Film and video

Curator: Lena Essling

The Moderna Museet collection of films and videos started as a club for children and experimental film organised by Pontus Hultén at the Eriksberg cinema in 1955. The Club soon had 500 members, and when Pontus Hultén started working at Moderna Museet the following year (he became the director of the museum in 1958) he brought the club with him. The first event at Moderna Museet after the exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” was a presentation of experimental film titled “À propos Eggeling”.

Experimental films and videos have been screened primarily as special events, such as “The Pleasure Dome” – American Experimental Films from 1939 to 1979 (1980) and the series “Contemporary Film and Video”. Today, the museum’s screenings of works from the film and video collection are more integrated with the collection as a whole, and a gallery has been built specifically for video projection. 

 
A great deal has happened since video first appeared, and this has probably enhanced the position of video in the art context. Video projections and installations have increasingly supplanted the one-channel video works that were presented on a monitor.