Deliverance is a monumental video installation consisting of a 20 metre long panoramic projection, specially produced for the National Museum of History in Stockholm. Without beginning or end, the film is structured as a loop running for 37 minutes.

Deliverance alludes to manipulations and catastrophes but also to freedom of expression and liberation. The work is a poetical and melancholy journey verging on recent history, memory, the human capacity for faith and the necessity of reconciliation. The flow of the narrative is slow and meditative, a mantra of moving images, which, among other things, expose urban fringe areas – the ruptures of city planning. In the work, these real places become illusory spaces, cities, countries or moods, which express conditions of loneliness and exposure.

The image sequences are intertwined with historical sound recordings: John Lee Hooker’s Tupelo Blues, recorded in 1959, and Bertolt Brecht’s 1947 statement upon being called before the ‘House Un-American Activities Committee’ during the McCarthy era, as well as an excerpt from a relaxation tape.

Mats Hjelm describes his work as a reflection on recent developments in the world that have increased the importance of religion, especially in relation to conflicts and politics, as well as a way of seeking reconciliation or concordance. The closer to our time history moves the more difficult it becomes to interpret.
Celia Prado, curator for the exhibition and for contemporary art at the National Museum of History in Sweden, views the work as a story and a prayer for our desire for reconciliation and eternal presence; at the same time she points out that every viewer’s experience and interpretation of an artwork carries its own truth.

Deliverance is produced using up to 4 synchronised High Definition cameras, Projected on four 5 meter wide screens with 5 channel surround sound.