About Johanna Billing
On a sunny summer’s day, a girl stands alone atop a diving tower at a swimming resort outside of Oslo. But she doesn’t dive. The swimmers below spot her and start wondering why she’s hesitating – why she doesn’t jump and get it over with. The girl walks back and forth on the trampoline, as though unable to decide whether or not to take the step into the air and jump.
Johanna Billing observed this real event while in Oslo to do research for her project for Moderna Museet. Johanna Billing, born 1973 in Jönköping, is the only artist involved in this year’s projects for Moderna Museet who performs her project outside of Sweden. The work of art, Where she is at, was produced in Oslo this past summer and is on display at the Oslo Art Hall between August 30 and October 7, 2001.
In Where she is at, Johanna Billing repeats the situation. At the same swimming resort and with “normal” people functioning as extras and actors, she makes a film about a lonely girl standing atop the diving tower. While she’s hesitating, the people below are waiting for her to jump.
Johanna Billing’s works often revolve around achievement and individualistic attitudes. In Graduation Show, her graduation piece at Konstfack [the Stockhom Art College, transl. note], she offered dance lessons to her fellow graduates. At the end of the lessons, the students were to put on a dance show at the college. Graduation Show deals with having the guts to do something you’re not good at, while at the same time having the graduating students’ natural desire to perform well. It’s also about giving valuable time to a group activity, when the highly individualistic world of art tells you to devote that time to your own work, the graduation piece. Missing Out (2001), another of Billing’s works, also describes a situation characterised by individual achievements. A few people are stretched out on the floor practising to breath in a kind of group activity commonly found in schools and kindergartens across Sweden in the 1970’s. Billing’s video tells us something about a society oriented so heavily towards achievement that you need help and instructions to perform such a fundamental bodily action as breathing. In Where she is at, this achievement becomes synonymous with diving from the tower, with doing what everybody is expecting you to do, even though you’re not certain it’s the right thing.
In connection with the showing of Where she is at at the Oslo Art Hall, Johanna Billing was invited to do a spread in “Morgonbladet”, one of Oslo’s daily papers. In that feature, Billing discussed the future of the swimming resort with the people who participated in the film. The diving tower, along with a modernistic restaurant, was constructed in the 1930’s, and now the buildings are decaying. Since the city council has shown no interest in the restoration of the architecture, there is now a debate on the future of the swimming resort.