Johanna Billing
09 May - 30 Jun 2007
JOHANNA BILLING
Magic & Loss (And Other Films)
Galeria Joan Prats is pleased to present the first exhibition in the Gallery of the Swedish artist Johanna Billing, Sweden 1973.
Johanna Billing’s works can be seen as attempts to visualize universal processes of social change and to relate these to the concrete experiences of the subject. They frequently evoke a sense of melancholy and loss, which is further radicalized by the intelligent use of irritating narrative ruptures. Ongoing social change and how it affects the individual are her central artistic interests, not that the suggestive force of her film projects is thereby lessened in favor of purely documentary elements. For the most part the films avoid rigorous narrative structures and present reduced actions and situations with protagonists operating as mute, concentrated witnesses in restricted contexts.
Johanna Billing’s videos attain a high degree of complexity through the frequent citation of films and pop music of recent decades, whereby the original sense of the recontextualized songs and films is brought to bear on the contents of the works and the suggestive power of the music becomes a vehicle for thematic concerns.The result is a tightly woven network of cultural, social, and historical references to scarcely perceptible ruptures in contemporary processes of societal change.
Born 1973 in Jöngköping, Sweden, Johanna Billing lives and works in Stockholm. In recent years her works were on show at numerous group exhibitions, for instance at the 9th Istanbul Biennial 2005, 1st Moscow Biennial 2005, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, P.S.1 New York, Knoxville Museum of Art USA, the Singapore Biennial 2006, and the Momentum Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art 2006 at Moss, Norway.
Magical World, 2005
This work has a documentary flair and was realized in Zagreb. In a youth center a group of children rehearse the song “Magical World” produced by the band Rotary Connection in 1968. Rotary Connection was one of the first US bands in which both colored and white musicians played. Active during the social upheavals of the 1960s, in their songs of this period they mirrored the desire for change without being explicitly political. The children in Billing’s video were all born after the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. They are thus part of a societal situation beset by economic and psychological difficulties as Croatia struggles to adapt to EU conditions of life. The film juxtaposes the historical context of the song and the real life of a very young generation in the midst of upheavals that are brought out by repeated views of the urban landscape and immediate vicinity of the youth center. Rehearsing the song in what for them is a foreign language, the children are seen to inhabit a complex intermediary zone socially, politically, and biographically. In this context the lines of the song make sense at different levels as well: “Why do you want to wake me from such a beautiful dream? ... Can’t you see that I am sleeping? ... We live in a Magical World.”
Magic & Loss (And Other Films)
Galeria Joan Prats is pleased to present the first exhibition in the Gallery of the Swedish artist Johanna Billing, Sweden 1973.
Johanna Billing’s works can be seen as attempts to visualize universal processes of social change and to relate these to the concrete experiences of the subject. They frequently evoke a sense of melancholy and loss, which is further radicalized by the intelligent use of irritating narrative ruptures. Ongoing social change and how it affects the individual are her central artistic interests, not that the suggestive force of her film projects is thereby lessened in favor of purely documentary elements. For the most part the films avoid rigorous narrative structures and present reduced actions and situations with protagonists operating as mute, concentrated witnesses in restricted contexts.
Johanna Billing’s videos attain a high degree of complexity through the frequent citation of films and pop music of recent decades, whereby the original sense of the recontextualized songs and films is brought to bear on the contents of the works and the suggestive power of the music becomes a vehicle for thematic concerns.The result is a tightly woven network of cultural, social, and historical references to scarcely perceptible ruptures in contemporary processes of societal change.
Born 1973 in Jöngköping, Sweden, Johanna Billing lives and works in Stockholm. In recent years her works were on show at numerous group exhibitions, for instance at the 9th Istanbul Biennial 2005, 1st Moscow Biennial 2005, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, P.S.1 New York, Knoxville Museum of Art USA, the Singapore Biennial 2006, and the Momentum Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art 2006 at Moss, Norway.
Magical World, 2005
This work has a documentary flair and was realized in Zagreb. In a youth center a group of children rehearse the song “Magical World” produced by the band Rotary Connection in 1968. Rotary Connection was one of the first US bands in which both colored and white musicians played. Active during the social upheavals of the 1960s, in their songs of this period they mirrored the desire for change without being explicitly political. The children in Billing’s video were all born after the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. They are thus part of a societal situation beset by economic and psychological difficulties as Croatia struggles to adapt to EU conditions of life. The film juxtaposes the historical context of the song and the real life of a very young generation in the midst of upheavals that are brought out by repeated views of the urban landscape and immediate vicinity of the youth center. Rehearsing the song in what for them is a foreign language, the children are seen to inhabit a complex intermediary zone socially, politically, and biographically. In this context the lines of the song make sense at different levels as well: “Why do you want to wake me from such a beautiful dream? ... Can’t you see that I am sleeping? ... We live in a Magical World.”