No Local Foundation proudly presents the fifth ART IN CINEMA projection.
On Wednesday, 24 September in Pod Baranami Cinema we will show Johanna’s Billing videos.
Johanna Billing is a conceptual artist from Sweden, working mainly with video. Her works are very compact and characteristic for their lack of narrative character, strong emphasis on social relations and attitudes being the outcome of these relations. For Billing the most vital issues are: participation, community feeling, one’s engagement in group undertakings, or its lack, silent resistance and indecision. Music in Billing’s works appears to be very important - the artist herself is a founder of an independent Stockholm-based record label named Make it Happen.
Over the last few years Johanna Billing’s works have been presented at a number of international exhibitions, such as the Istanbul Biennial (2005), P.S.1, New York (2006), Museum fuer Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2007) or this year’s Documenta 12, Kassel. Last year her works were exhibited in Raster Gallery in Warsaw.
MAGICAL WORLD (2005) was shot during a summer day in 2005 in a free after-school centre in Dubrava, a suburb of Zagreb. Never ending footage of children rehearsing the 1968 Rotary Connection song “Magical World” (written by Sidney Barnes) acts as an anthem for an uncertain future and presents a glimpse of a country in transformation. The film juxtaposes the historical context of this song with the real life of a generation of children growing up in a relatively young country facing the fast-paced development taking place in the face of European demands for future integration into the group of member states
PROJECT FOR A REVOLUTION (2000) “Project for a revolution” takes as its departure a moment in “Zabriskie Point” (Antonioni, 1970) but is set in present day Sweden. In the video the camera pans through a room where a large crowd of young people are assembled, but not yet to interact or perhaps even talk to one another. Instead they seem to be caught in a moment, seemingly waiting for something.
MISSING OUT (2001) The film begins with a bird’s-eye-view sequence where a group of people lie sprawled over a floor in an irregular formation. No activity is in progress; one rather gets the impression of having landed in one of the more innovative photo sessions of a fashion photographer. The highly staged images, where the artist has drawn inspiration from a clear childhood memory, a collective relaxation exercise (a kind of group activity commonly found in schools and kindergartens across Sweden in the 1970s) that has suddenly and illogically turned into a kind of achievement-demanding activity. The experience of always having to be there, ready to perform and participate, is constantly present in the work, which in itself forms a thought-provoking mirror of the age.
GRADUATE SHOW (1999) Dance video performed by graduate students at Konstfack University College of arts, crafts and Design in Stockholm. For her graduation project Johanna Billing invited her graduating fellow students from the various disciplines to rehearse a dance number created by the invited choreographer Anna Vnuk to the soundtrack by ESG’s track Moody (1981).
WHERE SHE IS AT (2001) was shot at Ingierstrand Bath, designed by Ole Lind Schistad and Eyvind Mostue in 1934, and one of the few remaining pieces of functionalist architecture in Oslo. In a sharp contrast to the ideals of the thirties about health and well-being, Ingierstrand bath is now run down. In the film a young woman climbs up the diving tower, but instead of jumping she stands wavering at the edge where she a faces a physical challenge and her own apprehensiveness.
MAGIC & LOOS (2005) was filmed in Amsterdam in 2005, and shows a group of people packing and removing the contents of a seemingly pleasant apartment. The methodical movements of people packing boxes, carrying the apartment’s contents to the street, and hoisting the furniture to the ground with ropes, and pulleys, silently creates a choreographed mysterious narrative. The owner of the flat is not present, and the unemotional detachment of the movers emphasizes the question of what has happened to the person or persons who once lived there. The title references an album by Lou Reed, recorded at a time when he was dealing with the loss of several people around him.
THIS IS HOW WE WALK ON THE MOON (2007) Set on the Firth of Forth with its iconic bridges this new film centres on the sea and the experience of sailing. Intrigued by the contradiction of Edinburgh’s proximity to the North Sea and apparent disconnection of the majority of the population to it, Billing invited a group of local musicians on a sailing trip. Events unroll from the preparations on land through to the journey under the Firth of Forth Rail Bridge, the students’ first awkward steps in unknown territory. The commensurate soundtrack: “This is How We Walk On the Moon,” takes a song from the 1980’s by experimental New York-based musician Arthur Russell, in an interpretation rendered by Billing and her collaborators using voice and string instruments.
After the show we will be pleased to meet you at the after-party in Miejsce club (Estery 1, Kazimierz).
No Local Foundation will present Johanna Billing’s most important videos, i.e.:
MAGICAL WORLD (2005)
PROJECT FOR A REVOLUTION (2000)
MISSING OUT (2001)
LOOK OUT! (2003)
GRADUATE SHOW (1999)
WHERE SHE IS AT (2001)
MAGIC & LOSS (2005)
THIS IS HOW WE WALK ON THE MOON (2007)