24.5. — 16.6.2024

UNDERDOG (2024)
(2-channel video installation B&W HD video, 30:00 min)

What is it to be a purebred pedigree dog by breed association standards – a status symbol coveted by humans and bred sick within a narrow gene pool? What is it to be a mixed-breed mutt, a mongrel, a bastard, a creature born of random desire and devoid of an intellectual idea? What is it to be a pedigree dog wagging its tail at a dog show, unconsciously competing for judges’ (taste) points? What is it to be an artist who is averse to competition in the world of art and who is conscious about competing for the (taste) points of the judges? What is it to be Finnish-Swedish, Finnish or a mixture of the two, and do questions of identity or human dignity have anything to do with dogs?

In her experimental documentary Underdog, Marjo Levlin continues a series of works in which everyday observations of the coexistence of dogs and humans, in this case made a decade ago, form the theme around which the bilingual essay film is built, combining with her previous work on topics such as migration, race biology and the relationship between animals and humans.

Underdog sniffs and explores the world of dogs and people; In the B&W film, the author’s childhood experiences of clashes between two social classes and language groups, parents living in different countries and living in a life of scarcity (which was shameful without being bleak or lacking creative solutions) have inspired her to examine the lives of pedigree dogs, which, with breeding, take on increasingly crazy, sickly characteristics that parallel her observations of the human world and life in the contradictory territory in which more and more people live in a multicultural world.

Marjo Levlin (b. 1966 Graz, Austria) is a visual artist/filmmaker from Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia, living and working in Helsinki. Her work deals with both personal and universal themes, combining history and contemporary phenomena. Levlin, who started her career as a painter, works mainly through short films and installations, often building up a body of work using collected and found objects and chance. Her recent work has given an increasingly strong role to archives, science and research and has been shown in solo and group exhibitions and festivals since the late 1990s, both in Finland and abroad. In 2021, Levlin was awarded the Risto Jarva Prize bythe Finnish Film Foundation at the Tampere Film Festival for her experimental documentary Ellipsis (2020).