Johanna Billing, Where She is At, 2001 DV, 07'35'', loop © Johanna Billing / Bildupphovsrätt 2001

MMP: Johanna Billing

Moderna Museet Project

30.8 2001 – 7.10 2001

Stockholm

A young woman is standing highest up on a diving tower. She goes to the edge but hesitates. The location is the beautiful leisure centre Ingierstrand, on the just outside the centre of Oslo. Ingierstrand was designed by Ole Lind Schistad and Eyvind Moestue and was inaugurated with a bath area, restaurant and dance floor 1934. It is one of Norway’s most outstanding functionalist building, an expression of one of the concerns of that time: to give city-dwellers the possibility to get out into natural surroundings in pleasant and healthy ways.

The video captures a condition of uncertainty – facing an encounter with nature and also facing demands and anxiety about how one will perform. What happens when one has a surfeit of freedom? Today the Ingierstrand restaurant is closed and the centre is deteriorating rapidly. Local interest exists, but the local authority of Oslo is unwilling to undertake any renovations – a position that is in strong contrast to the 1930s ideas of acting in the best interests of the citizens. In the newspaper Morgonbladet’s art project Rotation, on the invitation of Mats Stjernstedt, on 14 September Johanna Billing will comment on the current situation at Ingierstrand.

Allusions to the spirit of the times are also present in Johanna Billing’s Project for a Revolution (2000), which has its point of departure in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Zabriskie Point from 1973, but the events in the video are set in present-day Sweden. A group of young people – students – is silently and passively gathered to what seems to be a meeting in a schoolroom. The video is about the individual’s relationship to the collective or the group and how young people of today express their engagement. Questions around protest and trendiness in relation to popular culture are central to much of Johanna Billing’s work; she is interested as well in how resistance sloughs off its skin.

Together with her brother, Johanna Billing runs Make It Happen, a social platform for music and art, which, among other things, produces music that has difficulties getting heard in the usual music venues. Make It Happen has also been behind a number of popular events at Backstage, Stockholm Municipal Theatre.

Johanna Billing was born in 1973 in Jönköping and resides in Stockholm.

Moderna Museet in collaboration with Oslo Kunsthall. Moderna Museet’s focus on younger artists within the framework of Moderna Museet Projekt continues for the fourth year in a row. On previous occasions, the project has taken place outside the museum itself, sometimes moving to other locations and institutions. Johanna Billing’s project, a new video, will be shown in the newly opened Oslo Kunsthall between 30 August and 7 October 2001.

Moderna Museet Project

Moderna Museet Project is an activity of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Artists are commissioned to make new work for the temporary project space in the Old Vicarage next to the museum on Skeppsholmen, for other situations and environments in the city of Stockholm or elsewhere.