Niki Lindroth von Bahr

2024

The 2024 festival poster has now been unveiled. In the artwork, Niki Lindroth von Bahr has drawn inspiration from chess-playing computers and her characteristically humanized animal puppets, while also approaching this year’s festival theme with both curiosity and critique.

What did you want to explore in your festival piece?

– Since AI is this year’s festival theme, I knew I wanted to address that in some way. I was inspired by one of the early events in AI history: when the chess computer Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. A clear encounter between human and machine, where the human lost. There are also moments in chess history where players have been accused of cheating related to the use of computers. At the same time, chess in film and culture has become a symbol of life, death, and existentialism. Just look at The Seventh Seal! So I thought of an image of a control room for computer-controlled chess where we’ve just celebrated a win, but it might instead be a future loss for humanity. With the pig, I liked how there’s something touching about its appearance, while we humans share 98% of our DNA with pigs. There’s something beautiful about that.

Your art is incredibly detailed. What is it about working in this way that attracts you?

– I get a thrill from creating worlds and miniature environments that are just on the edge of being perceived as real. At the same time, it’s very time-consuming. When I was sitting with a tiny needle, inserting every hair on the pig’s silicone head, I really felt like there’s something wrong with me. Aside from the chess calculations on the screens, which I added in Photoshop, everything in the festival piece is handmade at a 1:6 scale.

Animals often appear in your films and your art, as they do in this year’s festival poster. What is it about animals that interests you?

– I often work with fairly dark themes, and when you present humans in animal form, something fragile and absurd is added to otherwise human situations. It creates an elevation of the mood. Like when a slug is sitting at the doctor’s, getting its blood pressure checked. It’s a tragic image, but also very funny. And that’s how life is: sometimes dark, but sometimes you just have to laugh at all the darkness.