Christina Hallstrom grew up in Sweden, in 1998 she graduated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam in Graphic Design and Visual communication.
Since then she works as a freelance printmaker, photographer, graphic designer, and filmmaker of documentary, art- and music-films based in Amsterdam. She is the co-initiator of Cutproductions. Sometimes initiating interdisciplinary collaboration projects, sometimes working freelance for artists, festivals, local communities or musea.
Lately she has been participating as a visual artist in dance performances integrating sequences and live projections in the performance. On the podium she creates a layered visual where past, present and if possible future can merge. ‘Live’ footage is mixed with the actual dancing going on stage. The images are projected on to different surfaces, some of the footage was projected on transparent cotton hanging loosely and dropping in a pile to the floor. Often combining a close with a total and/or past and present in one.
Within photography and print she let’s herself get inspired by the medium. She developed a very direct working method by exposing images directly on to the screen and by mixing her own inks. Also here layering is sometimes achieved by printing on transparent fabric or paper. In Hill, a series of still images printed on silk, this creates a non linear storytelling. The in betweenness of things as well as serendipity are important issues in her work.
She made two short films shot below water and since then algea is a returning subject in her printed work.
“Her work is involved with image making and video, film, photography and print. She collaborates with musicians and dancers, and much of her work appears in the form of DVD files and printed images. Her work as a printmaker is in the extended and growing realm of digital imaging, where the matrix is a digital file rather than the more traditional intaglio or relief matrices. Her artist motto, “We exist only insofar as we hang together”, underlies the decision to base much of her recent output on a collaborative process. In various ways this is what printmakers have been doing for centuries, but in this artist’s case the difference lies in her choice of technology and her global reach.”
(Richard Noyce in Critical Mass – Printmaking Beyond the Edge. 2010)
