Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1
by My Lindh

My Lindh is a visual artist and Senior Advisor at the residency program Transit Stockholm. Starting from the situation-specific, she deconstructs ideas of the common, the public, landscape and nature. Her work is based on a close examination of time and space and a care for materiality and detail, in order to create situations where the viewer can take part as a co-creator. She often works outdoors and wants to meet the viewer in the close, the local and the everyday moment. By examining places, stories and memories, she wants to ask questions about one’s own position and room of maneuver in relation to time, place, history and ecosystems.

About the project

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 about 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.

For more of My Lindh's work, visit mylindh.com

Still from Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No.1