Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1

Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1
(2015)

Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1

2015
HD video, loop 5 min

My Lindh’s film Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1 is the first in a series of planned video works. It portrays a landscape. This happens to be an Icelandic landscape, and as such an essentially stereotypical image. At first, it appears to be a still image, a postcard, until some slight unremarkable movement reveals that it is a film. The image slowly slides horizontally, but panning in two different directions. In this translation of quiet dislocation, the embodiment of a landscape starts to disassemble itself through a study of origin and nature. And the film seems to ask whether the very idea of a landscape is a construction. There is a passage by Simone de Beauvoir that comes to mind, where she writes how she would like to become the landscape in front of her: “I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance”, she writes. “But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.”

—Jonatan Habib Engqvist on Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1, in his text Impossible Possession, written in connection to an exhibition and a screening at Slakthusateljéerna and Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists in Stockholm, August 2015


Camera and editing: My Lindh
Special thanks to: Eva Arnqvist, Johan Lindh and Malin Pettersson Öberg
With support from: Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists, Malin Pettersson Öberg / Slakthusateljéerna (Sweden), Air d’Islande (Paris) and Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland)
Distribution: Filmform – The Art Film & Video Archive

Part of the Public Art Agency Collection


Watch Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1 excerpt


Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1

2015
HD video, loop 5 min

My Lindh’s film Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1 is the first in a series of planned video works. It portrays a landscape. This happens to be an Icelandic landscape, and as such an essentially stereotypical image. At first, it appears to be a still image, a postcard, until some slight unremarkable movement reveals that it is a film. The image slowly slides horizontally, but panning in two different directions. In this translation of quiet dislocation, the embodiment of a landscape starts to disassemble itself through a study of origin and nature. And the film seems to ask whether the very idea of a landscape is a construction. There is a passage by Simone de Beauvoir that comes to mind, where she writes how she would like to become the landscape in front of her: “I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance”, she writes. “But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.”

—Jonatan Habib Engqvist on Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1, in his text Impossible Possession, written in connection to an exhibition and a screening at Slakthusateljéerna and Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists in Stockholm, August 2015


Camera and editing: My Lindh
Special thanks to: Eva Arnqvist, Johan Lindh and Malin Pettersson Öberg
With support from: Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists, Malin Pettersson Öberg / Slakthusateljéerna (Sweden), Air d’Islande (Paris) and Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland)
Distribution: Filmform – The Art Film & Video Archive

Part of the Public Art Agency Collection


Watch Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1 excerpt