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Tag: 2010

Night view from the Soap Factory

Lewis & Taggart | Artist in residence November 2010

 

and other works for Vaasa


Andrew Taggart
and Chloe Lewis are Canadian artists based in Bergen, Norway. Their joint practice, established in 2006, investigates how sculpture can function as a vehicle for ritual and transformation, and how modest and readily available materials can serve to monumentalize the poetics of existential pursuits. Often paying tribute to particular people and places within which poignant and poetic occurrences are mobilized, their work embraces a cross‐contamination of objects with drawing, photography, video and sound, whose narrative threads intertwine and conflate. With the beginning of each new project, they establish a constellation of divergent starting points – often found within literature, myth, everyday anecdotes and historical archives – from which they create new systems of storytelling.

Recent works include a roving museum in Calgary, Canada, conceived to celebrate the unusual history of a local river, and a public “ribbon-cutting office” installed within the central shopping district of  Sandnes, Norway. Within the forthcoming year, they will present projects at Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway; The Odd Gallery, Dawson City, Canada; and The Factory for Art & Design, Copenhagen. Lewis & Taggart also operate The Museum of Longing and Failure – a small museum dedicated to the exhibition and collection of sculptural artifacts that embody poetic notions of longing and failure. In 2010, they completed a collaborative MA at Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen, Norway.

 

www.lewisandtaggart.com

 

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Platform Live Friday 26.11.2010

Friday 26.11.2010 starting at 19.00 – at Kuntsi Museum for Modern Art


 

Willem Wilhelmus, Myk Henry, Martin Renteria & Nathalie Mba Bikoro

This year’s last Platform Live offers a wide selection of international performance art: Willem Wilhelmus (Finland/Netherlands), Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon/UK), Myk Henry (Ireland/USA) and Martin Renteria (Mexico) will do performances on this week’s Friday at the Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art.

Address: Sisäsatama, Vaasa / Inre hamnen, Vasa

Free entrance. Welcome!

 

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Platform Live Friday 1.10.2010

Kuntsi Museum for Modern Art

 

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu, artist and film director, will present two film projects, Troleibuzul 92(8’00) and My Beautiful Dacia (72’00). He will also talk about an ongoing group project, The Iron Curtain, a box of memory, which is done in collaboration with Xandra Popescu, who will be present as well.

Stefan Constantinescu is a visual artist and a film director. In 2010 he participated at the Bucharest Biennale 4 where he presented the installation “An Infinite Blue”. In 2009, he represented Romania at The Venice Biennale, with the films “Passagen” and “Troleibuzul 92″.”My Beautiful Dacia” that is co-directed with Julio Soto, is a portrayal of Romania’s transition from Communism to Capitalism through the story of the Dacia automobile, an emblem of Communist Romania. The film’s premiere was at the Montréal World Film Festival and in 2010 the film was awarded the second prize at the Documenta Madrid Festival. In 2008 he conceived “The Golden Age for Children”, a pop-up book about the last 20 years of the communist regime in Romania. He is currently working on a series of fiction films “7 Nuances of Gray” and the group project “The Iron Curtain, a box of memory”. Stefan Constatinescu lives and works in Stockholm and Bucharest.

Free entrance. Welcome!

 

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Platform Live Friday 3.9.2010

Kuntsi Museum for Modern Art

 

STEVE VANONI

Performance art and live experimental electronic music!

Address: Sisäsatama, Vaasa / Inre hamnen, Vasa

Free entrance. Welcome!

 

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A collectors instinct – Leena Jokela

Leena Jokela | Artist in residence August 2010

During my stay in Vaasa, I chose to work with A collector’s instinct, which is an ongoing project that I started in 2006. The work consists of the objects I found and collected at various locations, mainly in Stockholm, where I also live. The objects are what many would call rubbish, but for me they are things that tell us a story about the place and time when they are found.

In Vaasa, I decided to collect objects on the basis of the fact that I have a Finnish heritage. There is one aspect of my life and existence that I as an artist not previously worked with.

During the weeks I was in Vaasa cycled and I walked around the city. I was looking for objects that caught my interest. After just a few days I realized I was looking for red, white, blue and yellow objects. In the back of my head were always thoughts about my Finnish and Swedish heritage. How very Finnish and Swedish am I? I was born and raised in Sweden, of Finnish parents who immigrated to Sweden in the mid-1950s. During my childhood, every summer the family visited my grandmother in Nykarleby, my grandfather in Jyväskylä and my grandparents (on my mother’s side) in Mäntsälä. What I experienced as a child was a mix of the Finnish language I did not understand, a Finland-Swedish with words that sounded archaic, special food and environments that differed from the Swedish I met on a daily basis.

When I as an adult now spent time in Vaasa, I realized that what I experienced as a child was present in me and it showed up as fragmented memories. My objects can represent these memories, and can be seen as fragments of my family’s history. They are there as a reminder of who I am and where I come from.

The final result is four colour photographs, size 65 x 65 cm. I’ve selected an object of each colour, red, white, blue and yellow, and scanned them into a flatbed scanner. They have become radiant because I want to show what we can not see with the naked eye, the heritage we carry within us.

Leena Jokela

 

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SHuSH 3, Saturday 3.6.2010

 

Here comes the third installment of SHuSH by Amal Laala, artist-in-residence during May and June 2010

The first two were crazy death-pop in Melbourne’s abandoned spaces. After being kicked out by a torch-wielding psycho, who claimed to be the owner but ended up being arrested and being shut down by police, we have decided to move north, way north to Vaasa, Finland!

So the Finnish sun has finally come out to play and so have we!

LIVE MUSIC

Hei // ambient drone with baritone guitar & electronics

Mattias Häggqvist // psychedelic blues

DJ’s

Rasmus Hedlund // electronic dub

Tuomo Väänänen // minimal dub-techno

Ufo-Matti // experimental music

Captain Hank // dj&vj set

Art

Jonathan Lindholm, Concrete Flowers, live installation

Street-art jam in livingroom-carpark on random objects

Live feed from projects happening in Australia/Morocco

Visuals and animations from Australia

Paintings from Mikael Linder

Sima, Bin Buffet and a Carpark living room.

What more could you ask for?

 

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Platform Live Saturday 22.5.2010

Kuntsi Museum for Modern Art

 

Platform live presents artist talks by Platform artist in residence Amal Laala (Morocco) and Stundars artist in residence Sophie Dvořák (Austria), and Amal Laala’s performance “The next man who walks through that door I will marry”.

Amal Laala is a socially engaged, site-specific artist, whose work is often temporary and fleeting, revolving around current social issues, experimentation and play. “My current work in progress is “Father, Father, Father”, where I am investigating how stories can be told and interpreted, ranging from spiritual, political to personal. During my residency at Platform I will continue developing these central themes of storytelling, family and interpretation. Investigating my Finnish grandparents and their past, I am to research elements of their lives using the little information I have.”

Sophie Dvořák’s practice revolves around questioning media imagery, such as press photography and visual representations of information or knowledge, used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly. She mainly uses drawing as a medium, working in a serial, sometimes even archival way. Often recurring elements include visual devices such as charts, diagrams, maps and lists, and elements like lines, boxes, arrows. Her reduced drawings and graphics, sometimes accompanied by text fragments, construct a new “reality-layer”. She interrupts the function and flood of information in order to deal with different ways of seeing events or things, perspectives and projections, with assumed knowledge (or lack of it) in the viewer, sending him on a search for the information that the image pretends to transmit.

Musical entertainment.

Welcome! Free entrance!

Saturday 22nd is also a Museum Night at Kuntsi, so the bar (and terrace, weather permitting) is open until midnight. See www.kuntsi.fi for more info about the Museum Night.

 

 

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Trajector Art Fair 23-25 April 2010

Hotel Bloom 23-25.4.2010 in Brussels

CFL was going to offer couples in love a hotel night for free in exchange for the story of how they met. In the hotel room during the fair there would’ve only been a video – shown in the hotel tv – of one person at a time telling a story of how he or she met her beloved. An intimate

However, this happened during a time that in European history will be known as the week in 2010 when the air space was completely empty due to a certain ash cloud that erupted from the Icelandic vulcano with the – at least for French people – unpronounceable name.


 

 

 

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Platform Live Wednesday 21.4.2010

Kuntsi Modern Museum of Art in Vaasa

 

Image – Irma Optimisti at mope08. (Photo Joakim Hansson)

 

Platform, in collaboration with Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, starts a new series of live art happenings called Platform Live. On the program for this first edition are performances by Tari Ito (Japan) and Irma Optimisti (Finland).

Tokyo-based Tari Ito is one of the most important female performance artists in Japan and East Asia. Her performances deal with feminism and female sexuality, seen through the historical ways of representing womanhood. Ito has performed all over the world, and she has also organised an international network of female performance artists.

Like Ito, Vaasa-born Irma Optimisti is a leading female performance artist, especially in Europe. This time, her performance will have a sculptural dimension. The process will be presented as it is.

Free entrance. Welcome!

Wednesday April 21st at 7pm – Performance artists Tari Ito (Japan) and Irma Optimisti (FI)

 

 

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Artist talk 5.2.2010, Ritz

Jenny Baines | Artist in residence February and July 2010

Jenny Baines’ artistic practice exists in various forms that are all intrinsically linked by hope and the possibility of failure. When making films, Jenny performs repetitive actions for the camera, documenting herself carrying out apparently futile yet defiant physical feats. These actions can seem like a romantic response to, or an urge to escape from the space in which they are performed. The works are process-based, using the limitations of the equipment or her own physical endurance as a basis and frame in which to be created. The repetitively performed action is often absurd or pointless.

Examples of work include the film Untitled, Victoria Park, in which she attempts to climb a lamppost before the wind-up mechanism of the 16mm Bolex camera runs down, which is never possible as the film cuts before she can achieve this. And ‘Against the Tide’, where she swims against a tide too strong for her, resulting in being continuously washed out of the frame. The resulting films become absurd attempts to achieve pointless tasks.

Jenny graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MFA in 2006. Her work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial (2007) and other venues outside the UK in New York, Warsaw, Berlin, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Film screenings include Studio 1.1, London, Format Film Festival, Derby and Videoholica, Bulgaria. Her work is to be found in various collections including Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, QUAD and Videoholica, Bulgaria. Jenny is currently an artist in residence in film at Kingston University.

“The films I shot when artist in residence at Platform deal with the same concerns in my practice and are made using the same techniques.

Mergere (working title) is from various locations (both in and close to Vaasa) where I filmed people ice-swimming. Using the wind-up mechanism of the 16mm camera, I was attempting to time the filming of each person entering the water so it would wind down and cut as they submerged, hoping for the result of the film showing a constant flow of people disappearing into the ice.

Rather than performing the action repetitively myself, I was more interested in the place, framing and observing of an action that was already happening naturally in front of me over and over. This was for practical reasons also.

I made a series of almost photographic films both in February and in July – where the films are a static shot of something I found slightly absurd. For example, a motor boat frozen into the sea and a lighthouse flashing at night. The only movement, other than that of the film, is of either snow blowing past in the first instance, or the light faintly flashing in the second.

On viewing the material on return I’m interested in combining architectural elements with some – bringing the film into the room with the viewer so they exist as an installation. In the case of Mergere, this would work well if projected floor to ceiling in a room with a white floor so the viewer could almost step into the image.

 

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