1 NOV 2021 – 31 JAN 2022
BIO
Tuva Björk is a video artist and documentary filmmaker from Helsinki, Finland. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts and an MFA in Artistic Film Directing both from Valand Academy of Art, Sweden. She has also studied at the Film and TV department in the University of the Witwatersrand and attended The Nordic Documentary Film School Biskops-Arnö. Her works have been exhibited in Gothenburg City Museum, Konstepidemin, Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, among others. Her previous work includes ZOOMANIA, We are a crowd of others and ZAMAZAMA. Tuva is currently working on her first feature documentary Laws of the Wild in collaboration with Sally Jacobson.
Tuva Björk's residency is supported by Iaspis, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden) International Program supporting international exchange for practitioners in the areas of visual art, design, craft and architecture.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Our future as a species is dependent upon us radically altering our relationship with the natural world. Instead of bolstering the invented dichotomy between man and the rest of the world, my work studies us humans as an inseparable part of an incoherent ecosystem where our actions have the greatest influence on how other living creatures can and do live. Operating across documentary filmmaking, propaganda, dance and video art, I seek to envision new ways of exploring and fuelling the crucial transition from dominance to dependence.
My work depicts the absurd spectacles by which we are surrounded under hypercapitalism: a lion doing laps in a zoo enclosure under the watchful eyes of bored customers; military training where the people tasked to operate the weapons are as confused as those they point them at; pandas being transported from China to Finland in the name of ‘conservation'. When filming, I often turn the camera to confuse the expected choreography of the observer and the subject, or take a step back, thus revealing the construction of the spectacle.
I believe moving images hold the power to expand the boundaries of our empathy, and to interfere with the fictionalisation and simplification of our shared reality. My aim is to create space for meditation upon the conventions of representation of nature in the contemporary media landscape; to develop an interconnected gaze, which flourishes the connections between ourselves and each other.