Saara Ekström’s Body All Eyes (2018) is screened at the International Film Festival of Popular Science and Educational films “The World of Knowledge“, held in St. Petersburg from December 1–6 2021. The film is included in the screening “The Hallucination of Artificial Life” on December 2 at 19:30 in the New Holland Island Pavillion.
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.
International Film Festival of Popular Science and Educational films “The World of Knowledge”, December 1–6 2021, St. Petersburg, Russia
More information: The World of Knowledge