ARTISTIC
Images of you
Original title: Bilder av dig
2023, 14:30. Documentary short
Language: DA
Subs: EN – SE – GL
World premiere January 28th 2023
Gothenburg International Film Festival
With her grandmother’s photos from Greenland, Louise tries to understand her colonial heritage. In the 1960s, her grandparents travelled from Denmark to Greenland to work as schoolteachers, at a time when the Danish state wanted Inuit children to reject their language and culture and learn Danish instead.
How did her grandparents see their own role in Denmark’s colonial history then – and how do they see it now? The filmmaker opens the family archive looking for a change in perspectives. Is it possible to see our personal history with new eyes? Can we adjust our image of whom we were to Greenland?
Director/producer: Louise Hollerup
Co-producer: Inuk Jørgensen
Official selection Gothenburg International Filmfestival, Tempo Documentary Filmfestival, DocLounge Locals
International premiere TBA
With support from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, City of Gothenburg & Filmcloud
Arctic Love Parade
Official selection Nuuk International Filmfestival
2021, 15 min. Hybrid documentary/animation film.
HDK-Valand in collaboration with ANIDOX:LAB, the Danish Filminstitute and Danmark på Film.
Have you met the Danes who fell in love with Greenland? In Arctic Love Parade, Danes who have lived in Greenland exhibit their Arctic souvenirs. The objects become a starting point for a reflection on colonial dynamics. Where do we draw the line between love, desire and objectification in colonial relations?
Artist statement
Director Louise Hollerup is interested in the emotional side of Danish colonial history. She grew up with her grandparents’ stories from the years they spent as schoolteachers in Nuuk. Whilst listening, she started to identify a kind of narrative DNA that seemed to also apply to other Danes’ stories about Greenland. On a deeper level, these stories appeared to talk more about the storyteller than anything else.
In Arctic Love Parade Hollerup collects ordinary Danish people’s stories about Greenland, trying to learn more about the narrative DNA of Danish colonialism. By presenting the viewer with personal stories of ordinary people, she puts forward lived experience and personal investment into matters that are often only spoken about in macroeconomic terms.
With this film, Hollerup invites all Westernes to reflect critically upon their complicity in colonial structures. She hopes to forward a difficult conversation about the past, present and future of colonial relations. What happens if we think of our fascination and attraction to the Other in the light of a broader historical perspective? Is it possible to acknowledge our emotional investment in colonial structures, whilst keeping in mind the harsh consequences for those on the other side of the equation?
Fluga Lambada
2020. 2:20 min. Stop-motion film. Narrated by Markus Pastuhoff.
The fly lambada is a dance between drowsy flies and curious cats. This film is a humoristical and sensual reenactment of a story from a man’s window sill.
The Merman / Sjömannen
2020, 1:40 min. Experimental film. Watch on Vimeo
Exhibition photo (2nd photo in roll) by Gustav Lejelind
Alone in the lake. It is nice and quiet. Most of the time…
The Merman is a short experimental film that explores the audiovisual possibilities of a lake by imagining the life of a merman. The film is inspired by the French composer Michel Chion’s idea that in film, “there is no soundtrack” (Audio-Vision, 1994) – instead, Chion thinks sound and image catalyses into new meanings along the vertical dimension of a timeline. The piece was exhibited on Gothenburg Art Museum November 7th-8th 2020.
Här i sjön är det lugnt och skönt.
Det är inte mycket folk här. Härligt!
Fast ibland känns det så konstigt…
Sjölander Reversed
2020, 00:36 min. Visual research.
All photos are by David Sjölander and published by http://www.digitaltmuseum.se under Creative Commons Public License. Reinterpreted by Mia Gran Rogersdotter and Louise Hollerup.
Read more about Mia Rogersdotter
In the 18th and 19th centuries, colonial settlers engaged in the scientific collection and indexing of biological difference in plants, people and animals. The world was undergoing intense taxonomy. In Sjölander Reversed, filmmaker Louise Hollerup and photographer Mia Gran Rogersdotter work from and with taxonomic processes by doing a rereading of the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg. How did the museum’s originators created and sustained lines of differences with their work?
One of the museum’s most renowned conservations is Sjölander’s elephant. In A Story About an Elephant, we learn that Swedish David Sjölander (1886-1954) was known as one of the world’s most advanced conservators. He shot the exhibited African elephant in 1948, in the area that by then was known as Portuguese West Africa. Neither the pamphlet, nor the exhibition, has any reflection on the ethical aspects of travelling to a colony and shooting an animal for the sake of “complementing the collections”.
Sjölander Reversed looks closer at the natural scientist’s gaze as a structuring mechanism, where the act of looking and photographing itself contributes to indexing the world. Just like Sjölander, Gran and Hollerup are both personally and professionally invested in the act of looking. This excersise was therefore also a reflection on their own gaze as artists, and how they produce meaning and categories when they frame the world with a camera.
Hairy Stories Trilogy
What do you do to your body hair, and what does your body hair do to you?
The Hairy Stories Trilogy is three short films about body hair made 2016-2018. Each of the film explores body hair with a different methodological approach.
Read more at www.hairy-stories.com
Part 1: True Body, 2016. 5:14 min. In True Body we filmmakers explore the culture that sticks to our own skin. We attempt to break the boundary of our own intimate through a performative shaving, asking the question: How does my “true body” really look like?
Louise Hollerup, Shannon Turner and Maja Byriel. Eye & Mind, Laboratory for Visual Anthropology
Part 2: Body Hair, 2017. 15:51 min. Body Hair explores women’s lived relationship to body hair in a politically tense world. We meet women in Palestine who help each other with hair removal in their homes. The film shows how body hair removal can be a social activity and gives the viewer access to a closed, female space, where women help each other to become beautiful in the eyes of society.
Louise Hollerup and Yasmin Zaher. Aarhus Filmworkshop and Filmlab Palestine.
Part 3: Salon, 2018. 6 min. Salon explores the material dimension of body hair removal in a beauty salon in Aarhus. How is intimacy dealt with in a capitalistic context with focus on production?
Louise Hollerup. Eye & Mind, Laboratory for Visual Anthropology
Screenings include: RAI Film Festival library access, Bristol, UK // Palestine Film Days, Øst for Paradis, Aarhus // Palestine event, Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke, Copenhagen // Disko Dusken, event by F16, Dome of Visions, Aarhus // Moesgård Museum, course for Anthropology students // Gendering in Research network, Aarhus University // Sexuality Studies, Aarhus University // Nordiska Folkhögskolan, Sweden // Feminist Reading Group, Café Mellemfolk, Aarhus // The Women’s Museum, Aarhus
Kikkut Qallunaajuppat? Who are the Danes?
2016, 27:27 min. Documentary film.
Produced at Eye & Mind Laboratory for Visual Anthropology, Aarhus University. In collaboration with the Greenlandic House, Aarhus.
Kikkut Qallunaajuppat? / Who are the Danes? is a film about Danes from a Greenlandic perspective.
The film is an experiment with representational practices, made with collaborative methods. In turning the ethnographic gaze towards the Danes, it becomes easier to see how the gaze risks to inscribe its human objects into generalisable categories. The powerdynamics involved in representation can be easily seen and discussed.
The project is described in “Kikkut Qallunaajuppat? – Hvem er danskerne? Om blikretninger mellem Danmark og Grønland og filmen Kikkut Qallunaajuppat?“ by Louise Hollerup 2019 in Grønlændernes Danmark, eds. Ole Høiris, Ole Marquardt & Gitte Adler Reimer. Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
Louise Hollerup 