.
Lina Selander: Moment, until 28 February 2016, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. For more details, visit www.modernamuseet.se
Credits
1. Lina Selander, Around the Cave of the Double Tombs (film still), 2011 © Lina Selander. Text in collaboration with Fredrik Ehlin and Oscar Mangione Bildupphovsrätt 2015
