"Parrot's excuse"
Mikko Kuorinki has carefully chosen artists working with texts and poets who are also visual artists to take part in an email conversation. The topic of the discussion was: what the artists and poets will present on the transitional table. As a player M. Kuorinki let the conversation very open and each one had the pleasure to get lost as an aesthetic manner, without trying to build a common homogeneous identity. The process of this international conversation had some similarities with the automatic writing of the Surrealists, each email creating some unexpected and not motivated reactions. But unlike for Surrealists the reactions was not a common daydream which would express the real functioning of thought. Here, the implicit process generated by artists was more the creation of a landscape where some future heterogeneous pieces could dialogue together. Through this chaotic approach, the exhibition escapes from the reality but some pieces put together could create some configurations and some possible realities. The artists were aiming at defining this landscape through hints. They shared pictures, references, intimate sketches, without any of those hints being more serious or essential than any other one. Gombrowich, Lituanien cake, the recipe of Alice B. Toklas, a bird on a table, the black monolith of the "Space Odysseus", "the Third Table" by Graham Harman. In this minimal chaos, as a scriptwriter Mikko Kuorinki at the end of the process, introduced to us a new participant, the british poet Sam Riviere, thus making this landscape more fleeting. He will present a photograph shot thirteen years ago, where we see an unknown woman in New Zealand, on skis with snow splashes, in a snowing landscape. The photograph has never been exhibited. Welcome in this landscape. Nathalie Rias, compressed diary
Title: Curator of the Transitionnal Table 2
Title exhibition: Parrot's excuse
Year: January 2015
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: Spatula
Year: 2014
Technic: Oregon Pine wood
Title: Visual Cliff
Year: 2014
Technic: Silk ink
Artist's website: http://www.yesyesdavid.com/
These works:
Visual Cliff is based on the psychology experiment from the same name developed by Eleanor J. Gibson and R.D. Walk in 1960. The experiment placed infants on a specially designed table with a brightly colored and patterned cloth from surface to floor to test wether infants instinctually knew to be cautious of a cliff. This table cloth painting uses the same structure but optically confuses the experiment, visually erasing the cliff.
Spatula is part of the ongoing spatula series. The spatula came from a therapy game called the "spatula game" from 20th century psychologist, Donald Winnicott. In it, a spatula is placed on a table in reach of a child. The child grabs it and starts to play. It starts to imagine the spatula transforming into something else, perhaps an airplane waved around in delight. Because it now sees an airplane, it can dream of what an airplane can do, it can think through the imagined thing.
Bio:
(1988, San Antonio, Texas) is an artist based in Amsterdam. He combines performance, sculpture, and writing to tell stories through objects. He has presented his work internationally at Walden Affairs, The Hague (2014); Nomas Foundation, Rome (2013 & 2014); Performa 13, NY (2013); CAC, Vilnius (2013); Frutta, Rome (2013); De Appel, Amsterdam (2013); and SculptureCenter, NY (2012).
Title: "Giving is living." I use Labanotation – a system of symbols for recording and analyzing human movement – to paint a portrait of my first performance.
Year: 2014
Technic: Paper,ink, MDF, acrylic paint
Artist's website: www.victoriadurnak.com/
Her work:
Past and future encounters trigger my introduction of narrative structure into the mishmash of lived experience. My narratives can be personal, detached, informed by others, nonetheless directed and arranged by me. Personal mythologies unfold through my performances, not just by turning life into art, but also by placing myself in odd situations where any task might become art.
Bio:
(b. 1989) lives and works in Oslo, Norway. She has most recently participated in the group exhibition Odd Bird, Kuva/Tila, Helsinki (2014), and her degree show at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2014). Flamme Forlag published her novel Deep shit, Arkansas in 2011, and her two poetry collections Stockholm sier ('Stockholm Says') in 2010 and Natt på museet ('Night at the Museum') in 2012. In February 2015 she will have a performance at UKS, Oslo, and in the early spring Flamme Forlag will publish her second novel Torget ('The Market Square').
Title: Then he watched me while I ate the egg.
Year: 2015
Technic: Hard boiled egg and story read by Mikko Kuorinki. After the reading the story was left on the window sill.
Artist's website: http://www.ingerwoldlund.no/home.html
Her work
Bio:
is an artist and writer based in Berlin. Lund is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts; Oslo, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design; Stockholm, and Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste; Frankfurt am Main. Recent exhibitions include Museo Apparente, Napoli; Galerie Parisa Kind; Frankfurt, Hordaland Art Center; Bergen, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Oslo, Galleri Box; Gothenburg and INCA; Seattle.
Her first book in her native language Norwegian will be published by Flamme Forlag in Spring 2015. A chapbook with stories in English will be published by Ugly Duckling Press in 2015.
Title:Sound poem for Mikko
Year: 2015
Technic: video
Artist's website: http://www.audunmortensen.com/
His work:
Bio:
Audun Mortensen (b. 1985) is an Oslo based author of six books of poetry and fiction, various zines, and has recently exhibited work at Futura Gallery, Prague; Gagosian Gallery, New York; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen
Title: 6x4 colour photograph stolen from 1 hr lab in christchurch, NZ in 2001
Year: 2015
Technic: Object assemblage on the wall. Materials: Feather, text on paper, sticky tape
Artist's website: http://samriviere.com/
His work:
Bio:
he is the author of the poetry collections 81 Austerities (2012) and Kim Kardashian's Marriage (2015, both Faber), and Standard Twin Fantasy (2014, Eggbox), a poetry pamphlet. He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Title: Movie
Year: 2014
Technic: various material
Artist's website: http://www.thenameofthesunisyellow.com/
His work:
Bio:
(NL, 1979) works with text and sculpture. He is interested in the relationship between everyday objects, metaphysics and poetry.
He recently exhibited at Centre d'Art la Panera, ES(2013), Estland National Art Museum, EE(2013), La Casa Encendida, ES(2012) and de Vleeshal, NL(2012).
Title: A bird is gone
Year: 2015
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
The transitional table has been made in reference to a concept of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. A transitional area is this space that we invest at the beginning of our life when we realize that we're a person and that there's an outside reality. The transitional area is a space between inside and outside, between subjectivity and objectivity.
And today, it's a landscape. Around 130 emails have been exchanged to create this landscape. In the email conversation, Inger wold Lund regularly finished her writings by "wind in the sails"
You see a cliff. David Bernstein has done it. Just before Martijn in't Veld wrote about an experience he had with a tee-shirt on which we can see a man playing chess.
Martijn told us that when he was wearing this tee-shirt a lot of people asked him whether this man was Marcel Duchamps. This tee-shirt became a kind of entrance to speak with unknown people. On the tee-shirt it was not Marcel Duchamps, but Witold Gombrowichz. Gombrowichz played often chess in cafe Bio Rex in Argentina. He fled the nazi regime. The landscape of the mountain Los Andes, the cliff near Mendoza, reminded him of the range of Tantras in Poland. His writing was censored until 1957. I am currently reading a book written in 1957. I haven't finished it yet. It's ''Portrait of the settler, Portrait of the settled '' of Albert Memmi. Recently René Vautier died. He has made in 1950 an anticolonial movie, it has been censored for 40 years, I haven't seen it.
On the table, it's not a chess game, but a cliff, a visual cliff made by David Bernstein. A visual cliff is a psychological experiment about the perception. It has been used with young children and animals. It's using a table cloth on a table, at the middle there's a cliff and at this location there's a plexiglas at the same level as the table top. When the baby is able to scrawl, he stops before the cliff and his heart rate increases. The young animals avoid cliffs. But with the plexiglas, was it a cliff? Our perception is the cliff of the reality.
What I perceive when I see the video of Audun Mortensen on this phone? 
I see an interviewed man in the street who has the voice covered by the sound of breakers and picks. I see a concret sound poem, dedicated to Mikko Kuorinki. I see the intention of the artist. I also see Michel Houllebeqc in a tv joke of the false news presenter Mikael Kael, alias Benoit Délépine.
Not so long after the terrorist attack in France, it's not easy to have this new perception on this exhibition. It's not easy because after the event I decided not to share my feelings about them in the public space, because both the media and public spaces were saturated. I needed silence, to reconnect with myself.
To see a video with Michel Houellebecq reminds me of these events. He was on the front page of the last edition of the attacked news paper, he lost very good friends in this attack, and before this event there was a polemic about his last book, about whether it is against islam or not. In France it's impossible to ignore all this events. For me it's difficult today to host this video, because it enters in conflict with the asceticism which was necessary for me.
Despite my emotions, Mikko Kuorinki, decided to show this video, because for him art is more important than my emotions. And I approve him, because art is also important for me. Audun Mortensen proposed this video 3 months ago. After the Paris events, Houellebecq choose the silence too. Before the attack he was as usually smoothly handling the polemic about his book, but after the horror, it was impossible to maintain it, because the horror is stronger than the polemic. He could not reach his target. He disappeared from the media.
After the cliff and the chess episode, Mikko Kuorinki spoke to us about the black monolith in Space Odyssey, Martijn in't Veld has created this art work, done with a meteorit.
In Argentina, in "Campo Del Cielo" which is meaning, the "sky's prairie", there are many craters probably created by the largest group of meteorit ever fallen on earth. In 1576 The spanish colonial governor of Argentina has been interested in these fragments, he thought that it was a deposit of iron, because the indian used it to make their weapons. Their ancestor, pre-colombian indian knew that it came from the sky, they thought that it was some sun's fragments.
Sometimes Mikko Kuorinki puts very small meteorits in his pocket.
He also introduced us Sam Riviere at the end of the emailing conversation. Rivière means river in french. I don't know a lot about him but what I know is that there's no accent on the e, on his name, contrary to the french word.
David Bernstein has made a lot of kind of spatulas since 4 years and he collects some pictures of them. This one is particularly elaborated.
He invites child to play with it as if it were a plane, but it's fragile… A spatula as a toy is an allusion to a work of the psychoanalyst Winnicot, the spatula was a transitional object, used by a child to transform his urges into a game. Here's a transitional spatula on a transitional table…. We evoked the "Third Table" of Graham and I proposed a concept of a "Fourth table", David replied that he has already writen a text about the "Fourth Table". I hope that I will meet you, a day, David.
With a spatula on a table, the egg is not very far. This one is not only domestic. A man wrote to Inger Wold Lund that he just put the egg here, so that you can think about wether you want to put it up your ass.
In the movie "In the Realm of the Senses", we see a woman playing with an egg, she puts it in her vagina. But I think that the scene of an another japanese film Tampopo is more exiting. A man introduces the yellow of a raw egg in a mouth of a woman and she returns him wis her mouth, etc etc…
Some scene of "The realm of the Senses" have been censored in Japan.
I don't know if the gift from Victoria Durnack will be open or not when I will be reading this text. So it's a new actuality. Thank you Mikko to have created this exhibition, on my table.