STOCKHOLM.- Lina Selander is one of Sweden’s most innovative moving image artists. She is currently featured in two solo exhibitions, one at the Biennale di Venezia, and one at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Where the exhibition in Venice explores image and representation in a meta montage, visitors to Moderna Museet will encounter three works that scrutinise the implications of actual and metaphorical boundaries.

The Stockholm show reveals a darker facet of Lina Selander’s oeuvre but is nevertheless part of her ongoing analyses of the oscillation between utopia and collapse. The presentation focuses on works dealing with various aspects of exclusion and inclusion, of controlling and owning the image of one’s history. The selection is influenced by the prevailing situation in and around Europe, which has rapidly grown unendurable, impossible, but which threatens insidiously to become normalised. The film works Around the Cave of the Double Tombs (2010) and The Hours that Hold the Form (A Couple of Days in Portbou) (2007) are shown in galleries that have been reduced to horizontal shafts, where layers of control, dreams and incarceration are projected. The Offspring Resembles the Parent (2015), which was produced for the Venice Biennale, is shown here for the first time in Sweden.

“Selander juxtaposes temporal images, uncovering a rift between intent and result, and explores the potential of film to examine issues such as these. The works here revisit ideas of boundaries - experiences of powerlessness and flight, or the attempts to maintain a zone where some are owners and others own,” says Lena Essling, curator.

Lina Selander’s films and installations can be read as compositions or thought models, where ideas and relationships are weighed and tested. Together, her works constitute a dense archive of observations, occasionally in dialogue with other films, art or literature. They are often set in historic or ideological periods where one system or physical place collapses and something new emerges. Some address the relationships between memory and perception, photography and film, language and image. The precise, rhythmic editing and soundtracks create their own temporality and a strong inner pressure. She recurrently explores her fascination for the phenomena and technologies that make images possible, thereby enabling history to be documented. Montage is used in the films as a means of juxtaposing images that can include the potential of depleting the content.

The exhibition at Moderna Museet features three works. The theme of the installation The Hours that Hold the Form (A Couple of Days in Portbou) (2007) is the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s last stop on his flight from the Nazi regime in autumn 1940. He took his life in the town of Portbou, where the France-Spain border was closed on the day of his arrival, only to open the following day. The spatially, temporally and medially fragmented composition is in itself a montage in the spirit of Benjamin. The Offspring Resembles the Parent (2015) relates to the observation that memory is inextricably connected to economy, in the sense of a capital that we manage or hand down. The work can be seen as a contemplation on fictive economies, dormant power, blind subordination and a hyperinflation of values – human and monetary. Around the Cave of the Double Tombs (2010) is based on material from the artist’s travels on the West Bank, mainly Hebron, a city racked by violent and seemingly insoluble conflict. The film explores the power held by emblematic images of a place and a conflict, without representation or interpretation. The images and text resemble the objects unearthed and jumbled together after an excavation, a scene where we can never quite work out the whole context but are left with mere scraps.

Moderna Museet is also presenting Lina Selander at the Biennale di Venezia 2015. Lina Selander’s exhibition Excavation of the Image – Imprint, shadow, spectre, thought, is shown at the Swedish Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2015. Lina Selander (born 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Her works have been featured widely by art institutions, including Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm; Moderna Museet in Stockholm; VOX, Montreal; Galleria Tiziana Di Caro, Naples; and in international group exhibitions such as the Kiev Biennial in 2015, Seoul MediaCity Biennale in 2014, Manifesta 9 in Genk, the Bucharest Biennale in 2010, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.