Lina Selander

Title: When the sun sets it’s all red, then it disappears
Directed and produced by Lina Selander
Duration: 09:09
Format: DV 4:3
Language: Swedish
Subtitles: English
Production date: 2008
Production country: Sweden
www.linaselander.com

When the sun sets it’s all red, then it disappears

Lina Selander explores images of and stories from 1968, the year of student revolt. Fact and fiction, poetry and politics, merge when photographed film sequences alternate with pictures from her private family album, documentations of the student rebellions in Paris and Stockholm, and famous press photos of a swimming Mao Zedong. The title is from the French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise from 1967, retrospectively regarded as a prescient analysis of the looming years of revolt. Using a montage technique similar to that developed by Godard, Lina Selander unravels the film’s dialogues and images and reassembles them in an open form that generates new meaning. Her work can be seen as an attempt to look beyond the dictums and truths of a legendary period, and to discover the many-layered meanings and ambiguities of the images. This raises questions concerning the relationship between historiography and photography – between word and image. What narratives does the image contain? What words must be removed from the image for us to truly understand what we see? And if they were really removed, what truth could fill the gap? The camera flash burns holes through the alternating montage of stills and moving images. In the middle of each potential statement is a disturbing blank white space – like an attempt to express what we cannot see.

Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lina Selander works mainly with moving images in film and video, but also with photography, text and sound. Her works are often installations where these different medias and components converge and interrelate to one another. She is interested in the image’s ability and lack of ability to reproduce time, experience and memories and she explores how different narrative forms and techniques transform and change a story. Her works investigate film as a medium, examining its possibilities and limitations as forms of expression, and they often raise questions about history, media archeology and authenticity. Selander’s work has been shown at Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Moderna Museet and in international group shows, biennales and festivals, for example in the Manifesta 9 in Genk, Bucharest Biennale 2010, Institute of Contemporary Art in London and The Netherlands Media Art Institute.

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