Pilvi Takala per la Finlandia

Il sito Frame ha annunciato che sarà Pilvi Takala ha rappresentare la Finlandia alla prossima Biennale del 2021. Supportata dalla curatela di Christina Li.

CS

Artist Pilvi Takala has been selected to exhibit in the Pavilion of Finland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Christina Li, the exhibition will be commissioned and produced by Frame.

“I am thrilled to be making a new work for the Pavilion of Finland in Venice. My practice is slow, requiring a long research process, so I am especially grateful to Frame for approaching me for a proposal well in advance. The fact that I could start researching early on means I don’t have to make any compromises due to lack of time and can be more ambitious about what I’m making,” says Takala.

“We are very pleased to be working with Pilvi Takala. She is an artist with a very special artistic practice. This exhibition will give her the opportunity to further develop her unique view on the world,” says Frame’s Director and Commissioner of the Pavilion of Finland Raija Koli. “I’m also happy to have curator Christina Li on board our journey towards the exhibition in 2021. Her perspective and her previous work with Pilvi puts her in a perfect place of collaboration.”

Artist

Pilvi Takala divides her time between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules and truths of our behaviour in different contexts. Her works show that it is often possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation simply through its disruption.

Takala’s work has been shown at MoMA PS1, New Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Museum of Contemporary art Kiasma, Kunsthalle Basel, Manifesta 11, CCA Glasgow, International Film Festival Rotterdam, HotDocs, Witte de With, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial.

Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011, the Emdash Award in 2013, and the Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.

Curator

Christina Li is a curator and writer working in Hong Kong and Amsterdam. She was the Curator-at-Large at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, where she served as the Director between 2015 and 2017. At Spring, she curated projects such as A Collective Present (2017), Wu Tsang: Duilian (2016), and Wong Wai Yin: Without Trying (2016). Her most recent exhibition, Dismantling the Scaffold (2018), was the inaugural exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong.

As a writer, she has contributed to publications including Artforum, Art Review Asia, LEAP, Parkett, Spike, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art. She was the curator of Hong Kong’s participation with Shirley Tse at the 58th Venice Biennale 2019 and is currently working on a special project marking the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Art Basel with Kasper Koenig, and Hamza Walker.

“Having closely followed Pilvi Takala’s uncompromising practice for more than a decade, I am thrilled and humbled to have the opportunity to further our conversions in this forthcoming collaboration, and to bring Pilvi’s daring vision into fruition for this occasion,” says Li.

Commissioner

The exhibition in the Pavilion of Finland is commissioned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Frame, an advocate for Finnish contemporary art, supports international initiatives, facilitates professional partnerships, and encourages critical development within the field through grants, visitor programmes and residencies, seminars and talks, exhibition collaborations and network platforms.

Frame has a varying practice for selecting artists featured at the Venice Biennale. For the 2021 Venice Biennale, Frame invited both the artist and curator. For the 2017 and 2019 biennials, Frame invited proposals in open calls.

The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

News dal Padiglione della Finlandia

Per il Padiglione della Finlandia alla 58. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia il collettivo Miracle Workers Collective, presenterà il progetto " A Greater Miracle of Perception"  che si anticipa con una serie di eventi di cui il primo si svolgerà a Berlino il prossimo 3 aprile.

Il tema del "miracolo" prenderà forma nelle diverse declinazioni dei componenti il collettivo che attiveranno anche collaborazioni esterne con altre identità.

Miracle Workers Collective

  “If people have been engaging with the possible and ‘the way the world is today is the result of the possibles that they did’ as Sun Ra said, then what would be the results of imagining and engaging with the impossible?”, the collective asks.

In 2019 the Pavilion of Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale will host the Miracle Workers Collective (MWC). The MWC is formed and informed by artists, filmmakers, writers, intellectuals, performers, and activists.

Its founding members include Curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, artist and activist Outi Pieski, Associate Curator Giovanna Esposito Yussif, Associate Curator Christopher Wessels and spatial designer Lorenzo Sandoval.

“It is a great honour to work with and as a collective of intelligent and diligent individuals that make up the Miracle Workers Collective, in order to re-imagine The Finnish pavilion in Venice as a space of encounters and discourses, a space of negotiation and  reconciliation, a space for frictions and rehabilitation, a space in which aesthetics and ethics co-exist ”, says Curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

The performative, discoursive, filmic and sonic arm of the Miracle Workers Collective will manifest itself as a series of punctuated iterations by public intellectual and writer Maryan Abdulkarim, writer and filmmaker Khadar Ahmed, writer and filmmaker Hassan Blasim, choreographer Sonya Lindfors, visual artist and musician Leena Pukki, visual artist and activist Martta Tuomaala, cinematographer Christopher L. Thomas and storyteller Suvi West, among others.

Open Call

Frame Contemporary Art Finland issued an open call for the Pavilion of Finland at the 58th edition of Venice Biennale. The five-member jury included Sabine Breitwieser, Director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Independent Curator Natasha Ginwala, Artist Terike Haapoja and Maija Tanninen-Mattila, Director of the HAM Helsinki Art Museum. The jury was chaired by Frame’s Director Raija Koli.

“The proposal brings in a fresh and innovative approach towards the art scene and cultural producers in Finland while addressing urgent global issues”, states the jury.

Commissioner 

The exhibition in the Pavilion of Finland is commissioned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Frame, an advocate for Finnish contemporary art, supports international initiatives, facilitates professional partnerships, and encourages critical development of the field through grants, visitor programme and residencies, seminars and talks, exhibition collaborations and network platforms.

The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary, editor in chief of SAVVY Journal, guest curator of Dak’Art Biennale 2018, and guest professor at Staedelschule Frankfurt, inter alia. He was curator at large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

Outi Pieski (b.1973) is a Finnish-Saami visual artist from Utsjoki, the Saami area in northern Finland. In her practice there is often a strong connection between nature and the local culture. Her work combines Saami handicraft tradition of duodji and contemporary art to reopen conversations about the Saami people within Nordic discourses. After graduating from The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, in 2000 Pieski has been exhibiting her work at the Southbank Centre in London (2017), facade of Helsinki Cathedral Chapel, Lux Helsinki (2017), Felleshus and Grimmuseum in Berlin (2015), Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London (2014) and Gallery Korjaamo in Helsinki (2014) among several other venues. Pieski has made public art works in the Saami Parliament Houses both in Finland and Norway. She was Ars Fennica Award candidate (2015) and won the Fine Arts Academy of Finland award (2017).

Giovanna Esposito Yussif is a curator and researcher with background in art history, museology, and critical theory. In the past few years she has focused on collective models of inquiry, exercises of criticality, and processes of dissentient imaginations. She is co-founder of NÆS – Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies, a collective-connective research studio focusing on emergent and resilient dynamics of social organization, and is part of the collective committee of Rab-Rab Press. Giovanna has collaborated with diverse institutions such as Checkpoint Helsinki, Frame, HIAP, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Galería OMR, SITAC, among others. She is currently on a curatorial fellowship at Manifesta Foundation.

Christopher Wessels is currently a curator with the Children’s Library Project at Åbo Akademi University. He is founding member of the Museum of Impossible Forms M{if} where he is also one of the Artistic Directors, and he is co-founder of Third Space (2014–2016), a collective of artists and curators in Helsinki. Wessels is also a Cinematographer with seven feature films under his belt. His artistic and curatorial practices look at the un-silencing of counter hegemonic narratives and the building of counter hegemonic institutions with anti-racist, anti-sexist and class consciousness at its foundations.

Lorenzo Sandoval works in the crossing points of artistic practice, curatorial processes and spatial design. He has exhibited internationally as well attended residencies in Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Kenya. He received curatorial prizes such as Inéditos 2011, Can Felipa and Nogueras Blanchard 2012. He won the prize ‘Generación 2017’ presented in Madrid and the grant ‘DKV- Álvarez Margaride’, for his solo show ‘Shadow Writing (Algorith /Quipu)’ at LABoral. He works in a regular basis with Savvy Contemporary. Since 2015, he runs the fictional institution ‘The Institute for Endotic Research’. His recent research deals with the connections between computation, textiles, photography and domesticity.

#finlandinvenice2019

#miracleworkers

Image: (from left) Outi Pieski, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Giovanna Esposito Yussif, Christopher Wessels and Lorenzo Sandoval.

Padiglione Finlandia

Artists Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen will present their first collaboration, The Aalto Natives, in the Finnish Pavilion at the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Opening on 13 May, the exhibition is the flagship contemporary art event included in Finland’s official centenary programme. Its patron is Mrs Jenni Haukio, the spouse of the President of Finland.   

The Aalto Natives explores national identity

Individually known for their irreverent and often comedic story-driven work, in which a humorous approach deceivingly belies a profound inquiry into contemporary issues of morality and power, Mellors and Nissinen will focus on various clichés surrounding Finnish history and national identity in The Aalto Natives.

The installation will be conceived for the architectural and ideological context of the Finnish Pavilion, designed by architect Alvar Aalto in 1956. Conflating ideas and tropes from archaeology, anthropology and science fiction, it will re-imagine Finnish society.

“The Aalto Natives explores themes such as the invention of national identity and the origins of culture by way of absurdist satire. Dressing its intellectual ambitions in purposefully silly gear, it both addresses the complex challenges our globalized world faces today, and pokes a cheeky kind of fun at the political correctness of its discourse,” says curator Xander Karskens.

In The Aalto Natives, the artists, who share an interest in the capacity of absurdism and transgression to critique power structures and the status quo, bring together Nissinen’s intuitive, do-it-yourself attitude to image production and his penchant for naïve musicality, with Mellors’ writing-based approach to filmmaking, and integration of sculpture.

“We wanted to take a cosmic perspective on nationalism — a comic-cosmic perspective on national identity, creation mythology, transnational movement, bureaucracy and class & racial stereotyping. We started with the idea of creation mythology – it seemed both absurd and necessary. We took a trip to the Ateneum in Helsinki, looked at  the Kalevala paintings and talked about the role of the egg-laying duck. We realized that Finland is part of a broader genus of egg-based civilizations,” say the artists.

The 57th Venice Biennale opens on 13 May

The Venice Biennale, located in the Giardini and Arsenale directly in the historic centre of Venice, will open to the public on 13 May. The Art Biennale, which rotates with the Architecture Biennale every other year, is expected to attract approximately half a million visitors. Along with the national exhibitions, the Biennale hosts a large main exhibition of 120 artists in the Italian Pavilion. This year the main exhibition Viva Arte Viva is curated by Christine Macel, Chief Curator of Centre Pompidou in Paris.

“The Venice Biennale is the oldest and one of the most prestigious international exhibitions of contemporary art, which always manages to capture the zeitgeist of the world in a magical way. The Aalto Natives exhibition is by far the most international production we have ever seen in the Finnish Pavilion. With their very special take on the global state of affairs, Erkka Nissinen and Nathaniel Mellors will provide us with a viewpoint like no other,” says Raija Koli, Director of Frame and the commissioner of the exhibition.

The Aalto Natives to be exhibited at the Cobra Museum and Kiasma after Venice

The Aalto Natives installation will be seen both in the Netherlands and Finland right after  the Biennale ends in November. In addition to being presented at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen in the Netherlands in December 2017, The Aalto Natives will be included as part of a major exhibition featuring Erkka Nissinen and Nathaniel Mellors at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki in spring 2018.

IC -98 per la Finlandia

IC -98 è il nome del duo artistico che rappresenterà la Finlandia alla prossima Biennale di Venezia nel 2015.

La sigla  rappresentativa degli artisti Visa Suonpää e Patrik Söderlund che inizialmente, quando si fondarono nel 1998, si chiamavano "Iconoclast", trasformato poi nella sigla IC-98.

Attualmente sono in mostra presso la galleria Beaconsfield  di Londra (da cui la foto) 

From web site http://www.socialtoolbox.com/

Based in Turku, Finland, IC-98 is Visa Suonpää (b. 1968) and Patrik Söderlund (b. 1974). In 2015, IC-98 will represent Finland in the Venice Biennale.

IC-98 (originally 'Iconoclast', founded in 1998) aims to realize its objectives typically in collaborations, drawings, animations and books. The objectives are not programmatic, nor are the messages unequivocal – on the contrary, they are in constant movement towards the intersections of individual intuition and mutual agreements – the ideal is a free space of thought. IC-98 is interested in events, which did not take place, fantastic connections between things, heresies and pure systems of thought, the presence of history in everyday life, the body politic, social formations and architectural constructions, control mechanism and techniques of escaping them.

The medium of choice always follows strategically the context, its history and present situation, and the objectives in question. In practice, traditional research is combined with intuitive, subjective and personal considerations. The drawings, animations and books (the typical but not only mediums of choice) are ambiguous mashups constructed from diverse sources of information. They are stages or stagings, tableaux vivants, a theatre where the world according to IC-98 is played out. All IC-98 projects can be characterized as narrative constructs, blueprints of the possible or scripts for action. They try not to close on themselves but to act as condensations of diverse fluxes, both linguistic and affective – they open up to point something out or to bring something together, like expanded collages. IC-98 strives for an expressive quality, which retains traces of incompleteness, a process or becoming – it is a language but a language which stutters, which has obscurities and strange gaps, a cartography that escapes pure reason. In general, what IC-98 is after is the virtual.

Paesi nordici (Finlandia e Norvegia) Falling Trees di Terike Haapoja

Finlandia con Terike Haapoja e Antti Laitinen

Gli artisti Terike Haapoja e Antti Laitinen sono stati scelti per rappresentare la Finlandia alla prossima Biennale d’Arte di Venezia. Mika Elo, Marko Karo e Harri Laakso saranno i curatori dell’evento.

Ecco il comunicato stampa di presentazione

FINNISH EXHIBITIONS AT THE 2013 VENICE BIENNALE WILL HIGHLIGHT THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN ART AND NATURE 

31 October 2012

Last year, a big tree fell over a building in Venice. The building was the wooden pavilion designed for the Venice Biennale by Alvar Aalto in 1956. The event effectively interrupted the Finnish exhibition in the 2011 biennale. The pavilion and the works exhibited there were damaged and the show had to be closed ahead of time. The pavilion was restored, and the incident would seem to be closed now. However, the random event caused by the forces of nature will feature in the exhibition put up by Finland in Venice next year. The 55th Venice Biennale will be held 1 June – 24 November 2013.

From among 40 submissions, the Board of FRAME chose Mika Elo, Marko Karoand Harri Laakso to curate and build the exhibitions in the Aalto Pavilion and the Nordic Pavilion. The goal of the curator team is to produce two distinct solo exhibitions that share the same concrete starting point. Antti Laitinen will appropriate the renovated Aalto Pavilion and the surrounding park for his work. The show by Terike Haapoja will be held in the Nordic Pavilion, as it is Finland's turn this time to curate the show there.

The working title of the curator team’s exhibition concept is Falling Trees. As the title suggests, the concept revisits last year's event and explores its inherent unpredictability and destructive force. The falling tree is not seen exclusively as an obstacle that must be cleared away or as the reason for the renovation, but as a rupture in which the framework of rationality yields for a second to make way for something unpredictable. The event opens up a stage for an interplay between art and nature that lies beyond the reach of fixed directions and the objectifying gaze. It is a gesture that leads viewers to consider the relationship between art and nature, and the nature of art. Where does nature end and art begin? What are the forces and incidents that a work of art binds together? What is the contribution of nature to art when it refuses to be translated into landscapes or objects?

‘The proposal by Elo, Karo and Laakso is complex and theoretically challenging, yet also very down to earth. The works by Antti Laitinen and Terike Haapoja are topical in the way that they both address our relationship to nature. The artists do not illustrate their concern over the state of nature, using instead visual and symbolic means to present an argument,' says Jan Kaila, Chairman of the Board of FRAME.

‘The tree falling on the pavilion was what sparked off the exhibition concept. A stimulus like that is often the trigger that sets the artistic process in motion. Instead of a fixed theme, we wanted to take as our starting point this unforeseeable gesture that brings nature and art into collision in a certain place at a certain moment, and thus challenges us to consider the dynamic between art and nature in a broader way. How do art and nature interface when nature is not reduced into mere raw material for art or a subject for representation? Antti Laitinen and Terike Haapoja both work in their own specific ways in these unforeseeable areas of confluence. The two exhibitions complement one another, bringing into play the enigmatic connections between the life of art and the art of life,’ say the curators of the exhibitions.

Antti Laitinen (b. 1975) will create a new installation for the Aalto Pavilion, and also present a sample of his earlier work. He will additionally conduct a performance on the biennale grounds, and documentation of the performance will be included in the exhibition. Antti Laitinen’s art is characterised by the physical testing of limits and the tragicomic character of our relationship to nature. A man steps onto the arena of nature, ready to do battle, such as spending days on end in the forest without clothes, food or drink, or sailing over the Gulf of Finland on a bark boat.

Terike Haapoja (b. 1974) will bring to the Nordic pavilion a research laboratory in which art, science and technology will come together in unexpected ways. The art of Terike Haapoja is characterised by an overall research approach which highlights the points of contact between contemporary art, natural science and environmental ethics. Haapoja’s practice is also coloured by ecological activism.

The curator team – Mika Elo (b. 1966), Marko Karo (b. 1971) and Harri Laakso (b. 1965) – are artist-curators who all work as researchers in the School of Art and Design at Aalto University. Their previous international curated works includeBacklight 2002 and 2005 (Laakso), Helsinki Photography Festival 2005 (Elo),Pointers 2006–2007 (Laakso), Square Minutes 2007 (Elo and Laakso), Art Research Event 2009–2011 (Elo and Laakso), Helsinki Photography Biennial 2012 (Karo). In summer 2011, the team had a joint exhibition entitled Extracts in the Rantakasarmi Gallery in Suomenlinna, Helsinki.

The artists’ websites:

www.anttilaitinen.com

www.terikehaapoja.net

The 55th Venice Biennale:

http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/

FRAME Foundation is a visual arts foundation supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. The mission of FRAME is to strengthen the position of Finnish visual arts and to promote international cooperation between artists and art institutions.

www.frame-fund.fi

Padiglione Finlandia storia / history

Uscendo dal Padiglione Centrale si trova alla sinistra il Padiglione della Finlandia, nato nel 1959 come struttura provvisoria ideato da Alvar Aalto, nel più moderno spirito ecologistico.


2013 — Antti Laitinen, Terike Haapoja (Curatores: Mika Elo, Marko Karo Harri Laakso)
2011 — Vesa-Pekka Rannikko (Curatore: Laura Köönikkä)
2009 —
2007 — Maaria Wirkkala
2005 — Jaakko Heikkilä
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