Where she is at

Where she is at (2001) by Johanna Billing is filmed at an open-air leisure center near Oslo, Norway, showing a hesitating young woman who ponders the act of whether to jump from the high diving board. The film will be shown on the big screen in the atrium during September 2025.

Still from Where She is At (2001) - a film by Johanna Billing. Cinematography by: Henry Moore Selder. Featuring Iselin Bråten. Produced by Moderna Museet Projekt and Oslo Kunsthall. Courtesy of the artist and Filmform.

This quiet and subtle drama focuses on a neglected open-air leisure center by the sea near Oslo, Norway. The center is part of a project designed for the benefit of the inhabitants of Oslo in the 1930s, (by Ole Lind Schistad and Eyvind Mostue), and one of the few remaining pieces of functionalist architecture in Oslo. In a sharp contrast to the ideals of the thirties about health and well being, the center was in 2001 under demolition order since the state was not willing to pay for its upkeep. Enhanced by its loop form, the narrative structure of the film centres on a hesitating young woman who ponders the act of whether to jump from the high diving board and on the minimal reactions of the other sunbathing visitors around. Public and private spheres are probed and intermingled by the camera’s intervention, turning the protagonist inward, along with the audience toward her own thoughts. Partly staged with actors, and partly interacting with the functions of the place, as well as with the people who today uses it, the film draws together the public concern of the baths’ fate and the inner struggle of the girl’s hesitation.

ART TALK WITH JOHANNA BILLING on Sept 24. Sign up here.

Johanna Billing x 2

The screening is part of a program curated by Anna-Karin Larsson and Andreas Bertman at Filmform. The Filmform program will be screened throughout the fall at SSE, and it is a program showing two films by the same artist during the same month - one on the big screen in the atrium and one on lill-skärmen in the north corridor on the groundfloor. First out is Johanna Billing x 2. Find her film Project for a Revolution (2000) on lillskärmen.

Johanna Billing was born 1973 i Jönköping, Sweden and she lives and works in Stockholm. Billing has been making video works since 1999 that weave together music, movement and rhythm. Merging the production modes of collective live events and workshops with a cinematic language, the films often focus on aspects of learning and how time plays a key role in that process. Billing in part directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private as well as the individual in the society as a whole. Billing often addresses political climates and cultural specificities. She transforms through a documentary method, her filmmaking in a fictive space to examine actual and contrived events and how that filmed compression illuminates their overlap. Billing's videos often feature modified scores and music composed by the artist or in close dialogue with participants, using sound as an essential device for collaboration and communication.

Filmform
Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes. Filmform is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Arts Grants Committee.