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Actors of the same yard
2017
Work in progress
Two channel silent film, 11 minutes.

Scenes from the film Blow-up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and released in 1966 are used as film material. The scenes thats been chosen, is from the scenes shot in Maryon park in London where the protagonist in the film, a fashion photographer (played by David Hemming) have been having a photoshoot. What he later realizes when he enlarges the images in his darkroom from this photoshoot, is that he have been accidentally photographing a murder taking place in the park.

In the second half of the 18th century the philosopher Jeremy Bentham was planning where to situate his prison-design Panopticon. 170 years before from when the film Blow-up was released, in 1796, Bentham had plans on realizing his construction in the area around Maryon park, the same area as where the murder-scenes in Blow-up was filmed.
Scenes from Blow-up showing the mere landscape in the park are converted to slow motion, the trees are swaying in almost a meditative manner, creating an atmospheric impression. These materials are used on one screen, while on the other screen, photographs of selected meanings in letters by Bentham and correspondences dating back to 1796 are used as intertitles, since the only traces left of Bentham´s panopticon are left in letters and drawings.
While the protagonist in Blow-up uses his camera as evidence and an extender of the eye, the photographed fragments from the letters on the other screen questions this extended notion of the eye.
Two otherwise contingent subjects in time are meeting through this particular shared space, evoked by their shared space of origin; the park. Held in the threshold(s) between image and event, charged and somewhat interpersonal dialogues sets out and conjoins a story that constantly deliberates a specific space and reconfigures the separate realities towards a fictional tendency.

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Wishing well
2017
Diptych. Two framed photographs, each 30x40 cm.

Each day I walk the exact same route to and home from my studio. One early Thursday morning walking this route I walked past a puddle, I made a quick glimpse at it and noticed a coin laying on the bottom of it. I continued walking approximately 20 meters when I stopped and turned back, decided to take a photograph of it.
The same day but on the afternoon on my way home, I walked the same route and past the puddle. I then noticed that the puddle had shrinked and that the coin was gone; a temporary wish for the longing ones.

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Work to be shown in the context of a museum
2017
Framed C-print with text.
40x50 cm.

The print consists of an brightened and faded image of the exterior of the crystal palace when it held the great exhibition in London 1851. The photograph are conjoined with information to the visitors of the Pan American exposition in 1901 "Please remember that when you enter the gates you are part of the show".
The crystal palace is notably unique due to that large parts of the construction was made in glass. Here conjoined with the text, the print enlightens the act of observing and being observed at the same time, a translucent act, in this case through an historical take on exhibition. The print are most suitable to be shown in the context of the subject it treats, a museum for example.

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The great White Silence
2016

Slide projection and over-head projection.

The Great White Silence is a slideshow that takes it´s departure from images, paintings and fiction depicting the north and the south poles. The images were found in several archives and are dated back to various expeditions between the late 1800's to the 1950's.
The starting point comes from fiction that specifically has described these places, due to the distance of these places they have often been rendered in mythical ways. Therefore, it can also be related to other places depicted mythical such as the high mountains reaching for the sky and the caves; the doors to underground.
The title of the work is taken from a documentary film from 1924, with the same title. The film was mainly directed by the photographer Herbert Ponting and shot during the Terra Nova expedition 1910-1913. The film was also restored and re-leased by the British film institute in 2011, this time with a musical soundtrack.
What was compelling about the film, was (as the title refers to) the silence in contrast to the cinematographic sequences and the "repetition of the landscapes"; a now further explored aspect in the slideshow due to the structure of projecting through a slide projector and the repetition of sound through this machine; handing over the narration to the images. The slide-projection are accompanied by short notes projected through an overhead projector. The notes are both taken from texts found among the images and reflections on the images when they were found in the archives.
The images have a total lack of human presence, the only signaling of a possible presence in the landscapes is the traces of movement; movements of curiosity, memory but also of the remote presence of the photographer. Each image are also taken from a distance, revealing the hands holding the archival materials and the environment they were found in, a gesture that could suggest an improvised process and the distance of the subject itself.

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The shepherd and his companions went out on a starry night
2016
Three framed digital C-prints and three frames with tipped in photographs and texts.

Illustrations of stars and star constellations in books dating back to the 16th century are photographed and used as specimens.
With the same observing eye as the scientist had in the making of the illustration books, the camera and it´s lens points at the same stars selected from the specimens. The photographs are after combined with fictional texts sharing a suggested observation of what is happening in the documented pages photographed from this richly illustrated book of stars and their mythological creatures.
The photographs of the pages in the book are placed on a shelf, while the framed images of the stars and the texts are hanged slightly higher on the wall, putting the observers gaze in same action as the scientist and when this work was made.

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Kim Svensson

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