Working Archive, Silphium et al.

Lina Selander’s Working Archive, Silphium et al. (2015) is a custom-built display case containing images, fossils, a radioactive stone, an ancient coin, publications, documents, photographs, and a film. The work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015 together with six other works by Selander and can be said to be representative of her investigative artistic practice, in which history, science, and image production are interwoven.

The work (part of the SSE permanent collection, to be found in the corridor outside the President´s office) consists of a specially constructed light table in the form of a glass display case made of steel, glass, and wood. Inside the case, a collection of objects and visual material is presented: radiographs, plant fossils, a radioactive stone, optical elements, publications and documents, as well as 140 C-prints from the film Anteroom of the Real. The film, an essayistic video work by Lina Selander, is also shown on an iPad within the installation. The visual material is drawn from the forbidden zone around Chernobyl. It builds dense layers of images and archival material and addresses how reality is understood and represented through images.

Among the objects is also an ancient coin depicting the extinct medicinal plant silphium—a plant highly valued in antiquity, among other things for its abortifacient properties, and believed to have been driven to extinction due to overexploitation. The two radiographs in the upper right corner are images produced by Selander after she placed uranium-containing, radioactive stones in light-tight boxes for four to six weeks, thereby allowing the radioactivity to react with the silver in the photographic paper and create an imprint, which the artist later developed in her bathroom. These two images can be said to be imprints of reality in the same way that the fossils in the display case are as well, though these were formed over thousands or even millions of years.

By bringing these objects together within a single display case, Selander investigates time. The work articulates extreme differences in temporality: the almost incomprehensibly slow geological time spanning millions of years, the fraction of a second it took for the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to annihilate the two cities, and also the time and duration inherent to film itself. The work also examines the boundary between archive/document and artwork. By placing scientific objects and archival material within an artistic context, Selander challenges our notions of what counts as fact, image, and narrative.

Donation by Lena and Per Josefsson

The artwork at the Venice biennale in 2015.