Rustan Söderling’s work often revolves around the perceived disparity between ‘what is natural’ and ‘what is constructed’ as being an artificial one, imagined by us.
I work mostly with the manipulation of moving images and hold that, just as cinema, history itself can be understood as something constructed, and therefore something that can be taken apart, revised and reassembled in new constellations. The work takes place on a metaphysical timeline somewhere between ancient history and distant future. It invokes a shifting tension between constant motion and perpetual stillness: a server farm abandoned to the forest, tangled with vegetation. A ruin or relic can be seen as a symbol of the briefness of human labor and the permanence of nature; chaos over order. But it can also be seen as a merging of the two, a tether to the past, which is what I strive towards in the work.
Tannhäuser Gate (not really now not anymore)
HD Video / 17:17 min / 2017
Eternal September
HD Video / 18:11 min / 2016
SandyMouth
HD Video / 04:10 min / 2018
The Post-Material-Antiquarian
HD Video / 23:08 min / 2015