This fall, Marabouparken konsthall is proud to present Lina Selander’s first major solo exhibition in Stockholm in over a decade. Selander is considered one of the leading artists of her generation and she represented Sweden at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Selander is known for her visually intense and multi-layered work in the field of moving image. At Marabouparken konsthall, she gathers twelve new films from 2023 to 2025, most of which are being shown for the first time. Political conflicts, violence and destruction have found their way into her work. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is present, especially in two works in which she has lifted images from social media feeds using an analogue camera.
Lina Selander mixes her own footage with film fragments and stills from various sources. She processes the images to enhance their materiality and give them body. In the production of her new works, she has used older and defective recording and editing machines and has sought out the damaged and incomplete.
An essential idea is that both bodies and images break down, which is reflected in the installation where different film works interact as one whole, and transparent screens create visual duplications and connections between the works. It is an exhibition that bleeds, both literally and metaphorically.
Reflections on contemporary events interact with a broad spectrum of cultural-historical and media-technological references. For example, she highlights how “film” derives from the Old English word for membrane, “filmen”, which is related to the “scales” mentioned in the New Testament: “Then it was as if scales had fallen from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again.” (Acts 9:18).
The relationship between technology and seeing is a question Lina Selander constantly returns to. But what distinguishes her oeuvre above all is not what the works refer to, but how they are always the result of her handling of the material. Her works consciously move below the surface of the supposedly non-material, perfect and quickly passing flow of images that surrounds us. From the broken machine emerges an image where the gaze no longer glides along as if over a smooth, polished surface, but instead opens up a space for the human and the bodily, and thus lends agency to the broken. In the scratches and gaps, the gaze and the thought can take hold.
“For me, the work in the studio is about re-establishing purely physical connections to the technological and cultural systems that shape our lives,” emphasizes Selander.
