Catalogue > At random

In the first sequences of Lina Selander´s new film a story is told about the ancient, now extinct, plant silphium. The plant grew on the coast outside the North African town Cyrene—a settlement of Greeks from the overpopulated island of Thera in 630 BC—which became the main town in the Greek colony, situated in today´s Libya. The plant was famous for its medical usage (it was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient) and for its richness in flavour, which made it the base of the colony’s export. Its importance for the economic wealth was so crucial that the image of silphium was imprinted on the coins. When exploitation of the plant led to extinction, the city declined. As is often the case in Selander’s works, the film builds on layers of images and meaning, layers that link history and pre-history to contemporary society, and in which nature as a prerequisite for life is one of the focal points. The human strive for development and expansion, the desire for control over nature, and above all—visual control, depiction and surveillance, is always met by another contradicting force. The nature looks back at us, its eyes empty—a reoccurring image in Selander’s film. In Silphium this double movement of visual and earthly mastery and its opposite—loss of visual control, awareness of vulnerability—is first expressed in a shot of the famous 16th-century painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein. The ambassadors are depicted together with the emblems of wealth and superiority of the countries they are the representatives for. A contradicting image is hidden until you view the painting from a specific angle, but when you do a human skull becomes visible, the sign of mortality. Selander lets the image oscillate in and out of visibility; the painted image emerges as in a rupture of light in the dark whilst mumbling voices count—numbers, years maybe. The sound fragment is a loan from Chris Marker´s 1962 film La Jetée—another important point of reference. The films narrative tells the story of how a man is used in time travel experiments in order to save the world. He travels through sediments of memory and images, much in the same way as Selander’s film, only to return to his beginning.

Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She works mainly with moving images in film and video, but also with photography, text and sound. Her works are often installations in which these different medias 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 narration is created and how different techniques transform a story. Her works investigate film as medium, examining its possibilities and limitations as form of expression, and they often raise questions about history, media archaeology and authenticity. Selander’s work has been shown at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Moderna Museet, Kunsthall Trondheim and in international group shows such as Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium and the Bucharest Biennale 2010 and at Haus Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Seoul International Media Art Biennale and upcoming exhibitions such as Momenta Art, New York, INIVA, London and she also representing Sweden in the 56th Venice Biennale 2015.