July 11 – August 8, Installation, Durham Art Gallery

When I was asked to curate this program, I soon came up with a sketch in my head consisting of a number of artists that I have either curated or whose artistry I know well from before. From the selection of films I worked with, a theme became visible, where all the works were either about the machine or the body, about the tension between the mechanical and the organic.

Tim Claxton

Tour Guide, 2024
8:47min

Filmed in and around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and in Pripyat, Ukraine, we take the POV of a visitor to a world devoid of people, but bearing traces of a civilisation. We take a tour through a world marked by human presence and absence: one in which “nature” is encroaching and reclaiming. The remnants form historical evidence of a society long gone. What can we know of this lost society? Using science fiction tropes the film looks back, raising questions and feelings, about that past society.

Coming from a audio-visual background, Tim Claxton’s work often focuses on the dark beauty of the dirty, the derelict and the spoiled. Feelings of absence, of memory and of former lives often pervade. A sense of threat! Traces of people and society are extant but rarely take centre stage. More, it is what is left, in abstract and transient forms, which shapes an atmosphere – a feeling. Tim holds a BA (hons) in History of Art, and an MA in Film.

Josefina Malmegård

Heavenly Bodies, 2019
1:03 min

Through Instagram I encountered fitness instructors, bodybuilders and mixed martial arts professionals during a residency in Riga, Latvia. Their profiles show pictures and captions that convince you that all your goals are within reach; you can take control and overcome fear.

Through selfies and motivational captions, they build their personal brands on social media. The monologue is based on these captions. The film follows their communication and training which subtly questions the iconic image of the strong, independent man. To subvert the normative image of training in the gym, the fitness instructors are filmed in natural landscapes. Surrounded by greenery, their bodies may be read in light of ritual and holy practices. Reminiscent of religious communities, their path is marked by discipline and dedication.

Josefina Malmegård is a Swedish artist who was born in 1989. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Candyland have featured Josefina Malmegård’s work in the past. In MutualArt’s artist press archive, Josefina Malmegård is featured in The Ring Beyond the Mat, a piece from C-PRINT in September 2022.

Natalie Sutinen

FAZERS HUND – Synopsis, 2020
15 min

The short Art film “Fazers Hund” is a quarts loop; with a scent of violence in an otherwise dreamy and soft visual flow. In the film we keep looking back to a dollhouse and a woman who either fiddle with different objects, are being transformed into children or is found lifeless in a burned down forest. The woman cover the doll house using a blue cloth, a veil of oblivion covering the landscape of childhood. We also see humans wearing animal masks in the deep forest, people with bird heads, a 100 years old stuffed dog in small rooms; the film shifts in scale and perspective, reminiscent of classical surrealism. The scenes form an evocative string of pearls, having no order, as in dreams (and in nightmares). 

Sutinen works work with illusions of large and small, inside and outside, and in the film she uses her self as a sort of Alice in Wonderland, and she play with time. Her vision is to make film that plays with the idea that everything that happens at the same time. Is time a fundamental part of the universe, does it exist independently from us humans or is it an intellectual construction – not existing by itself, but created by humankind? “From a sense of positive isolation, as I remember my childhood summers, far away from civilization, I mix contemporary processed material with my own experience of parallel worlds, a refuge I had during my childhood and which still persists.”


Natalie Sutinen (b.1972) is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden, working mainly with collage, painting and film included in sculptural installations. An interest in what is real and authentic runs like a thread through her work where the film process becomes an investigation into our personal relationship with all images as a means of discovering ourselves. Except for her low-key and unassuming teaching in perception psychology that reveals no dramatic truths, but it urges all of us to be humble before all contradictory statements about what is real and authentic.

Dan Lageryd

LUNCH, 2013, 01:30
KEBAB, 2013, 01:46
TAKE AWAY, 2013, 01:37

Documenting the windows of fast food restaurants; the signage, the customers and the employees inside, along with the street outside; through its sounds and reflections. Dan Lageryd, born 1963, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Lageryd works mainly with the moving image and focuses upon themes such as time, space, repetition, perception and architecture. Lageryd has studied Photography and Sculpture at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and Architectural Theory and History at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm

Anna Ridderstad

Wind (Horns Udde), 2021
1:42 min

Wind (Horns Udde) is a short documentation of a meeting with the elements on the Baltic Sea Island of Öland. Without sound, the movement is clarified and an everyday situation creates a choreographic work with the natural world for a short while. We are used to being able to protect ourselves from conditions outside of our comfort zone. It is easy to forget our physical fragility in relation to the world.

Anna Ridderstad (b. 1976) is based in Stockholm, Sweden, and works with installation, photography and video. In her practice the relation between the body and the outer world is the starting point, in small scale as well as in landscape and topography. Together with fellow artists she runs various collaborations and she is also a member of artist run ID:I Galleri, in Stockholm.

Hillside Prodjects

Again and Again We Ask These Question, 2019-2022

7 min

Again and Again We Ask These Question consists of a collection of questions used and asked repeatedly throughout the development of and within several lecture performances held by Hillside Projects. It takes into consideration and reaches out to all extinct and endangered species, cultures and habitats that are being driven or already have been driven towards extinction. It commemorates the stories of past, current and potential endlings (an endling is the last individual of a species).

Hillside Prodjects is Emily Berry Mennerdahl and Jonas Böttern. Situated within a conceptual framework, Hillside Prodjects investigates tales of disappearances in the natural world and the interrelated socio-political narratives and existential emotions that arise through these tales. HP approaches its subject matter by embracing the absurd, the comedic, and the tragic. HP questions who should be saved and why?

Joonas Jokiranta

Swans, 2021
4:51 min, HD Video

Swans are swimming back and forth in an idyllic landscape. They are like trapped in a time loop. The video is showing a natural phenomenon, which is pure without any cultural connotations. The birds still seem to create a mystical performance as a harmonic soundtrack is playing. Swans have their own secrets.

Joonas Jokiranta (born in 1980 in Köyliö, Finland) creates visual poetry, physical essays and absurd yet truthful statements, which explore the past, the present, the dystopia and the forgotten utopias. Non-politically and politically, he intertextualizes everything. Jokiranta considers his work as traces of performance and marks of existence, which, like messages in a bottle, he sets off. Using video, sound, paint, objects, various materials and his own body, he offers the audience a chance to join the spiritual yet shallow journey through decadence in the post-industrial society.

Merzedes Sturm-Lie

Reflector Games, 2019
5:28min

An allegory containing images of a building in full construction with the cityscape of Brussels as backdrop, an accumulation of trash in the streets and the face of a dog analysing this Anthropocene age we inhabit. The soundscape is an intertwining of Russian constructivist sound recordings from the 1920s.

Merzedes Sturm-Lie, born in Denmark in 1991. She works as an artist and curator. Today
divides her time between Stockholm and Brussels.

Nils Taki Claesson

Row a Cow, 2023
15:17min

We are the cows. We live in a country named Cow. The Republic Cow lies in the middle of Lake Mälaren, fifty kilometers from Stockholm city centre. For every citizen in the country, Cows are holy cows. The constitution of the land of Cow states: A cow is a cow and should be regarded as nothing else. Similarities with human beings are temporary misunderstandings. A cow is a cow. A cow can´t stand being alone. A cow is a social creature with all that it means: buffing, huffing, musing, and sizing. Cows are citizens of the European Union. Cows have a social security number and a passport. 

Nils Taki Claesson (born 1958 in Stockholm), is an artist, filmmaker, author, and artistic
researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.Claesson received his PhD in fine
arts from the Film and Media Department at Stockholm University of the Arts with the
dissertation The Ghost Machine: Seven changes and transitions – animation processes in
animated film

Alexander Mood

Kvarlåtenskaper, 2022
3 min

During the last years, in my artistic practice I have worked with the fictional kingdom and personal collection that my father Lars left behind. It has been a process where I have had to twist and turn concepts such as collection, archive and micronation. Do I have to become a collector too? A keeper of my father’s world? Or a creator of a new one? 

I have artistically related to my father’s large collection of objects with inherited memories and feelings the previous generations and from his own fantasy world. Thousands of plastic soldiers that he sorted into the regiments of fictitious armies, razors from five generations back, maps of a kingdom that only existed in his own brain. A process that led to a series of works exhibited at a number of exhibitions. The work around the legacy from my father has already had certain recurring components, partly the boundaries between my father’s artistic practice and my artistic gaze, what I choose to investigate and his integrity, the border between a fictional nation and reality. Questions that are strangely urgent in our time when a self-made prince wants to stage a coup d’état in Germany. Suddenly the line between fiction and reality is crossed. There are also aspects in all of the works and in the whole process of ritual, a way of cleansing from the grief of a lost father but also a way of understanding him and his motivations. I started with my own experience and then tackled the physical legacy and the outer limits of the micronation of Roma.

Alexander Mood, born in 1973 in Stockholm. Trained in Stockholm and Dublin. BA (hons) degree from the National College of Art and Design Dublin 1999. Active as an artist and as a curator and member of the board of the artist run Stockholm based gallery ID:I Galleri.Working on both my own art projects and with group projects I have participated in a number of in exhibitions internationally, mainly in Europe but also in the United States and Canada.

My artistic activity is mainly concerned with politics,Micro history and memory and how history works in forming the present. I often start from an anthropological discourse and working method. I work whit both traditional technics such as drawing and print making and with video and audio and installation.