Johanna Billing, filming in Iasi, (work in progress), 2008, © the artist.
Johanna Billing, You Don’t Love Me Yet, 2003, Artists: Cory Arcangel/Beige, Johanna Billing, Jeremy Deller, Iain Forsyth + Jane Pollard, Kristin Lucas, Hadley + Maxwell, Elke Marhöfer/Anne-Marie Schleiner, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Abe Linkoln/Marisa Olson.
Johanna Billing, Magical World, 2005.
Johanna Billing, Where She Is At, 2001, video, color, sound, 7 mins and 35 secs, courtesy Hollybush Gardens, London. |
|
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road
+ 44 (0)20 7472 5500
London
Johanna Billing:
I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm
July 10-September 13, 2009
Swedish artist Johanna Billing has been commissioned to make a new film which is the second project in the 3 Series; a collaboration between Camden Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford and Arnolfini.
Shown alongside other work, this exhibition is Billing’s first major solo exhibition in a public gallery in London.
Johanna Billing’s videos reflect on routine, rehearsal and ritual with an emphasis on the fragility of individual performance and power of collective experience.
Her new work is based around the recording of a live performance of dance "learned" or performed by amateur Romanian dancers in Iasi (pronounced ‘yash’), during Periferic 8 Biennial of Contemporary Art "Art as Gift" in October 2008.
The film links several days’ activity into a continuous process, in which dancers were watched by an audience who were free to come and go as they pleased.
Johanna Billing’s skill lies in combining the choreography of individuals with facilitating their freedom to perform naturally, bringing the whole together through editing hours of footage.
There is no final performance, the whole is a collaboration between choreographer, dancers and local musicians. The unfolding dramas hold the viewer enthralled and moved.
Stockholm-based Johanna Billing (born 1973) shares a particular interest in the communality and shared emotional resonance of pop music with artists such as Phil Collins and Jeremy Deller, and is perhaps closest to the latter both for her interest in the merits of amateurism as well as in her efforts to coordinate large numbers of people in order to create her participatory projects. For her 1999 graduation show at the Konstfack University College for Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Billing showed a video documenting a performance conceived by the artist but featuring her fellow students energetically dancing under the supervision of Swedish choreographer Anna Vnuk. That work bore early testament to the artist's keenness for experimentation and group endeavour, not least for its inherently political nature, whilst also revealing her philosophy of dilettantism and distrust of the culture of expertise.
Billing's best-known work so far is also perhaps her most ambitious. Between October 2002 and June 2004, the artist worked on a film and music project entitled You Don't Love Me Yet, after a 1980s song by the cult American psychedelic musician Roky Erickson. At numerous Swedish venues, as well as at London's Frieze Art Fair and a final performance in Chicago, Billing gathered musicians of many different stripes — more than 100 in total — to reinterpret this plaintive song about the trials and tribulations of relationships. Many versions were recorded, and CDs of these freely distributed, and the project's centrepiece was the making of a documentary film following the process of a collective recording of the song in a Stockholm studio in June 2003. Erickson himself, of course, is one of rock's true outsiders, whose history of mental illness is as legendary as those of Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson. Billing's project, therefore, besides no doubt having been a great deal of fun, is also an examination of that seeming contradiction at the heart of much popular music artistry, between intense intimacy and collective feeling.
Billing has been the subject of numerous solo shows over the last few years in Europe and the U.S. and was included in the 9th Istanbul Biennial, the 50th Venice Biennial, and the 1st Prague Biennial. Her work is part of the collections of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Holland; the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. |
