Ulijona Odišarija
The Dying Swan, 2’, 2016

Ulijona Odišarija’s video The Dying Swan is a screen capture of her mother remembering the dying swan solo from the ballet Swan Lake during a Skype video call. It depicts a zoomed-in view of an arm becoming a wing. ‘We would sometimes perform it for each other when I was a little girl after seeing the ballet in the National Opera and Ballet Theatre. The gliding, waving arm was our sharpest memory from it. The dying swan solo requires great technical skills from the ballerina; it is a role that dancers strive for from a very young age. My mother and I were no ballerinas, but we would make each other believe we were great at it’, says Odišarija. The granddaughter of Michael Fokine (who choreographed the dying swan solo) believes that the ballet is not about a ballerina being able to transform herself into a swan, but about death, with the swan operating as a metaphor. The digital image of the fluttering arm in Odišarija’s poetic work emerges from the sharp light of the window and vanishes into the haze of the darkened room — this could convey not only the life experience embedded within such a movement, but also the importance of intimacy, openness and fragility in our relationships with one another.

Mother walking and the trees, 5’, 2016 

The artist is following her mother with a hand-held camera on a cold autumn day. The camera lens is straining to zoom in with a faint hum and gets lost in the forest. With its grey and wet atmosphere, the film is a  meditation on the impossibility to get as close as one might want to.

Ulijona Odišarija’s practice incorporates video art, photography, found objects and installation art. She is the founder and singer of the band Steve & Samantha. In 2016, she graduated from an MA course in fine art media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL), United Kingdom.

Åsa Cederqvist
Mama Dada Gaga, 33 min, 2019

 In collaboration with her five-year old daughter and mother who has Parkinson’s disease, the visual artist Åsa Cederqvist has staged a world under constant construction. Mama Dada Gaga plays with reality and fiction, questioning the expectations of motherhood and the role of women.  A recurring sequence in Mama Dada Gaga is  birth and the transformation and the transition from one state to another. The sculptures in the film form set-design elements for the rituals of play and themselves express these different states of transformation, just like the film’s three main characters. This film suggests multi-layered storytelling – between parenthood and childhood, symbiosis and separation, hubris and crisis, life and death.

Åsa Cederqvist works have a performative foundation often expressed through video, sculpture, installation and performative add-ons. For the past five years, Åsa’s practice has explored co-creation processes as well as the conditions and possibilities of playing, where she focused on presence, vulnerability, trust and a kind of everyday magic. One result of this is the film (and the installation) Mama Dada Gaga.

Josefin Arnell
Mothership Goes to Brazil, 28’, 2016

 The characters in Josefin Arnell’s videos are generally of an unrestrained nature: three young women linked together by a chain through their labia, communicating with an iceberg; a dancer encased in a hazmat suit trying to become one with a group of deer; someone with a serious pony fetish. Seen in this context, a middle-aged Swedish blond smoking, cursing and coughing is a positively ordinary character. Except that the woman in question is Arnell’s mother, and she is struggling with alcoholism and a serious illness. The filmmaker persuades her to travel to Brazil to seek salvation from the famous alternative healer John of God (who later would be accused in one of the biggest sexual scandals in Brazil and imprisoned for 19 years), but when they arrive, it turns out the miracle worker has been hospitalised. Instead of pain relief, the mother and daughter get a chance to become closer to one another.

Now the time of blossoming arrives / Den blomstertid nu kommer, 3’, 2019

In this video Mothership, aka Josefin’s mother, shoots beer cans while singing Den blomstertid nu kommer (translated as ‘Now the time of blossoming arrives’), a popular Swedish hymn that sings of the forthcoming summer.

Josefin Arnell’s video work extends to performance, installation, objects, poetry or drawings, often floating between reality and fiction. By often choosing to work with non-actors, she is capturing a rawness that reflects an emotional landscape of unattainable desires, perfectionism and control. Arnell’s work has been shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Kunsthalle Münster (Münster), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius), Moscow International Biennale for Young Art 2018 (Moscow), among others.