Contemplative Cinema Practises and Performative Film Screenings
2016 - Ongoing .
The performative film screening is an invitation to bring your body to the cinema: to listen with your eyes, to see with your back, to respond to the screen with the felt sense of your own experience.
![]()
Performative film screening Acelerator (2024). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
Performative film screenings an invitation to see what happens if we include more senses in the experience of film.
The intention is to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film.
Performative film screenings, where the room and the bodies become co-creators. Film is always created in interaction with those who see it and I have wanted to find a way to emphasize that relation and how it not only includes an intellectual understanding. It is rather about a kind of active participation, feeling, and processing. By emphasizing the body in the room, the sound of the room, the fact that we are here together and looking and breathing, my hope is to open up for a multisensory, critically playful, sensual film experience.
I have come to include guided meditations and exercises in connection with film screenings. Try to catch a bare listening gaze on the film and through love for the film see what it can do to the body, to time.
This is an invitation for you to listen with your whole body. To listen with your eyes, feel with your hearing, dance with tastes and memories.
To fumble with
precision.
The performative film screening is an invitation to bring your body to the cinema: to listen with your eyes, to see with your back, to respond to the screen with the felt sense of your own experience.
Performative film screening Acelerator (2024). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.Performative film screenings an invitation to see what happens if we include more senses in the experience of film.
The intention is to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film.
Performative film screenings, where the room and the bodies become co-creators. Film is always created in interaction with those who see it and I have wanted to find a way to emphasize that relation and how it not only includes an intellectual understanding. It is rather about a kind of active participation, feeling, and processing. By emphasizing the body in the room, the sound of the room, the fact that we are here together and looking and breathing, my hope is to open up for a multisensory, critically playful, sensual film experience.
I have come to include guided meditations and exercises in connection with film screenings. Try to catch a bare listening gaze on the film and through love for the film see what it can do to the body, to time.
This is an invitation for you to listen with your whole body. To listen with your eyes, feel with your hearing, dance with tastes and memories.
To fumble with
precision.
The
performative
contemplative film works have been shown at Accelerator, stockholm, EMAF, Osnabrück. Tensta Konsthall, Gorki Theater Berlin
and Index Foundation, Stockholm.
![]()
Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. At the symposium Non-Knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image (2022) . Photo: Annika Larsson
![]()
Kunsthalle Osnabrück. European Media Art Festival № 37. ( 2024) Photo: Angela von Brill
![]()
Kunsthalle Osnabrück. European Media Art Festival № 37. ( 2024) Photo: Angela von Brill
Performative Film Screenings, a Back Story
In the summer of 2014, I was invited by Tensta konsthall to Stockholm Music & Arts. I wore my favorite tiger dress and felt beautiful. I sat in the grass outside the theater where my screening was to take place and went through the text I had written. I thought I had found links between the landscape around the Högdalen landfill and trans, periphery, and center. I had gathered fragments of bot my own and others’ texts around these themes that I planned to read together with material from my earlier feature films that had not ended up in the films, leftovers that I experienced as valuable.
The material was from the places around Kungens kurva, Skärholmen, Högdalen, and Vårberg, places where I have grown
up and lived for many years. There was something in returning to these film leftovers that had been in my own archives, stored on hard drives, that gained new life. Layers of leftovers, as on the dump, traces of fireplaces, photo albums, and landfill.
Here, I started to explore ways of being present with the films on stage next to the film screen, reading the text, allowing images to trickle into my body, trying to have a full body relation to the moving images. Allowing my voice and body to be affected by both the images and the room. Allowing my body, my living archive, to affect the image.
Inspirations
The performative film screening has several sources of inspiration, such as Juliette Mapp's seminars at SKH about her artistic kinship line with various artists for generations after Black Mountain College. Choreographers are present here, such as choreographer Susan Rethorst. I was particularly drawn to Barbara Dilley's contemplative dance practices. Another important inspiration is the meeting “Elsewhere & Otherwise” at Performing Arts Forum (PAF), especially the meeting in 2018 with the theme Tools for Visceral Sensibility – Trauma, Love, Work and Polyvagal Theory. At that meeting, I got to take part in the practice of performance and sound artist Neha Chriss, who introduced me to Polyvagal Theory. Fiona James led workshops in trauma/tremor release exercise (TRE). I came into contact with practices and theories that are based beyond language with the body's nervous system in focus.
Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. At the symposium Non-Knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image (2022) . Photo: Annika Larsson
Kunsthalle Osnabrück. European Media Art Festival № 37. ( 2024) Photo: Angela von Brill
Kunsthalle Osnabrück. European Media Art Festival № 37. ( 2024) Photo: Angela von Brill
Performative Film Screenings, a Back Story
In the summer of 2014, I was invited by Tensta konsthall to Stockholm Music & Arts. I wore my favorite tiger dress and felt beautiful. I sat in the grass outside the theater where my screening was to take place and went through the text I had written. I thought I had found links between the landscape around the Högdalen landfill and trans, periphery, and center. I had gathered fragments of bot my own and others’ texts around these themes that I planned to read together with material from my earlier feature films that had not ended up in the films, leftovers that I experienced as valuable.
The material was from the places around Kungens kurva, Skärholmen, Högdalen, and Vårberg, places where I have grown
up and lived for many years. There was something in returning to these film leftovers that had been in my own archives, stored on hard drives, that gained new life. Layers of leftovers, as on the dump, traces of fireplaces, photo albums, and landfill.
Here, I started to explore ways of being present with the films on stage next to the film screen, reading the text, allowing images to trickle into my body, trying to have a full body relation to the moving images. Allowing my voice and body to be affected by both the images and the room. Allowing my body, my living archive, to affect the image.
Inspirations
The performative film screening has several sources of inspiration, such as Juliette Mapp's seminars at SKH about her artistic kinship line with various artists for generations after Black Mountain College. Choreographers are present here, such as choreographer Susan Rethorst. I was particularly drawn to Barbara Dilley's contemplative dance practices. Another important inspiration is the meeting “Elsewhere & Otherwise” at Performing Arts Forum (PAF), especially the meeting in 2018 with the theme Tools for Visceral Sensibility – Trauma, Love, Work and Polyvagal Theory. At that meeting, I got to take part in the practice of performance and sound artist Neha Chriss, who introduced me to Polyvagal Theory. Fiona James led workshops in trauma/tremor release exercise (TRE). I came into contact with practices and theories that are based beyond language with the body's nervous system in focus.