About
Mourning School is an artistic study program on the notion of being in grief as the stuff of our everyday, initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper.

Contact
info@gallerinef.com


Sometimes Time 


A film program at Tranebergsbron (18 June, 23:00-00:30) and Fylkingen (19 June,13:00-17:00)
and an educational program at Vårby Gård and Kista Biblioteket (7-19 June 2022)

Sometimes time presents films on intergenerational loss, transitory rituals and togetherness developed by Mourning School.

Taking place between 18 and 19 June with public events at Tranebergsbron (Saturday, 18 June 23:00-00:30), and Fylkingen (Sunday, 19 June 13:00-17:00), accompanied by an educational program on view during opening hours at Vårby Gård Biblioteket (7-19 June) and Kista Biblioteket (7-19 June).

In an act of reclaiming public space as a place for mourning, we invite you to gather with us for a midnight screening at Tranebergsbron to see the works of Ayla Dmyterko, Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson, Mathilde ter Heijne, Natalia Papaeva, and Natasha Tontey. As the clock strikes midnight, words in Tornedalian, Swedish sign language and Buryat get stuck in movements and muscles that have lost their way as the languages slowly disappear. Under the bridge, we lament these losses through transitory rituals in the form of Karelian lamenting songs, the Ukrainian healing technique Strakh vylyvaty, and the faded boundaries between life and non-life in Minahasa cosmology.

On Sunday 19 June, we invite you to Fylkingen to discover the works of Lise Fischer, G, Julia Heijligers, Louis Hothothot and Alexander Rynéus. During this day-time film screening, every particle of light unveils flickering images reminiscing, and manifesting  impressions of mortality through personal stories and memories of very different families. We witness how one experiences, shares and prepares for loss and grief across generations whilst coming together over moments of grace, doubts and sorrow.

Sometimes Time is accompanied by an educational program that reflects on intergenerational relationships and loss through the works of Martin Smatana and Angela Bravo. The animated film The Kite by Smatana is on view during opening hours at Vårby Gård and Kista libraries between 7 and 19 June, the film is accompanied by a working book for children with questions and drawing exercises to gently prompt them to reflect on the feelings that accompany loss.

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Alexander Rynéus is a Stockholm based film director, cinematographer and artist. Previous films include the feature documentary debut ”Giants and the Morning After”, ”Autonomous”, Stekenjokk and the Guardians of the Eggs” and ”The Home and the Cavity”. His work often consist of place specific art projects surrounding storytelling, mythology and different layers of a place and its conditions.

Glittering Night Sky (2022) A glittering night sky, the act of looking and a time to pay attention to the way my parents speak to each other. A film that departs from a longtime project surrounding an old glitter factory in Dalarna where my grandparents once lived.

Ayla Dmyterko (b.1988, she/her) is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Glasgow raised on Treaty 4, the territories of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation. She has exhibited her work at international galleries and institutes including VITRINE, Basel & London; CCA Glasgow; Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow; Projet Pangée, Montréal; and forthcoming with Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick. 

Rite of Return (2021) This moving image work simultaneously reflects on Marianne Hirsch’s text Rites of Return whilst extending the Rite of Spring – a riot-inducing ballet originally performed by the Ballet Russes. The initial narrative circles around a sacrificial virgin dancing herself to death, appropriated aesthetically and thematically from Ukrainian folklore. In this version, the soloist awakens fraught with solastalgia due to ecological decline and lack of community. She remedies this by drawing upon old-country aphorisms and the poetic structures of Strakh vylyvaty or pouring forth the fear, a Ukrainian healing technique to remedy anxieties, especially those related to land. In folklore globally, themes of dance, desire and death are repetitive. These connections are important for me, as I believe that folklore will survive amongst congregations not defined as culturally specific. Instead, it can be enveloped by likeminded individuals interested in intersectional dialogue and education, envisioning spaces of transformation through perseverance and practise. The audio, text and imagery within the film is a poetic bricolage of free association, symbolism and embodiment. It echoes a fragmentary and porous diasporic imagination illustrating ways that cultural memory exists and ceases through generational slippage.



‘ONGOING’ – 2022

Luton, The Galaxy, The Mall.

Mourning, Death & Dying.

The 'Anti Bio’.

‘Non performers’, ‘Non Dancers’ everything that we are told we are not good at or need a

qualification for.

Humour x 100000.

Power Dynamics.

FREE ART SCHOOLS.

Anthropology.

The internet (beware 2nd hand information and the vacuous).

Comedians.

Performance as a survival technique.

Embarrassing myself during depressive episodes.

Bass players.

Barbados.

Semantics.

My Mother and Father (RIP).

Sci Fi as a survival technique.

Britishness.

Mental Health.

Grinding my hips as slow as I can (Sam I love you).

Sub woofers.

Dressing up as other things.

Joy.

‘Non-Artists’.

Friends above the age of 70yrs old.

Exciting poetry.

My ongoing Death Doulaship training (Be weary of it ever being done)

HOME IS WHERE THE WORK STARTS 1988 (2019)
3 generations. What does it mean to outlive your most/onced loved. We are now left. We openly mourn and hold our joy with both of our hands. We have each other, I cannot use words to describe how blesssssssSSSssssssssssed I be. Words fail. 'Get my brain better' methods.

Julia Heijligers is a contemporary artist living and working in Amsterdam. Her work arises from a feeling of alienation and largely focuses on character studies. Those who live at the margins of society represent and inspire the characters in her work. What happens when there is no fixed framework to classify someone? How does one’s behaviour and habits influence this classification and how come these alienated characters find shelter in the alienated? These are some of the questions that revolve within Julia’s practice. Her work is translated through painting, wig design and film.

Dear Shannon (2021) shares the story of three people whose lives become inextricably linked as their relationships with one another strengthen, and they retreat into a world of their own.  The film shows the impact of illness and the loss of bodily functions on a person whose body was known, understood and recognised as outlandish, grand, sensational; an expression of wild thoughts. What does it mean to be 'the queen of the scene' when this is only recognised through a costumed body, a symbol of beauty, vitality and expressiveness? This film shows what hides behind that costume; vulnerability, a new kind of beauty and a body in distress.

Karin Keisu (b.1995, Tornedalen) and Josse Thuresson (b.1992, Stockholm) have been working as an artistic duo since 2018. Their projects take the form of text, film, performance, digital installations and curating, addressing politics of language, queer time and the strength of being on the margins. Educated at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design.

Back to Back (2022) In Swedish institutions such as the Tornedalian workhouses for children and the schools for the Deaf and hard of hearing, children have been punished for speaking Meänkieli and Swedish Sign Language. In this multi-channel film work, the artists put their mother tongues in centre, back to back, with the help of the poets Jamila and Amina Ouahid and Tornedalian activist Fanny Eriksson.

The workhouse was a type of charity and boarding school for Tornedalian children and became one of the key institutions in the Swedification of Tornedalen. There were twenty workhouses in Tornedalen between 1903-1954. Today most young Tornedalians cannot speak Meänkieli.

Manillaskolan is the oldest school for Deaf and hard of hearing in Sweden. Between 1880-1981 sign language was forbidden as an educational language in favour of the Oral method which included lip reading and speech therapy. In 2013, Manillaskolan was moved, and today many deaf children assimilate into hearing schools and never learn sign language.

Lise Fischer is a movie director based in Paris. She directed her first film in 2010. The films of Lise Fischer are anchored in specific places, in which nature is strongly present and the landscape is the main actor. Her movies defend the wild in a political and poetic way. She chooses contemplation over fictional narration and includes a true sound and musical identity. She places the production of images and film at the heart of her practice, thanks to different methods such as filmed video-projection or the use of different film formats. In parallel, she works on installations and video experiments in which she creates correlations between supports and projected images.

Lumières Fossiles (2015) In the Pyrénées-Orientales, Jacqueline, 85, retraces the paths that lead to the Pic du Canigou. She is witnessing a memory that, little by little, seems to permeate the mountain…

Louis Hothothot is a film, video artist, graphic designer and art critic reviewer. He was trained as a graphic designer in China Central Academy of Fine Arts, as a video artist in Dutch Art Insitute, as film artist in the Netherlands Film Academy. Lousi Hothothot focuses his research on film narrative, cinematic language. His subjects are about “body and movement”, “identity and politics”. His cinematic language research combines graphic design, video art, animation and performance. Louis Hothothot regularly shows his work in cinema, film festivals, museums and theatres.

Four Journeys (2021) As the second-born child during the Chinese one-child policy, director Louis Hothothot was illegal for a while. In his film Four Journeys the Chinese-Dutch filmer exposes family traumas by going back to China and interviewing his parents and his sister. A painful history of Mao's China.

Mathilde ter Heijne's research based practice is founded in intersectional feminism. She acts as interlocutor within a social system of contemporary and past voices. She explores the role of women in forming cultural identity and re-inscribes the interrelationships between economy, spirituality, politics, and gender relations of societies now and in the past, differing to that of the current patriarchal system. Her installations, performances, films and videos draw on historical material, from archives, reconstructed archaeological artefacts, and ethnographic studies of ritual to resurface these old knowledges and identities, forgotten and ignored voices, to set iterations of these narratives circulating once again. Her work has been widely shown, for instance at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, Singapore Art Museum, 4th Mediation Biennial, Poznan, ICA Sofia, Museum of Modern Art Arnehm, Shanghai Biennial, MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

Lament. Song For Transitions. (2014) Lamenting is an ancient oral tradition that combines singing and crying. Everywhere in the world, women have traditionally sung and continue to sing these songs at transitional moments in life such as funerals and weddings, or bidding farewell to a loved one. The ritual is used to express suffering and sorrow, heal pain and trauma, and connect the past with the present to advance into the future. The material for Lament, Song for Transitions was recorded at a workshop the artist organized during her stay in Suomenlinna, Helsinki, Finland (2010), where she invited singer Pirkko Fihlman to teach the almost forgotten, ancient Karelian lamenting technique. The video includes footage from Finland’s first re-enactment: Häidenvietto Karjalan runomailla: A Wedding in the Karelian Songlands, 1921 (directed by A. O. Väisänen, U. T. Sirelius). Part of the workshop was held at the Karelian Pentinotsa house at the Seurasaari Open-Air Museum, Helsinki. Various types of video transitions including jump cuts, fades, blurs, blends, dissolves and masks become an important formal element that hold image sequences together, resisting the idea of a smooth, linear story.

Natalia Papaeva is an artist, born and raised in Buryatia (Eastern Siberia). Since 2013, she has lived and worked in the Netherlands. Her artworks mainly take the shape of performances and video art. A starting point for Natalia's work can be an imaginative dialogue, a text or a confrontational memory. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague in 2018 with the award-winning work Yokhor. In 2021 Natalia received a Mondriaan Stipendium for Emerging Artists. In September 2022, Papaeva will start her residency in the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

Yokhor (2018) I forgot my mother tongue. And I am not the only one. Many people in my native Buryatia (Siberia) are losing their language. The Buryat language is one of nearly 2600 languages likely to disappear. Of all 6000 languages in the world, 43% are endangered and I am going through this process myself. In my performance, I am singing two sentences from a Buryat traditional song. The only two sentences I remember.

Natasha Tontey is an artist living and working in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings. Her work has been shown at Asian Art Biennale 2021, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart (Berlin), transmediale 2021, Performance Space 2021, Other Futures 2021, Singapore International Film Festival 2021, Kyoto Experiment 2021, Asian Film Archive (2021), amongst others. In 2020 she received the HASH Award from ZKM and Akademie Schloss-Solitude and is currently a fellow for Human Machine of the Junge Akademie at Akademie der Künste Berlin 2021-2023.

Wa’anak Witu Watu (2021) Researched and speculated on the North Sulawesi where once belief that the first person was a woman and gave birth through a stone, Wa’anak Witu Watu investigates the fiction, myth, and cosmology of the Minahasan and their relation to the geo entity stone and stone as gift economy. The indigenous practice of Minahasa tribe—where humans celebrate their form of communication with stone—is understood as only a pre-institutionalised religion practice and categorised as animist belief. However, for people living there they see themself practicing monotheism. There are almost no boundaries between Life and Non-Life in Minahasa cosmology. In this work, the dynamic of Minahasan cosmology is explored alongside its potential to imagine an alternative world where the phenomena of anthropocentrism practically does not exist.

Colophon
This film program is made possible with support from The Swedish Art Council. 

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