Johanna Billing: Look Behind Us, A Blue Sky

The video works of the Swedish artist and 2007 Documenta participant Johanna Billing, born in 1973, occupy an unusual terrain between documentary and staged scientific experiment. Billing depicts the rituals of society by filming, for example, a group of young people as they reconstruct a long-forgotten experiment, or a group of artists singing a melancholy ballad together in a gesture of solidarity. By focusing on the dialectical interplay between the individual and the community, Billing reveals processes of social erosion--but without asserting emphatic judgment of these processes. The artist's video works--among them the well-known works You Don't Love Me Yet (2003) and Magical World (2005)--have been shown in many international group exhibitions, but this publication is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of her profoundly atmospheric productions.