LINA SELANDER. Excavation of the Image: Imprint, shadow, spectre, thought

Lina Selander examines relationships between memory and perception, photography and film, language and image. Her works focus on junctures in history where a system or physical place collapses and something new emerges. Montage is used in the films to create pauses or set images against one another, but also involves the risk of causing perceptual gaps.

This installation  - comprising film, radiographs and a text plaque -  is made in dialogue with Dziga Vertov’s film The Eleventh Year from 1928, about the construction of a hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper, juxtaposing it with contemporary footage from nearby Pripyat, a ghost town since the Chernobyl disaster. Images are also included from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev – such as of fossils, the earliest imprints documenting prehistory.

Radiographs displayed in a vitrine corroborate the symbiosis between early photography and the discovery of radioactivity, which, in turn, seems to presage the invisible code of digital photography.

"Model of Continuation is based on the invisible core of the visible inscription, the image as an interior object and its relationship to seeing and various reproduction technologies. In my work I have attempted to follow an idea of the illusion’s beginning in the simple fact of images, like radioactivity or leakage between layers: vegetation and sporadic work outside the window, the room, the studio environment, the lonely plants, as well as the projection with its different layers of time." LS

Vitrine with radiographs, fossils, stone containing uranium, ancient coin with silphium plant, Anteroom of the Real (video) on an iPad, publications and documents.

"The film takes its starting point in the deserted town of Pripyat, located within the zone of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A pair of hands flip slowly through a pile of photographs: images of a model of reactor 4, buildings in Pripyat, books in deserted offices, empty rooms, trashed interiors, pictures of a TV monitor showing a documentary about Chernobyl, etc. As the timelines of the still and moving images cross, the film raises questions about what an editing room is and can be, and about narrativity, time and images." LS

The film Silphium centres on an ancient coin from the Greek colony Cyrenaica, imprinted with the eponymous, priceless and now extinct medicinal herb. The sense of something lost and obscured is like a filter across the film’s fragmentary historiography; Hans Holbein’s enigmatic painting The Ambassadors, Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, with its time warp. Selander reveals different layers and experiences of time – geological, cinematic, personal. Footage from the Stasi archive and the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology in Trondheim appears recurrently.

Memory is inextricably connected to economy – in the form of capital that we manage or hand down. The title is based on Aristotle’s Politics, in which he argues that it is unnatural for money to increase at interest, since, unlike livestock or crops, it cannot breed. The word memory stems from the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, protector of language and recall, likewise the root for both money and muntze .

Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Selander’s work has been shown at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) in London, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Kunsthall Trondheim and in international group shows such as Seoul Media City Biennale 2014, Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium, the Bucharest Biennale 2010 and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. www.linaselander.com