Sicherheit
2016–2017
Video installation, HD-video, 22”00
Arabic, Serbian, English and Swedish spoken with English subtitles
Courtesy of the artists
The film installation Sicherheit (German for “security”), made collaboratively by Saskia Holmkvist, Ellen Nyman and Corina Oprea, stresses the construction of colonial modernity in the Swedish imaginary. Through a research process that is both systematic and para-fictional, carried out in archives and on the ground, the authors seek to endow the image of the Swedish weapon industry with a contextual agency by linking it to people and places of importance to the production of weapons, including Karlskoga, Luleå and Göteborg.
The term “Sicherheit” is used by the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck to describe how an increase in security solutions creates a culture of fear in which conflicts can easily arise and escalate and that ultimately endangers democracy itself, as it leaves people in the perceived position of having to choose between their security or democracy.
Per capita, Sweden is one of the world’s largest weapon exporters. At the same time, it promotes itself as one of the foremost alliance-free, peace-making nations in the world. The film Sicherheit points to the Swedish relationship with war and the weapons industry by examining how it is expressed at an individual level. The sites in the film are silent and peripheral reverberating a global manufacturing society which creates employment opportunities, national security, financial and technological development, colonisation, peacekeeping troops, instability, migration and death. Intertwined in the narrative, the authors are building a replica of one of Sweden’s most sold hand-held weapons, the “Carl-Gustaf”.
Artist’s Bio:
Saskia Holmkvist’s work draws on interactivity and performance to instigate work on translation, agency and contested history. In a hybrid form of realism, documentary strategies are retooled with performative interaction to focus on verbal speculation. Circularity and timelessness are used in revisiting history and place by looking at site, intertwined recent history by means of gestures, memory and discourse. The protagonists are invited along the process to interact through performative encounters, direction and improvisation.
Collaborators Bios:
Ellen Nyman (SE) is an actor, director and visual artist. Her research and practice bear an interdisciplinary focus on performativity and blackness within performing and visual art. Nyman is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts and is rehearsing for the upcoming staging of playwright Tracy Letts’ Mary Page Marlowe at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Sweden.
Corina Oprea has been the Managing Editor of L’Internationale Online (internationaleonline.org) since January 2019 and is the former Artistic Director of Konsthall C (2017–2018), where she ran a programme on “Decolonization in the North”. She holds a PhD from the University of Loughborough in the UK, having written a thesis on “The End of the Curator: On curatorial acts as collective production of knowledge”.