Verena Blok
Out Lookers, 2022
7 min 26 sec
Music by Haron Auma
Video still. Courtesy the artist
In Out Lookers (2022), Verena Blok portrays older women who reclaim their space in public. Witnessing these women age while she herself was maturing into womanhood, the dominant Western discourse privileging youthful femininity rendered them slowly invisible. Blok’s use of closeup, cropping, and focus play, center her subject’s expressions and words. The elderly women in this film, anonymous and unnoticeable, are likewise made present by assuming dark sunglasses that filter their gaze. Fragments of conversation—between the artist, her mother, and mother’s friends—touch on the transitional nature of femininity, and weave through quotations from a book they love: Olga Tokarczuk's “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” (2009). The novel’s narrator, a post-menopausal woman, is drawn amongst this group, who become what Blok describes as “commentators on the meaning of womanhood through time.”
Installation view, Billytown
Photo Jhoeko
Verena Blok (b. 1990, The Netherlands) has a deep interest in personal histories and narrative storytelling. Intrigued by the way cultural and political factors influence one’s life, she uses her lens-based practice to shed light on the inner life and everyday ‘reality’ of her protagonists. As a Dutch-Polish dual citizen, Blok maintains a keen awareness of her positioning between East and West, and her work often refers to the gendered performance of the self. Encounters with her subjects take place in intimate settings, which serve as the core of and the fuel for her work. By becoming close to them and embedding herself in their lives for long stretches of time, she uses the context in which they exist as a studio, a backdrop to the narratives that both she and her subjects become part of. Blok holds an MA Photography from AKV St. Joost in Breda and a BA Photography from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague. She was an artist in residence at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten 2020-2022.
Lisa Tan
Sunsets, 2012
22 min 30 sec
Courtesy of the artist and Galleri Riis
Video still. Courtesy the artist
Sunsets (2012) is comprised of scenes filmed at either three o’clock in the morning during the summer solstice, or at three o’clock in the afternoon during the winter solstice, in Sweden. The video opens with the sound of a scratchy internet call between two people: the artist – who is largely undetectable, save for the sound of her keypad as she types – and a friend of hers who has agreed to translate an interview from 1977 with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, found on YouTube. This recording, both halting and casual, forms the soundtrack. In the interview, we hear Lispector describe aspects of her working method and philosophize death’s role in her creative process. “If you couldn’t write anymore, would you die?”—asks the interviewer. The author’s response: “I think that when I write I am dead.” The forces of light and mood converse with the enigmatic Lispector as she chain smokes, seemingly fueling transformative states of becoming, and turning translation’s liminality into a material presence.
Locations:
Archipelago in the Bohuslän region of Sweden
Lisa Tan’s residence, Stockholm
Lisa Tan’s studio, Stockholm
Stockholm Public Library
A cemetery somewhere between Stockholm and Gävle
Sources Recorded:
Clarice Lispector interviewed by Júlio Lerner, 1977, originally televised for the Brazilian program Panorama, accessed in five parts on YouTube
Skype conversation
Apple Inc. screensaver “Cosmos”
Production:
Video and editing by Lisa Tan
Final editing by Nils Fridén
Installation view, Billytown
Photo Jhoeko
Lisa Tan (b. 1973, USA) is an artist and educator based in Stockholm. Working with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures, she regularly draws from literature to think about the formation of individual subjectivity and one’s ever-shifting relationship to the world and others. Tan’s work has been presented at institutions such as Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; MIT List Center, Cambridge; Kunsthall Trondheim; ICA Philadelphia; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Tabakalera, San Sebastian; and Artists Space, New York. She was commissioned for the 11th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2021), osloBIENNALEN First Edition (2019-2020), Transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017), the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), and the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015). Her current solo exhibition Dodge and/or Burn is on view at Accelerator in Stockholm until February 11, 2024.
Eugene Sundelius von Rosen
Mikaelidagen, 2021
HDV-video
18 min 29 sec
Video still. Courtesy the artist
Mikaelidagen (2021) follows two characters who dwell in and move through various environments: a staircase, a backyard, a door leading inside from a street, and an apartment. Although operating separately from each other, the actions and movements of these figures become intertwined. Perhaps reflecting on mutual memories, or their immediate surroundings, the sentences spoken by the characters and narrators unfold as a poem embodied in space.
Actors:
Aron Skoog and Clara Birnbaum
Narration:
Olga Pedan
Music by the artist with violin by M Markström
Installation view, Billytown
Photo Jhoeko
Eugene Sundelius von Rosen (b. 1991, Sweden) is an artist and poet based in Stockholm. Working in various media, with a connection to a writing and photographing practice, his work relates to layers of fiction, mediation, ambience, language, and the passing of time connected to an aesthethicized poeticized being-in-the-world. Architecture, as a conceptual basis, both directly and indirectly constitutes a strong component in his practice, whether through textual allusion, found or photographed still and moving image, or otherwise. Alongside exhibiting he performs readings at art and literary institutions. Exhibitions and performances include Minibar, Stockholm; Bonamatic, Copenhagen; Kohta, Helsinki; Index, Stockholm; and Issues, Stockholm. He holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and has also been a guest student at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, Stockholm.
Victoria Verseau
A Ghost's Gaze, 2021
HD video
20 min 25 sec
Video still. Courtesy the artist
In A Ghost's Gaze (2021), artist Victoria Verseau tries to capture the memory of her friend Meril and the time they spent together in Thailand after undergoing gender confirmation surgery. Meril, who passed away in 2015, was a close friend of Verseau—someone to look up to and share dreams and thoughts about the future with. Years after their first meeting, the artist visits the remote hotel where they lived together to heal from the surgeries. The now empty hotel and the tidal landscape that surrounds it elicit a peculiar atmosphere, emphasized by whispered narration taken from notes collected during Verseau’s return journey.
Installation view, Billytown
Photo Jhoeko
Victoria Verseau (b. 1988, Sweden) is an artist and filmmaker working in various media ranging from moving images to sculpture, large-scale installation, and performance. Her artistic practice examines the body and memory formation, shaping identity through the affection of social structures. She is searching to tell untold stories, remaining in the periphery towards oblivion. Approaching destructive forgetfulness, she attempts to capture, preserve, and reconstruct the fleeting memories of crucial times that shape subjectivities. In 2023 Verseau won the postproduction award at Cannes Docs, Cannes Film Festival for her debut feature Meril. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at Fotogalleriet, Oslo (Hope is a dangerous thing for women like us, 2023); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (Approaching a Ghost, 2021); and Uppsala Konstmuseum, (Engender my past, 2021). Verseau lives and works in Stockholm, where she graduated with an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in 2020. In 2017, she was the first transwomen recipient of the ANNA Prize, established by Women in Film and Television (WIFT) Sweden and UN Women Sweden to expand the knowledge of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms Discrimination against Women). Presently she is working on her debut feature film Meril.
All texts courtesy of the artists