Saara Ekström’s Shadow Codex (2021) will have its World Premiere at CPH:DOX NEW:VISION competition. CPH:DOX will be held online from April 21 – May 2. In the NEW:VISION competition, the festival presents 12 short and midlength artists’ films. CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, is one of the biggest documentary film festivals in the world.
Filmed in the empty Turku County Prison (active between 1835–2007), Finland, Shadow Codex documents the surveillance machinery, architecture and layers of messages drawn, engraved, glued and burned on the prison walls. These markings function as a double exposure: they are passages into the shadows, the darker side of a person’s psyche, but likewise represent the murky dreams of a society which, while attempting to organize a sanitized system of order, hides the “dirt” it generates.
Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time that nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of her art. Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.
CPH:DOX, April 21 – May 2 2021, online
More information: CPH:DOX