Carolina Sandvik – Some Monsters And Their Habitats
Solo exhibition
Project room, Färgfabriken
Curator: Emilia Rosenqvist
With her stop-motion animated horror dramas, artist Carolina Sandvik has garnered attention at film festivals around the world. Färgfabriken is now presenting the award-winning film The Expected, together with the scenography that the film takes place in. In addition, the film Dewclaws will make its Stockholm premiere.
Sandvik’s dramas are a balancing act between everyday boredom and nightmares in the isolated atmosphere of the home. A home that appears increasingly claustrophobic as the story unfolds, where emptiness becomes an adversary in an intense chamber play, which moves the character to ever stranger actions. Inspired by the aesthetics of the horror film genre, she works with visual expressions that create strong emotions and primitive reactions in the viewer. At the centre of it all is the physical body and its transformation, as well as themes such as “expectation” and “waiting”. It’s the same both in Dewclaws, with a werewolf-tinged (bad) dream and an unexpected ending, and The Expected , in which a pregnant woman’s body turns into a starting point for an unexpected transformation.
“In my films, I want to work with moods and scenes, both of which can draw on the unpleasant and the comic. The animation medium can adopt liberties beyond the laws of physics and function as an elevated grotesque reflection, or constitute a body of abstract sensations. There’s a seamless transition between the dream and reality, between the banal and the extraordinary. I take details from my own reality in the form of objects, anecdotes and observations, whilst the aesthetics and film language come mostly from the horror genre.”
The carefully created scenographies and miniatures contribute to the artistry of the films. Although Sandvik’s home environments and people are almost generic, easy to recognise and relate to, she’s cautious to always create things based on something she’s seen with her own eyes. In that shift – between the stiff and silent dolls and our ability to recognise – a strange distortion arises, a reflection that casts an eerie glow back at us.
About the artist
In recent years, the Malmö-based artist Carolina Sandvik (born in 1988 in Avesta) has attracted attention for her animated short films that have been shown at Swedish and international film festivals. In 2021, she also won the award for best Swedish short film at the Gothenburg Film Festival for the film The Expected, which had its American premiere at the South by Southwest festival in March of the same year. She received her MA in Free Art from the Malmö Art Academy in 2019. She presented an exhibition called Interiora at the Digitaliseum in Malmö last year, and is currently part of the group exhibition Home at the Malmö Art Museum.Co