Two short films by Saara Ekström, Amplifier (2017) and Body All Eyes (2018) are screened at Flight International Film Festival, held from October 10–18 in Genoa, Italy. The screening of the films takes place on Saturday, October 10, at 16:30 in Galleria Incantations. The festival goes also online.
Amplifier portrays how time inevitably moves from past to future, passing the present moment. Mankind encloses to time its marks, stains and ruins. On the verge of vast changes time acts abnormally. It leaks, folds and fractures, allowing things belonging elsewhere, to the otherworldly, topermeate itself. In the 8mm film the Helsinki Olympic Stadium represents a historical paradigm shift. Completed in 1938 the building outlines pure functionalist architecture and stands as a landmark for optimistic utopia and the oblivion on man’s neglect of history.
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 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.
Flight International Film Festival, October 10–18 2020, Genoa, Italy
More information: Flight International Film Festival