Lina Selander: "Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut"

The elements of Lenin’s Lamp equally reject an idea of films, photographs or videos as neutral accretions of visual information. The elements of this film are to be seen both as material witnesses of the experience of modernisation and as agents of the very same history. From Dziga Vertov’s film The Eleventh Year (1928) to and video recordings from the Chernobyl disaster and the ghost city of Pripyat to images of fossils in museums and prehistorical landscapes, Selander’s images consist of sensory materials. Lina Selander offers a subtle meditation on the long-term historical effects provoked both socially and ethically by the Soviet utopia of the production of energy, summarised in Lenin’s slogan from 1920: “Communism is Soviet Power plus the electrification of the whole country”.

Lina Selander, artist and guest Professor the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Her works often focus on junctures in history where a system or physical place collapses and something new begins to emerge; the narrative of mechanical cinema giving way to that of digital video, or a political or economic system plummeting into a new one. Her works revolve around images as memories, imprints and representations. Selander’s work has been shown at Argos - Centre for Art and Media, Brussels; Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; VOX - Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal and in international group shows such as Venice Biennale 2015; Kyiv Biennale 2015; Seoul Media City Biennale 2014; Manifesta 2012 in Genk, Belgium; Bucharest Biennale 2010; and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

January 24, 7 pm, Blauer Salon