basis is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the Schwedish Artist Johanna Billing in Germany.

Johanna Billing’s works can be seen as attempts to visualize universal processes of social change and to relate these to the concrete experiences of the subject. They frequently evoke a sense of melancholy and loss, which is further radicalized by the intelligent use of irritating narrative ruptures.
Ongoing social change and how it affects the individual are her central artistic interests, not that the suggestive force of her film projects is thereby lessened in favor of purely documentary elements.

For the most part the films avoid rigorous narrative structures and present reduced actions and situations with protagonists operating as mute, concentrated witnesses in restricted contexts. Loss of narrative stringency in these works opens up the field for complex questions of individual identity, the power structures of contemporary society, and the challenges posed by social and personal changes occurring in the world we inhabit.

Johanna Billing’s videos attain a high degree of complexity through the frequent citation of films and pop music of recent decades, whereby the original sense of the recontextualized songs and films is brought to bear on the contents of the works and the suggestive power of the music becomes a vehicle for thematic concerns.
The result is a tightly woven network of cultural, social, and historical references to scarcely perceptible ruptures in contemporary processes of societal change.

Born 1973 in Jöngköping, Sweden, Johanna Billing lives and works in Stockholm. In recent years her works were on show at numerous group exhibitions, for instance at the 9th Istanbul Biennial 2005, 1st Moscow Biennial 2005, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, P.S.1 New York, Knoxville Museum of Art USA, the Singapore Biennial 2006, and the Momentum Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art 2006 at Moss, Norway.

press review as PDS