Testimony (Vittnesmål)

Now finally I’m going to tell. I’m going to tell it, just as it was. I was there, I was a witness and this is my testimony. But which story should I pick? Suddenly self-confidence crumbles in a myriad of voices, recollections and cultures. What gives me the right to wipe out other peoples stories with my own? Do I want to cover up the multiple truths I believe in with just one? Everybody is a witness to their own life. It’s a story that’s continually changing. We want to give our testimony.

Lars Siltberg – Ambidextrous Performance 2006 2 min
To see all sides, take in everything, one thing and another, and still manage to say something…? Siltberg’s film writer uses his right hand, his left hand and both feet. The white text is incomprehensible but more and more resembles his wings.

Lars Siltberg is an artist based in Stockholm. He has been working since 1999 to develop a filmic language that can be described as haptic, that is, something that the body perceives and understands. His interest in rituals, trials and states of mind emerges form his work with performance-video. Through his unyielding examination, humans are on a par with animals and things in an effort to free ourselves from the object-subject dichotomy (see Merleau-Ponty). Suggestion and repetition are key characteristics of his video work that meditate on our vegetative side and perceptions and associations based in the body.

Richard Dinter – Vitt 2010 6 min
A sudden change in a room and the consequences that this has. Vitt (White) is a film about colour and change. It’s about buying new white furniture for the family’s sitting room and about white-hot feelings –an unruly and not always flattering testimony.

I make art films because I need to get things out of my system. It’s a seeking and sometimes quite restless and improvised way of working, which also includes other forms of expression such as documentary short film, radio, audio effects, short prose and poetry. I mostly use myself as a point of departure for my work and I’m often the main character in my movies, my art and my other works. Not so much to show myself off as to try to explore and understand the things I feel and go through. At best, art will be the result of this.

Joanna Lombard – Details from the Future 2007 4 min
Joanna Lombard’s mother and her sister were young when they first worked
as extras in the film Z, by Costa-Gavras (1969). Then their lives have moved on. The women didn’t know back then, how life would turn out, but now Lombard knows what happened. Her belated fortune telling moulds itself into a testimony about things that still haven’t happened. The stories create an interesting cat and mouse game with the coming into being of the ego as a central focus.

Joanna Lombard often works with staging situations with authentic backgrounds to address issues of identity, origin and alienation. Her films often have a deliberately ambiguous narrative that can deal with sexuality, the individual and the group and the individual's desire for liberation.

Magdalena Dziurlikowska, Niklas Rydén – Self Torture 2009 7 min
I was brought up in catholic faith. The first time I went to confession I didn’t have anything to confess, so I lied. This is a story about the self-destructiveness that is present in many of us. A narrative about a divided self, someone who exposes herself, drives herself hard, and at the same time someone who is being exposed and tormented.

Magdalena Dziurlikowska is an artist and art critic based in Stockholm. She works primarily with video, photos and text. The core of her works are staged documentaries in which she scrutinises herself, her problems and her artistic work with a mix of black humour and deep seriousness. Through her various projects she investigates contemporary subjectivity, where the individual is obsessed with personal trivia and at the same time with the desire to make themselves heard.

Niklas Rydén moves freely between different modes of expression and genres in his art. With music and theatre in focus, text, film and projections have become the most useful tools in his work. Niklas Rydén is the artistic director for the theatre Atalante in Gothenburg and the New Opera CO, where he demonstrates new directions in musical drama. In Niklas Rydéns work the interest to renew artistic forms meets a genuine desire to communicate, to convey thoughts and experiences. The documentary often takes centre stage, along with the desire to tell important stories about the human condition, stories that can touch and inspire.

Aurora Reinhart – Julio & Lupita 2004 4 min
Julio dances gently with Lupita but harshly bends her hand back. How can she put up with it? Should he be allowed to do it? It’s nothing to gossip about. In Latin America there’s a tradition that an abandoned husband makes a doll representing his wife and dances a last dance with his creation.

Aurora Reinhardt is an artist based in Finland. Her work deals with issues of gender, male and female identities and how they are constructed and represented in society. She works with photography, video and three-dimensional objects.

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir – Jean 1998 2 min
Jean is a voice with a French accent who tells how he met his dream woman. She was beautiful and happy, but after some time together, she was still just as happy... In Ólafsdóttir’s film someone tells about an incident that no one knows about, not even Jean.

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir moves freely in her practice between film, sound art, performance art, drawing and photography. Her work has a clear narrative, and often tells stories about individuals. In a playful and sometimes frightening way she weaves together authentic life stories with the imagined with a dreamlike symbolism.

Markus Öhrn – utdrag ur Magic Bullet (excerpt from Magic Bullet) 2008 3 min
When the film censor cuts a film clip she even cuts out the people in the film that are reacting to what happened. All these people with their wide-eyed looks have gone from the illusion of film to the truth of the archive and give evidence on our relation to what should be kept secret.

Markus Öhrn’s work is often based on existing film and textual material. He has worked with the National Film Archives since 2008 and made the acclaimed 49-hour movie, Magic Bullet, which consists of a compilation of all the material censored by the Swedish film censors. Together with writer and director Torbjorn Säfve he has revived the film company Swedish Subterranean Movie Company (SSMC) that Säfve started in 1966 when he was accepted as a student at the Film School. SSMC only produces films based on found footage and the duo are currently working on a new version of Ingmar Bergman's film Persona to be recorded in Uganda, in the autumn of 2010.

Anneé Olofsson – Evil Eye 2005 10 min
How many times can one die? A woman is lying on a bed, eyes closed and another pair painted on her eyelids. A voice tells how she died. She was beaten to death, stabbed, shot raped, it never ends. It’s a story about many of murders but carried by one woman’s body.

Année Olofsson's deep and eerie work deals with complex family relationships and power structures. The pieces are partly autobiographical and Olofsson experiments with her own obsessions, drives, fears and traumas. Through surreally coloured photographic and video projects she examines the relationship between parents and children. She takes up themes like loneliness, fear of growing old, violence, death, and the distancing and alienation that always creep into close personal contacts. The films and photographs get under your skin and they also allow for different interpretations, depending on who the viewer is.

Jonas Odell – Lies (1 of 3) 2008 4 min
How do you get into a locked and heavily guarded company, completely fool the guards, work two days in a row and remove goods worth thousands of crowns. Part of the answer is amphetamines, and the ability to cheat. But now everything is over, and it begins with a confession.

I have mostly made animated films, or films made using multiple techniques. From the beginning I was drawn to documentary as a reaction to what I perceived as a kind of confinement, especially in the world of animation. When I see the films now I realize that the driving force has been to take the existing stories, which are powerful but often difficult to take in, and retell them in a way that can reach more people. Simply to help the stories reach the audience they deserve.

Fia-Stina Sandlund – Act 1 An Idealistic Attempt 2007 12 min
Two old friends meet, one makes nothing but mistakes, - how can she do right if you compare her with her friend the idealistic terrorist? They begin to plan a campaign against the Mærsk McKinney Møller and Fia-Stina Sandlund asks herself how far she is willing to go in pursuit of her ideals.

I have two main goals with my art, to constantly challenge and develop the concept of art and that my work will get political reactions in society. I work within feminist performance art tradition as well as in the tradition of relational aesthetics and interventions. I often work with narratives in which I take the role as both subject and observer. I lift up hidden power structures in my work, which otherwise might have passed unnoticed.

This exhibition is made in collaboration with Filmform http://www.filmform.com/

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