Elina Brotherus: Films, Videos & Photographs

About

Widely known in the UK as a photographer, the youngest to have been shortlisted for the former Citi Bank prize, Elina Brotherus has been a prolific film maker since her earliest work, Lesson (1998). Working on video, film and recently H.D. her film work has been collected internationally and is held by the Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj, Denmark, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, the Koc Foundation Istanbul and in Stockholm, Barcelona and Alsace (full bibliography below). Two films have been seen in the UK, the triptychs Spring and Baigneurs, both at The Wapping Project in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Brotherus captures the Finnish and French landscapes and the landscape of the body in films which, almost without exception, eschew narrative. They capture instead a leisurely sense of the passage and movement of time, the seasons and the temporal quality of life. Framed with the same sense of repose and stillness reminiscent of her finest photographs, figures wander in and out of her landscapes, walking in and out of the frame. The camera is almost always held in a fixed position and in this sense her work owes something to the French nouvelle vague, in particular Alain Renais. The constrained camera movement lends the work a lightness of touch, an unhurried and restful quality as Brotherus measures and appraises life unfolding in front of her lens. The Wapping Project - Bankside will present ten works, including the triptychs Spring and Baigneurs.