Petra Lindholm ”Fever”

Petra Lindholm works with different techniques and moves freely between the digital, two-dimensional, the analogue and tactile. The moving image, soundscapes and music has been part of her artistry since the beginning, in recent years combined with textile assemblages. In the films she uses both recorded and collected imagery that is processed and put together in loops and transparent layers. Short fragments of reality are extended and transformed into an abstracted, suggestive flow of images. The audio tracks amplifies the visual content with atmospheric sounds, samplings, voices and singing. The textile assemblages are natural extensions of scenes in the films into the physical space. Lindholms uses thin fabrics in different colours which are applied with glue on panels. The pictures are reminiscent of the films in their structure where layers are added until the finished composition appears.

Despite not being painted, Petra Lindholm’s video and textile works are highly pictorial, where a close permeation of techniques seep into an overlapping of visions and experiences, invoking a constant sense of flux, of perennial transit, within our state of being. Her assemblages are crystalized fragments of her video yet their fixed nature better convey the residues of events having taken place on earth by means of the small incisions into the textile surfaces. Similar to a palimpsest, humankind’s transit across the earth leaves its mark for the umpteenth time after previous traces have been scraped away. Moreover, her enlargement and repetition of certain natural elements give form to an expression between the abstract and the figurative art, a place where the dimension of time is prioritized. Besides, a series of relevant questions are indeed connoted by time, questions concerning such issues as the nature of change, identity, causation and free will. It is this latter human faculty that Petra Lindholm addresses specifically and, after providing us with her vision of the present, invites viewers to consider their own future thoughts and actions.