Johanna Billing
Johanna Billing

JOHANNA BILLING | KEEPING TIME

curated by Ilaria Bonacossa

A traffic jam is in a way the most terrible and time-consuming thing you can think of and not something you would deliberately want to put yourself in. But it has been challenging to think about how one could turn it into something that is almost the opposite - like a parade, perhaps, a kind of a quiet and unexpected Volksfest.

Villa Croce presents Keeping Time, Johanna Billing’s first solo exhibition in an Italian museum. Johanna Billing is internationally recognized for her talent in weaving music, movement and rhythm in videos that oscillate between documentary and fiction. The show, conceived in response to the villa’s historical architecture, spans the past fifteen years
of the artist’s career through four significant productions filmed in different places (Norway, Germany, Italy, Romania).

Keeping Time literally evokes the rhythm that articulates a musical performance as much as the idea of capturing the flux of time in images. Thanks to a strictly film-like language and using the production modes of the performance, Billing in parts directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations that develops chorally as multi-layered interpretations of each location and its social and political history. Her capacity of emotionally capturing the viewers is linked to the production process of the work, in which the careful staging and playing out of simple choreographic activities enables her characters to freely interpret themselves, forgetting the camera. Her mesmerizing video installations, without dialogues, interact with our bodily space; the screens of her videos sculpturally occupy the environments of the museum, and the slow narratives of her films, through the precise montage of gestures and music physically engage the viewers. Music in fact plays a key role in Johanna Billing’s works becoming a medium of exchange, memory and reconstruction. On the occasion of the show, the artist has released a new vinyl record containing the soundtrack of her last film Pulheim Jam Session, the piano improvisation by the Swedish musician Edda Magnason with all the video original ‘backstage’ sounds and noises.

Johanna Billing was born in 1973 in Sweden. She attended Konstfack, International College of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm where she lives and works. Recent major solo exhibitions include The Mac, Belfast (2012); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, (2010); ACCA, Melbourne (2009); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2007). She has participated in survey shows such as Documenta 12 (2007), Istanbul Biennial (2005) and Venice Biennale (2003).