"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him"
Hello Mikko
I just inform you about the other works. I noticed that in this exhibition, each work has a structure, a language game very different from the others… A language game is also a concept of L. Wittgenstein, it is an autonomous system in the language, using its own rules and following its own way depending on the typical situation where it is played.
Similarly to russian doll-set, in all these language games done by the artists, there are other language games where something is deliberately missing, unusual or unthinkable for the viewer. These anomalies drive us where language does not go: in a kind of virgin spaces in which one invites us to practice a crazy subjectivity, in an indefinable area.
In one, there is some words but maybe they do not tell all… Is there a telltale?
In another one, we follow a woman, in a forest. We try to divine what happens but we do not have any information, maybe we can feel a suspend.
And in another, some usual objects create an enigmatic tension. Is it a kind of hallucination?
In another, a word cut out in a magazine and a natural item, put together in a space smaller than an A4, give us the vision of a pure temporality, it is a kind of suspension. A suspension in what?
In another, some objects from the past appear with their stories that we have to reconstitute, maybe we are wrong.
In two works there are some plants which are represented and maybe in an another one there will be a real organic item, like a sensitive link between all works, but it is not the topic.
Wittgenstein:«Whereas games form a family, the member of which have family likeness. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likeness overlap." But each game has its own properties.
And you: How will be your language game? And what will be missing? It is a little warm in Helsinki for the season. How is Madrid? During the opening (7h15 pm) and the others days I will do a public speech, a performance that will be questioning the art works on the table, …..
See you soon, Nathalie
Title: Night
Year: 2007
Technic: 16 /9, duration is 6.57 mn, single channel.
Artist's website: http://www.elenanasanen.com/
To see the video on the web:
http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/night_en/
Her work:
She makes work about women who go beyond physical or psychological boundaries in some way. The landscape is also often a strong presence in my films, which could be described as feminist road movies. Although the work often refers to traditional cinema, the method of developing the story is closer to that of experimental cinema.
Bio:
She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her extensive production has been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions internationally and in Finland. Näsänen's work has this year been exhibited, amongst other places, at the short film festival Akbank in Istanbul in March, and at Frankfurt Kunstverein in the group exhibition presenting art from Finland, 25.7.- 12.10.2014.
Title: Aluminium, ceramic clay, arrowroot, piano tuning felt, elastic band, vitamin d capsule, cotton Muji handkerchief
Year: 2014
Technic: Aluminium, ceramic clay, seaweed, silicone, melatonin, cotton Muji handkerchief
Technic: Aluminium, ceramic clay, rhubarb, azurite, cotton Muji handkerchief
Technic: Aluminium, ceramic clay, sour mango, nacre-mimetic material, stibnite, cotton Muji handkerchief
Technic: Aluminium, ceramic clay, arrowroot, piano tuning felt, elastic band, vitamin d capsule, cotton Muji handkerchief
Artist's website: http://www.kuorinki.com/
His work:
One of the central method in Kuorinki's current practice is the act of wandering. It can mean for example physical roaming in the streets of an unknown city or endless browsing of the internet. This seemingly aimless drifting is however guided by sharp-eyed observation, and perpetual interest in the surrounding world and its phenomenons. The stimulus for the works can be found anywhere from contemporary poetry to the aesthetics of a gym equipment to zen meditation to American sit-coms.
Bio:
(b. 1977 in Rovaniemi, lives and works in Helsinki, Finland) holds a BA in photography from Turku Art Academy and received his MFA from University of Arts and Design Helsinki. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki and Skånes Konstförening in Malmö. His group exhibitions include Malmö Konsthall, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Kunsthalle Helsinki and Ursula Blickle Stiftung in Unteröwisheim.
Title: from the series "Altered Powers"
Year: 2009
Technic: pigment ink print on mdf
Artist's website: http://www.vilinkakatko.com/
Another artist's website: http://vilinkakatko.tumblr.com
THE UNFORESEEN REORGANIZATION //
i know, it sounds crazy, but the very jumping is the best way to proceed here. via the splashes of the jump the grass snakes and the water plants entangling your limbs get flown so far away that when the water returns to the place, you've already managed to leave the spot.
no sharp stones or underwater currents dragging you with them is to be found here, at this spot - that i know, from my experience.
the main thing is to jump - if you for example walk to the water from that island, carefully grope your way deeper, or if you little by little descend to the water from the boat, no reorganizing will happen. but if you jump, the water gets mixed and you can catch something you never imagined.
JUMP TO THE UNKNOWN //
the surface of the water is crystal clear. the boat floats at the far end of the premises, behind the island lush with spruce trees and piece lilies.
on the left there's a wall, it's quite near, i can see it - a oil lamp on the pew at the other end of the boat is spreading its light some meters. how far is the space continuing on the right, that's impossible to perceive.
from here, the water looks pure black - - for one to jump into that water, it takes an unreasonable amount of courage.
Title:did i tell you
Year:2014
Technic: carbon ribbon on paper - 40,6 cm x 29,7 cm
Archives zaroum: http://www.afsnitp.dk/galleri/archiveszaroum/
"Notes for soloists": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2NaLpiHOzU
Her work:
She is a poet born in Gothenburg and based in Berlin. She writes visual and conceptual poetry in different languages, and her publications include zaroum (2001), archives zaroum (2008), notes for soloists (2011) and sounds for soloists (2012). Works of hers have recently been shown at the Grimmuseum Berlin, at Signal in Sweden and at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn.
Bio:
She is a poet born in Gothenburg and based in Berlin. She writes visual and conceptual poetry in different languages, and her publications include zaroum (2001), archives zaroum (2008), notes for soloists (2011) and sounds for soloists (2012). Works of hers have recently been shown at the Grimmuseum Berlin, at Signal in Sweden and at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn.
Title: Delicate as a dream, bird hovers in flight. For these birds, homemaking is easy: they build no nest.
Year: 2014
Technic: Object assemblage on the wall. Materials: Feather, text on paper, sticky tape
Artist's website:
http://www.tanjakoljonen.com
Her work:
I work with found objects and fragments of text. I interpret an idea and isolate objects from their original function, discovering the usefulness of the insignificant.
I often use the photograph to seal these two elements (object and word) together. This is to give more space for the text. Despite focusing on photography in my recent work, photography is not my ultimate goal. I'm interested in searching various possibilities to display suggestions for the viewer to ask: where does the image exist at the end?.
Bio:
(born 1981) lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She mainly works with photography and words. She studied Photography in Aalto University of Art, Design and Architecture. Since 2008 she has participated in several exhibitions and screenings at film festivals both in Finland and abroad. She is also a member of an artist group Maanantai Collective.
For 2014, March-Sept, she is chosen to take part to 6-month International Studio Programme in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
Title: Untitled
Year: 2014
Technic: Plaster, paper, tempera, reed, inkjet print
Artist's website:
Her work:
Her art varies from site-specific installations to performance and social event/happenings. In her installations Wesamaa uses the traditional methods of both; painting and sculpture along with other mediums such as photography and light.
Laura Wesamaa works by painting and building installations that often tie in with the surrounding environment. The works become integrated into the surrounding space and the space in turn becomes material for the works. Simultaneously with the presence of the conceptual, formal or theoretical questions inherent in the medium of painting, the works approach the riddle of our common existence and structures of reality.
Bio:
She's living and working in Helsinki where she graduated with MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts 2006.
Her work has been previously been shown in solo exhibitions at Helsinki City Art Museums Kluuvi Gallery, Gallery Bergman and SIC Gallery in Helsinki and Poriginal Gallery Pori, as well as in several group shows in Belgium, Finland, Israel, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.
In addition to her individual artistic work she works in continuous collaboration with a number of other artists including being co-founder of the collective/non-profit space Oksasenkatu11, running the artist initiative SIC in Helsinki and being member of the Mustarinda association.
Title: A lion on my table
Year: 2014
Technic: performance, speech ahead art works
Artist's website: http://www.nathalie-rias.com
Link to the performance: See the performance's text
Her work:
Is protean, it can take the form of installations, videos, performances, books, collaborations… The common denominator would be a particular interest in language and semantics, whether it is through literary references, through the revelation of hidden meanings, through the enquiry on documents and archives, through the questioning of the notion of History, or through the erasing of the frontiers between documentary and fiction. She is interested additionally in the interpretative reception of the spectators. She also do some rituals to observe small differences but she don't speculate about these reccuring works.
Bio:
She is french and living actually in Helsinki. She was artist researcher and post-doctoral at Academy of Art of Nantes (Ecole des Beaux Arts). She also studied the Theory of Theater at la Sorbonne Nouvelle. The right of broadcast of her last film has bought by the region of Saint Denis in France. She participated also in few group exhibitions, she performed for others artists in Tate's London, South gallery in London, in Centre Georges Pompidou. She also participated in research groups in art, written reviews about dance and theater, choreographed some show and shoot some cartoons for arte tv.
The text of the performance
Did I tell you, I began to speak...
Did I tell you, there's a text of Cia Rinne on my table and it's begin by: "Did I tell you"
I ear that Cia is a good performer when she's reading her texts, so, I will not read her text.
Did you tell her?
It's the night and a women is going outside the house, in the forest. What will happen?
We are in a fiction but we don't have the keys to organize the story, to have an interpretation. We let our mind to disconnect and we're drived by the clever body of the woman, her body is speaking.
I'm very close to the body of this women, my eyes are on her neck. I'm the camera, like a predator I'm following her, maybe the danger, it's me…. I don't know what is the plot, but the danger it's me and I discover it, in the same time I'm seeing the movie.
Is there a telltale?
Did I tell you that Cia Rinne have finished her text by there's a telltale?
After to be disconnected, I reconnect my mind, I'm not sure there's a danger, there's no clear information about that. In what kind of story am I?
If I forgot to reconnect my mind, the camera do that for me, It interrupt to follow the women.
So i stop be a predator.
Now, I see her face and and she's looking at me. Maybe I'm stilling the danger, the goal of the displacement of the woman, but now the danger is in front of her and she's going in my direction.
I'm taking this character in a sandwich, I'm two forces, like two vectors.
The experience I do in seeing this film, is to be contradictories forces.
Tanja Koljonen is also playing with forces. Temporary a feather defies the laws of gravity, or, this is my consciousness of spectator who is invited to imagine, this eternal time. It's not science fiction, it's an experience of unthinkable, if you're able to think it.
Usually Tanja takes photographies of object, she presented pictures like surfaces, she shown the concept of the object. This feather that you see, this word cut in a magazine are shown for the first time in real, it's not only laws of gravity which are defies, now it's an irruption in real, it's a tiny cataclysm.
This irruption in real remind me a conversation with Laura Wesamaa. She used branches in several works. She said me that it's because she copies the reality, but I think she doesn't copy, she bring the reality in the show.
She's not wrong and I'm not wrong. You can choose between both, or choose to remain undecided.
The branches you are seeing is a part of nature which had survive from an another times. From this time, in this excavation, you see some residues.
What did it remain? Some primary forms. The color and the technic inform us that it's made by humans. It is abstract forms.
These forms from the past could be stilling done and thinking today. It's not coming from the past, it's the persistence of the past in today. This is the mathematical mind of human. The waves drawn, should represent the hair of an antique mycenaen figurine, a goddess of mortal, found in a grave.
What kind of stories, archaeologist, humans tried to restore….
In what kind of story we are in the Elena Nasanen's movie?
In the excavation, the force come up from the past, to do a fragmented knowledge in the present.
In the photography of Vilinka Katkö the force is going down. She suggests, in a text, to jump in unknown, in crystal water.
You will find this text on her Facebook or on her website. It's relative to this picture.
When I see this picture and I didn't read the text, I'm like an archaeologist spectator.
I will not see the Island, the boat which she's speaking about. I see an electric plastic plug in a theatrical staging with smoke.
In the Laura's work you see an archaeologist tool, with rectangles black and white, it's using to have a measurement 's marker when they take a photo of an antique discovered object. It's a kind of rule.
They organize and archive the known.
But what this photography says? It's unknown….
The archaeologist will not guess that this plastique plug was crossing an area like an esthetic practice.
Now, as an artist I'm drawing in the space with my hand and my words the diagonal of unknown.
Unknown, unknown, unknown.
But is there a telltale?
Plastic is staging in tension with plants.
There we have a proximity with common plastic objects and plants. This combination is sophisticated and remind me japanese food. But i don't compare this work with japanese food and you're not allowed to do that. It's just remind me that, it's my pure fantasy and it could be a point to enter in another paradigm.
In Japan at the Nara age, they developed the technical of fermentation that still used today for soya sauce, miso, sake, mirin etc. The temple of Kin-jinja was specialist in the culture of this kind of mushroom. They also use it to preserve salt fish. They put it in a fermented rice, it was a bulwark against the putrefaction and they was able to conserve the fish for few months.
At the time to eat it, they took of, the rice and eat only the fish. The name of this food was nare-zushi.
It was at the same time they developed the emakimono. It was some long narratives rolls, with calligraphy and draws, it was able to roll out as you want to see the history.
It was a walk on history, like the walk I have done when Mikko sent me a list of words with a picture of his work.
Devices
Communication
System
Exotic
Everyday
Language
Disease
Infection
Objects as language
Language as objects
Objects squeezed from language
Language squeezed from objects
Mixed
Mutation
Contaminated
In between organic, synthetic, living, dead, raw, processed
Spirits
New age
Belief (he said me, he walked with a quartz in his pocket to see if something will happen)
Potentiality
Simulating
New form
Crudely combined
Loaded objects
Voodoo objects
Inside body
Outside body
Touching the surface
Protecting the surface
Covering the surface
Penetrating the surface
links
connections
holes
transmitters
wrapped together
artificial
real
study
test
There, there's a voodoo men who is in contact with the unknown. There the telltale is unknown. There there's a person who is trying to organize the unknown into knowledge.
We have an another diagonal.
We have this one and this one, this is the x, the unknown.
We had to wait 8 centuries after Nara age, to see the sushi as we know today, to appears.