Josefin Arnell is either the most or the least Swedish artist I’ve encountered. Her films, which are often collaboratively written and community-specific, spin documentary and fictional elements into loose plots that play out in improvised – and in many cases cringeworthy – performances by actors and non-actors alike. Works like Buurthuis 2 (Community Centre 2, 2023), a horror film about gentrification made together with the staff and visitors of a community centre in Amsterdam’s Wittenburg neighbourhood where the artist lives, explore complex group dynamics while also taking on broader issues such as class, feminisation, and political and cultural exclusion.
Yet unlike more agonistic strains of socially-engaged filmmaking, such as Pilvi Takala or Johanna Billing, Arnell’s films tend toward the darker sides of human behaviour. Her work mines libidinal attachments with a kitsch aesthetic full of gore, psychosexual violence, and juvenile obsession.
In Blood Sisters (2020), a group of elderly women party like frat boys inside a rose garden. In Gag Reflex / I Wanna Puke in Heaven (2016), the artist trains her lens on the self-induced vomiting of three teens laughing hysterically on the steps of a public park. Such scenarios are typical in Arnell’s films. She has said in interviews that she likes to think of her work a kind of exorcism – a curious choice of words, but I think I get it. Visiting her exhibition Crybaby, currently on view at Index in Stockholm, felt like wrestling with collective demons.
Although Arnell is well-established in the Netherlands – an alumnus of the Rijksakademie residency program in Amsterdam, she was recently short-listed for the Prix de Rome, one of the nation’s most prestigious visual arts prizes – this is her first institutional solo presentation in her home country. Comprising eight films spanning 2016 to 2023, Crybaby is a lot to take in, visually and emotionally. (I couldn’t watch it all in one sitting, having maxed out at around three-quarters of the total run time, which is just under two hours.) Here, we are invited to view the films from an uncomfortably close vantage inside a row of sculptural horse stables. Despite their graphic imagery urging us to look away, the films are riveting like witnessing a car accident is riveting, implicating us and forcing us to reckon with our voyeuristic desires.
In an early scene in Beast and Feast (2023), a campy send-up of a police procedural, we see the film’s protagonist, a single-mother named Annina, energetically masturbating in front of her infant son. As we soon learn, she is a police officer investigating a grisly murder. The symbol-laden vignettes that follow centre mainly on her desire for a seemingly unobtainable horse (cue the psychoanalytic readings), and much of the film unfolds in and around stables. More allegorical than narrative, Beast and Feast envisions a world eerily like our own, in which maternal law has become the rule. The mass hysteria depicted in the film finds its climax in Annina’s frenzied speech to an imaginary horse: “Come to me, I am responsible for you!”
The more context-specific Wild Filly Story (2020) was filmed at Pony Ranch Floradorp, a government-subsidised recreation and therapy stable on the outskirts of Amsterdam Noord. The film is a kind of psychodrama revisiting the artist’s upbringing in the mid-north countryside where she was, according to her own description, “a horse-obsessed teen.” In it, we follow a tight-knit group of so-called “horsegirls” and women – staff and regular visitors to the ranch – as they negotiate the physical and social demands of the stables. The story, if it can be called that, kicks off when a girl’s stallion is sent to the slaughterhouse, and culminates in a raucous banquet inside a barn, where everyone has gathered to eat barbecue horse burgers. In between, the girls are haunted by a scene-stealing ghost whose pastimes include hair-pulling, listening to gabber music, and trashing the stables. “All I ever wanted was to become a horse,” she moans. Later: “Nobody talks about my story. I don’t even know it myself.”
There is much tenderness in the way Arnell depicts her subject-participants, who are given ample room to be as petty, contradictory, and kind as they are in their lives offscreen. Most of the time, it looks like they are having fun too. Underlying negativity notwithstanding, the film’s dramatisation of the struggles of not only young girls, but also the rural working class is profoundly empathetic and lacking in condescension.
This becomes even more palpable in the short documentary Nikita (2020), in which a young woman from the ranch speaks candidly about the feelings that she developed while caring for and rehabilitating an abused horse. Watching Nikita speak about her special bond with Spot, I was knocked sideways into awareness of our common condition. Arnell’s films attest to the unrelenting darkness and strangeness of our times. Yet they also call our attention to what makes them bearable. Call me sentimental, but a girl’s love for her horse simply cannot be denied.
