Saara Ekström’s Body All Eyes (2018) and Sami van Ingens Flame (2018) are included in the selection of the Festival Les Instants Vidéo, held in Marseilles, France, from October 24 to December 31.
Both Body All Eyes and Flame are installed at Friche la Belle de Mai.
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.
Flame is a fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s. He lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Van Ingen finished his doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2012. He often uses random or found materials in his works. His works have been seen in many national and international exhibitions and festivals over the years, including Tbilisi Triennial (2012), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) and Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (2002).
Festival Les Instants Vidéo, 24 October -31 December 2019, France.
More information: Festival Les Instants Vidéo