Projects

 

  



 

 

Present Perfect Tense evolved from three reels of double-8 footage filmed by Ellis Edman (1899–1988), a Swedish newspaper journalist and editor-in-chief. Edman bought his camera in 1935 to pursue filmmaking as his hobby. Alongside family vacations, he often filmed the same events he was reporting on for his paper. The three films obtained from Edman’s son, Jan Edman and used in the project are the following:

  1. Rågårdsvik, Sweden, summer of 1935: family vacation, the earliest film from Ellis Edman
  2. Paris, July 19, 1938: Parisians welcoming the arrival of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, Edman’s first color film
  3. Gamla Uppsala, Sweden, April 26, 1943: pro-Nazi demonstration, Edman’s first and only film screened outside his home before his death. The film was confiscated by the Swedish secret service and returned to him later.

The project raises questions about documentary approaches and narrative constructions in order to embody the remote experience that is only accessible through Edman’s silent moving images. Present Perfect Tense was realized in three sections: 

Past Participle (2009)

Past Simple (2009)

Present Participle (2009)


In the first section the film frames are isolated showing Edman himself and worked with these as slide projections. In the second working again with slides, a sequence of still images is created showing the people in the films who returned Edman’s gaze and looked into his camera. Lastly the core of the project is a large video projection that incorporated the films themselves where the researcher (the artist), the filmmaker (Edman), and the archivist (his son) each get a “voice”. The memories of the archivist function as the setting for reconstructing the family history. Nationalism becomes a vital tool in examining the different modes of gaze in each film and the otherness that constantly oscillates between the two remaining voices: the researcher/artist and the journalist/filmmaker. Notions of remembering and forgetting, history as a narrated construction, generational patterns for receiving knowledge and the contradictions between the “written past” and personal history articulated in differing forms of memory are among the main interests in this project.

 

Installation View (KHM Gallery)