The Weather War is a documentary/art film about man’s attempts to control the weather and harness it for his own purposes. In a blend of land art performance and road movie, artist duo Bigert & Bergström travel to the US tornado belt with their special machine-sculpture, the Tornado Diverter. The goal is to stop a tornado.
The film also presents historical examples of how the science of meteorology developed in symbiosis with military goals, and how these visions evolved into modern ideas of geo-engineering—controversial ideas with sociopolitical consequences that spotlight the big question of who is really entitled to modified weather.

From a larger perspective, the film features the problems faced worldwide due to global climate change. How do we meet those challenges? Do we adapt? Or do we wage war against increasingly aggressive weather? Bangladesh is building protective walls against coming floods; China shoots rockets into threatening clouds; and in Italy, antihail cannons are fired to protect the year’s wine harvest.

This is the final film of the trilogy, which Bigert & Bergström have been working with since 2002, dealing with the human obsession with control. The subject of first film, The Last Supper (2005), is the last meal offered to the death row inmates prior their execution. The Life Extended, the second film from 2009, focuses on the contemporary dream of a longer, or even of an eternal life.

Since 1986, Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström have produced and created a wide range of art projects ranging from large-scale sculptures and installations to performance and film. Often with a conceptual edge, the core of their work is placed right in the junction between humanity, nature, and technology. With energetic curiosity and often using humour as a tool, the duo is known to analyse scientific and social issues discussed in contemporary society, such as climate change or environmental sustainability. Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström were born 1965 and 1962 in Stockholm where they currently live and work.

Video from a recording session at Atlantis studio in Stockholm, featuring around 40 musicians recording a cover version of You don’t love me yet originally made by Roky Erickson 1984. The film is part of an extensive and ongoing live tour, starting in 2002, that includes multiple live interpretations by local participants at each venue, playing with the potential of covers and their invitation for subversion and reclamation.

Johanna Billing’s conceptually oriented video art is often situated in the interplay between the individual and society, the public and the private, the staged and the improvised. Questions of learning, time and socially scrutinizing processes are recurring themes. Her films often involve music, which through dialogue and collaboration becomes a medium for exchange, memory, and reconstruction. Johanna Billing was born in Jönköping in 1973 and lives and works in Stockholm.

From 1997 to 2005, Catti Brandelius – performing as her alter ego Miss Universum – produced films, pamphlets, poems, fanzines, events and songs with specific feminist content.  

Giving herself agency by proclaiming herself Miss Universe, Catti Brandelius questioned the preconceptions of the desired feminine body as a commodity, the economic system around beauty and the role of women in society. Brandelius’ Miss Universum has a loud voice and a strong attitude, addresses the question of class and features the suburb of Bredäng (south of Stockholm) in her work. Bredäng is where Miss Universum lives.

Catti Brandelius is an artist and musician using various artistic expressions such as photography, drawing, video, pop music, silkscreen, poetry and tap dance. Over the years she has used several aliases like Miss Universum (Miss Universe), Profesora (The Professor), Evert Taube and Elitakrobaten (The Elite Acrobat). She uses stereotypes and builds up new personas, which in themselves are stereotypes, but tries to compromise and change these to get both herself and others to see the world from new perspectives. Absurd and sometimes burlesque, her work tends to be humorous. Catti Brandelius was born 1971 in Gävle and lives and works in Stockholm.

The video set in the outskirts of Istanbul, focuses on moments of transition and marginalised experiences of time, seen through the lens of a street dog. Having been moved by the authorities to peripheral pockets outside the expanding city, the dogs are continuously moving along lines of gentrification and corporate city making. Through looping and repetition, the video relates this process to an experience of time: exploring the present as a complex gap between past and future, one in which an increasing process of erasure, also removes other registers of being and seeing.

At the centre of her artistic practice lies an interest in social interaction: How do we live together? What kinds of societies do we create? What occurs in the margins of society and in the transition from one social order to another? Recurring themes are interaction and exchange, circular forms of communication, self-awareness, empathy, and the life of animals. Working across a range of media, she is notably a forerunner of collaborative practices. Annika Eriksson was born 1956 in Malmö, since 2002 she lives and works in Berlin.

In the commissioned film Sylwan, Astrid Lindgren’s famous story about Pippi Longstocking becomes a window to an overlooked side of Swedish history. It is a story about the first documented Afro-Swedish actor Joe Sylwan, and his family of performers and actors, who played a minor part in the first and rarely screened 1949 film adaptation of Pippi. Later, Sylwan’s son, Ramon, played Starke Adolf [Strong Adolf] in the more well- known television version of Pippi from 1969, frequently shown on Swedish Television and exported to many other countries.

Starke Adolf works at the circus and is introduced as the strongest man in the world — any man who dares is invited to challenge him in wrestling. However, for Pippi, who is not a man but the strongest girl ever, he is no match and she easily wrestles him down to the delight of the audience. In the visually seductive Sylwan, an actor playing Joe Sylwan enters the stage of an eighteenth-century theatre and tells the true story of a racist attack on Joe Sylwan, which led to a much-publicized trial in Stockholm in 1932.

Dramatizing documentary material, as well as drawing on his own memory of going to the movies for the first time to see the Pippi film, Hilowle combines striking images with documentary accounts from the Sylwan family.

Salad Hilowle is an artist, filmmaker, and art educator. He is interested in the historical roots of the Afro-Swedish diaspora in Sweden and its links to the 2020s. Encompassing video, photography and installation, the work revolves around the themes of identity, memory, and feelings of “inbetweenness”. Salad Hilowle was born 1986 in Mogadishu and grew up in Gävle. He now lives and works in Stockholm.

In the video How to Civilize a Waterfall, artist Hanna Ljungh performs an authoritative confrontation with nature, an indifferent and independent force. Inspired by the dramatic expressiveness of hard rock music, Ljungh challenges a waterfall and tries to persuade it to turn into a hydroelectric power plant. The work reveals humanity’s comical and paradoxical relationship with nature. The encounter becomes an emotional and almost spiritual experience – an encounter with one’s self.

Hanna Ljungh works with film, photography, sculpture, and installation and has for some time now dedicated her art practice to the matter we describe as land, soil, stone, and mountain. Her work reflects upon and questions the fine line between what we call human and non-human forms of existence and the complex relations between them. Ljungh’s works are often fact-based in their core but in their aesthetics, they move away from the factual to rather relate to the viewers bodily sensations and feelings. Hanna Ljungh was born 1974 in Washington, she lives and works in Stockholm.

In the video work Delay the artist moves like a dancer along the streets of Stockholm, concentrating his movement around Stureplan, the mecca of night life in the city. His tall figure sometimes pauses to blend in with young men.

Mostyn imitates the men’s movements, strokes their cheeks and positions himself uncomfortably close. His declaration of tenderness creates responses of surprise, laughter, but also resistance. In one scene Mostyn is involved in a confrontation with one of the men and his physical movements develop into an uncontrollable fall along the street. Towards the end of the video we see Mostyn riding the subway out of the city, then further on, cycling through a park and finally running over a dark meadow, disappearing into darkness. In the last scene we see sleeping swans lying on a rock at night. The musical score accompanies the patterns of movement, both tonally and rhythmically.

Santiago Mostyn’s films, installations, texts, and performances often explore the dissonance of lives lived between different political spheres. His work simultaneously employs footage of historical events, political and cultural figures, and racial injustice to speak to his own personal histories. Santiago creates an intuitive narrative through layering and collage, whether through video or installation, combining new and archival imagery. His research-like process examines questions of identity and memory, both personal and collective, and the intersections of history with current events. Santiago Mostyn was born 1981 in San Francisco. He is currently based in Stockholm but maintain strong ties with Zimbabwe, and Trinidad & Tobago, the countries of his upbringing.

Glitterfabriken is a colorful meditation on stars, nature and glittering Christmas tree decorations where that which seems everyday here takes on a magical shimmer. 

“Swedens only glitter factory is located in Dalarna close to my home village. Between the years 1950–1970 it produced Christmas tree tinsel during the winters. After the factory closed, the house was also the home of my grandfather and grandmother until they passed away. In the midst of the prevailing Covid pandemic I spent a lot of time in the house. Me and my parents went through different objects from different times still occupying the house and The Glitter Factory turned into an archaeological excavation with confused archaeologists. The film camera was with me in the house and suddenly years had passed.

In The Glitter Factory, the year’s cycle materialized in an attempt to produce different objects, according to the different needs of the different seasons, that would sustain the factory’s survival. Christmas tree tinsel in the winter, binoculars in the spring, sunglasses in the summer, and zippers in the autumn. With the ever- present feeling of time, I filmed my parents over and over again. Over time scenes from life, dreams and imagination came to life in The Glitter Factory. The act of looking and a spotlight on mortality slowly emerged. The house itself started to fade away and a new place became visible. A house that invites us to spend time with each other, a camera that gives us a reason and moments to pay attention to the way we look at things and the way we speak about them. ” 

Alexander Rynéus.

Alexander Rynéus is an artist and film director whose work can be described as place-specific art projects. Using the documentary as a method, he engages in personal encounters with people and their lives in communities often affected by big changes. His processes often take years to realize, where the time perspective enables a more extensive history writing allowing for minor moments to unfold alongside the bigger narrative and together form a new whole. Alexander Rynéus was born 1987 in Svärdsjö, he currently lives and works in Stockholm.

The Haven takes place in the communal laundry house, typical to Swedish housing complexes and a kind of frame of mind for ordinary life. The laundry house is not only a warm and temporary safe space, it is also a place where it is possible to be somebody else, for a couple of hours. In an uncertain and vanishing existence, simple everyday routines – like doing laundry – becomes a way to hold on, and to belong.

Petronella Petander works within storytelling, mainly through video, text, photography, audio, and installation. By using and transforming embodied experience, her work deals with matters of belonging, social hierarchies, and shame. Petronella Petander was born 1977 in Stockholm where she currently lives and works.