Johanna Billing Swedish , b. 1973

Johanna Billing (Jönköping, Sweden, 1973) is a conceptual filmmaker who lives and works in Stockholm. Since 1999, Billing has been making video works that weave together music, movement and rhythm in ways that blur the lines between documentary and fiction.

In her works, 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.  About the musical aspect of her work, she has said: “I have a background in working with music in various forms. During many years I used to work parallel both with a record label, and with lots of live music events, as well as working as a DJ and a music journalist. In my films I have also come to work a lot with the musical soundtracks, which I arrange together with musicians whom I have an ongoing collaboration with. In the films there is always some kind of performance, but then the performance is most of the times only for the camera. [I am interested in] how to work with live events, in the music world – as well as in the art scene, and to explore this in different places and venues.”