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Text from the catalouge for the show "Cut my legs off and call me shorty" på Tensta Konsthall 17th. jun - 19th. sep 2009.

Ulf Lundin takes his time. We might think that his works first express the moment, the shutter click of the camera, the instant captured. If we look again we realise this is an illusion for each of his photographs is a composite, a work that may take hours to create. He calls them still films. This is an apt description of the process and the way we may view them.
When we see an image such as Still Films #1 (2006-2007) we see an almost banal image of a public park. Parents are watching their offspring skate and are dutifully recording the act for posterity. Then we notice that every single child, all fourteen who are on the rink have fallen - they are not victims of a freak wind but of Lundin’s patience.
In his video Bless You (1999) Lundin pushes and pulls at the concept of the moment even further. The work shows a series of people, each has a simple task - sneeze! The result is a compelling sequence where we are held in suspense waiting for the inevitable. But trying to sneeze is not that easy and we watch as each of his actors struggle to achieve something so commonplace. The sneeze has been called an orgasm of the face. We can sneeze unexpectedly because we have encountered something of extreme pleasure and therefore we want to repeat the moment. In Lundin’s work there is also a reference to Fred Ott’s Sneeze filmed by William K.L. Dickson in 1894, one of the very first films ever made. The moment the sneeze comes is always a surprise – Cut my legs off and call me shorty!

William Easton

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