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University essay from Kungl. Konsthögskolan

Abstract: The central theme of my work is systematic violence on the micro-level of everyday life, our understanding and relation to “evil”, and the conditions behind it. I wish to address the relation between these micro-levels of experience and individual action with larger questions regarding the history of modernity – the power structure and social order of the modern state and its regime of identity and identification, set against the backdrop of a haunting colonial past and post-colonial present-day reality.   I understand film – the moving image – as a medium of sensory experience that appeals in a direct way to the human mind. It enables us to experience well-known or completely strange states of mind and reflect on them, thus creating new awareness of our own position and behaviours, which enable new forms of self-knowledge. Film speaks to all that is ‘unconscious’, and it makes it possible to observe human behaviour in new ways, to understand the driving forces behind individual action and the self. Fiction is for me a way to enter into these realms of reality, to bring to the foreground those aspects that are normally inaccessible, or consciously or unconsciously hidden or repressed in the name of social order or common sense – in order to then return in the form of structural violence.

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