Johanna Billing (Jönköping, Sweden, 1973; lives and works in Stockholm) has been making video works since 1999 that weave together music, movement and rhythm. Merging the production modes of collective live events and workshops with a cinematic language, Billing in part directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private as well as the individual in the society as a whole. Billing often addresses political climates and cultural specificities, but more importantly she transforms, through a documentary method, her filmmaking in a fictive space to examine actual and contrived events and how that filmed compression illuminates their overlap. Billing’s films often involve music, which in her hands becomes a tool for communication, memory and reconstruction.
Recent major solo exhibitions include Keeping Time, Villa Croce, Genova, 2016, I’m Gonna Live Anyhow until I Die, the MAC, Belfast (2012); I’m Lost without Your Rhythm, Modern Art Oxford, Moving In, Five Films, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, (2010); Tiny Movements, ACCA, Melbourne, I’m Lost without Your Rhythm, Camden Art Centre (2009); Taking Turns, Kemper Museum, Kansas City; This Is How We Walk on the Moon, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2008); Forever Changes, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Keep on Doing, DCA, Dundee (2007) and Magical World, PS. 1, New York (2006). She has participated in survey shows such as 4th Auckland Triennial, Last Ride in a Hot Balloon, Auckland (2010); Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Belief, Singapore Biennale (2006); 9th Istanbul Biennial; 1st Moscow Biennale (2005); 50th Venice Biennale (2003). From 1998 until 2010 Johanna also ran the Make it Happen record label, publishing music and arranging live performances.