KANSAS CITY.- Swedish artist and founder of the independent music label Make It Happen, Johanna Billing creates breathtaking, poignant videos and films that address issues of individuality, isolation, public performance, and decisive action—or inaction—in the context of collective endeavors. The exhibition of seven works by Johanna Billing is on view November 21, 2008–February 1, 2009, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Museum admission is free.

The exhibition opens with a free public reception, 5:30–7:30 p.m., Friday, November 21, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri.

For each work of art, Billing invites people to participate in contrived situations that often involve familiar, group activities, such packing and moving anonymous belongings from an apartment, singing at choir practice, or engaging in dance rehearsals. Through her documentary-style fictions, Billing reveals the ambiguous struggles—individual, social, and political—underlying the human condition in contemporary society. In the exhibition’s most recent work This Is How We Walk on the Moon (2007), a group of local musicians learns to sail in the Firth of Forth, off the coast of Edinburgh, Scotland. Set to the 1980s song of the same title by the late experimental musician Arthur Russell, Billing’s video explores the romanticism of the sea and the novice seafarers’ first steps into uncharted territory.

Born 1973 in Jönköping, Sweden, Billing lives in Stockholm, Sweden. Earlier this year, her work Project for a Revolution (2000) was included in the exhibition Here We Dance at Tate Modern in London (March 14–May 26, 2008). Billing has also been included in numerous exhibitions worldwide, such as the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005), the First Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art (2005), and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006), among others.