Saara Ekström’s Body All Eyes (2018) will have its World Festival Premiere in the Official Selection of Sheffield Doc/Fest, held from June 6–11 in the UK. Doc/Fest is the UK’s biggest documentary festival and the third largest in the world. The screening of Body All Eyes takes place on Sunday, June 9, at 21:30.
Body All Eyes is a requiem for barren skies in which archaic myths of flying through time and space collide with a technological and pragmatic world. It shows a stratosphere of airplanes, drones and surveillance-satellites that are all-seeing and ever-present eyes – a privilege that once belonged only to gods and their messengers, the birds. In the 8mm split-screen film the supernatural, mechanical, corporal and transcendental confront and embrace each other. A masked acrobat, creating a performative exchange between human and animal, leads the viewer through a torrent of images into a mysterious world, that undulates in a weightless state between heaven and earth.
Saara Ekström lives and works in Turku, Finland. She studied at Turku Drawing School (Turku Arts Academy) in Finland during 1983–86 and at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the United States during 1995–97. In her video, photography and installation works, Ekström is interested in natural and artificial materials that embody strong symbolic values. She has participated in several national and international exhibitions since 1986. She was a candidate for the Ars Fennica Award in 2002 and the artist of the year of Helsinki Festival in 2005. Ekström’s extensive solo exhibitions have been seen at Amos Anderson Art Museum in 2005 and at Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma in 2011. Her works are represented in many collections in Finland and internationally.
Sheffield Doc/Fest, June 6–11 2019, UK
More information: Sheffield Doc/Fest