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Tag: AiR

An object of desire already lost – Part 1

 

‘An object of desire already lost’ is an ongoing work presenting objects within an immersive environment that suggests questioning, possibility and radical otherness during a time of profound cultural uncertainty. Through continuing research a collection of textual, audio and visual objects that relate to mythologies of club culture have been generated. These objects take the form of an installed work evoking a repository of strange knowledge (engaging aesthetically with archival practices and museum display).

The various objects (texts, transcriptions of conversations, photographic images, printed matter, techno music and ephemera) aim to question the ownership of culture, history, ideology and action as well as the limitations of culture as a means of individual, social and political transformation. Utilizing the language of recorded cultural histories the objects are rendered both recognizable and strange, raising issues of memory, imagination, desire, possibility and the function of cities in relation to human bodies.

An object of desire already lost – Part 1 will be installed in the project space at Platform Kasern. Visual artist and techno producer Rasmus Hedlund will install audio as part of the event and an artist’s book produced by Emma Haugh during the residency will be shown alongside other new works.

About the artist

Emma Haugh is an Irish artist based in Dublin. Her background comprises Forum Theatre facilitation, club promotion, Dj-ing, photography and an ongoing involvement in the collaborative realization of queer/ alternate cultural spaces. Emma’s visual art practice finds points of departure that both resist and utilize knowledge and skills garnered from these activities.

Starting points for active research are often built out of spoken language and the language of the body. Conversation and improvised exchange have become important processes for developing ideas, often documented through audio and textual transcription that moves back and forth.

Subjectivity/objectivity, the imagination as a relational space, the physical/psychological boundaries that manifest in relation to architecture and the social/cultural hierarchies of our cities are ongoing themes.

Emma has taken part in several residencies in Ireland and has co-organized an international residential project ‘engage 2012’ in Bucharest, Romania earlier this year. She recently produced a commissioned work with Commonplace projects in Dublin, curated by Sally Timmons, the work ‘Berghain’ will travel to Berlin for exhibition in early 2013. Emma has shown her work in several solo and group exhibitions in Dublin. This will be her first solo exhibition abroad.

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Finnish Dream

 

A public art work on a balcony in Vaasa

A cloud of bubbles made out of wire grid is emerging out of a private balcony on the back of the apartment building on Koulukatu 62 in Vaasa.

German visual artist Susken Rosenthal is currently the artist in residence at Plaform in Vaasa. The work she has produced during her stay is called ‘Finnish Dream’.

The intstallation or cloud could be seen as the ideas, hopes and dreams that every individual person has about his or her life, normally invisible, anonymous, now pouring out of the balcony the cloud is opposed to the flat sliding windows of the facade.

The installation can be seen from 7th to 30th June.

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I can hear your heart beat

15.–31.3.2012, Vaasa Railway Station

Thursday–Saturday, 1–4 pm.

Opening 15.3.2012, 2–8 pm.

In association to the IHME Contemporary art festival in Finland the interactive sound installation I can hear your heart beat by Mari Kretz, Platform’s current artist in residence, is shown in Vaasa.

I can hear your heart beat is an interactive sound installation which registers, visualizes and makes the inaudible audible. Two chairs are placed facing each other, next to each chair is a loudspeaker. Two participants sit on the chairs facing each other. Electrodes are placed on the participant’s chests. Their heartbeats are transmitted through the loudspeakers. After a while, both hearts are synchronized, then they return to their own rhythm. An intimate meeting takes place.

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The site for The IHME Contemporary art festival’s production, Christian Boltanskis’ The Heart Archive and the recordings in Vaasa is Vaasa City Library. You can participate during the opening hours of the library.

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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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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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Last landscape of pleasure 21 January 2010

Jaša | Artist in residence December 2009–January 2010

On January 21st Platform was pleased to present a new project by Jaša (Slovenia). It was developed during the residency period and took place in the Platform Studio, Vasa.

Art historian Jernej Kožar wrote about the artist: »Jaša found a way how to reinterpret the question of ecology, consumership and the area of intimacy. Profilation of materials is a statement of it’s own-materially and esthetically. Jaša’s narrative work, which is never told in one way, sometimes shock us with their flashy colors and inferior materials, but in this dynamics never become self-sufficient and function incredibly unified and in tune with the contemporary way of life. Jaša managed to complete installation with performance and create a wholesome art work which is efficiently described in a book Radical Chick. The creative overview of this millennium’s first decade is captured in Radical Chick which was published in 2009 and represents a turning point in presenting Slovene art. The book is a catalogue/résumé of Jaša’s nine years of creating, but it surpasses a set form of an art catalogue and invades the area of books about artists.«

 

http://www.jasha.org/

 

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Genealogy – Släktforskning – Sukututkimus

RACA | Artist in residence November 2009

During the period of November 6th to 10th RACA performed as squirrels interacting with the region of Vaasa. The mission was set to investigate the narrative of the flying squirrels, in Finnish “liito-orava”. The animals are told to be living in the area of Vaasa but few people have actually seen them. However, the animals have become part of the place’s identity and a social subject for conversation.
The encounters and dialogues made became the driving force and the decision maker for the next place and narrative. Some of the places visited were the Vaasa church, an old people’s home, a ski resort, the meteorite site, a fur farm and the giant shopping mall in Tuuri.

The documentation of the project was shown as a slideshow in the window of the pet shop Vaasan Akvaarioliike between November 24th–30th.

 

More info: http://www.raca.dk

 

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Intimate Economies

Sarah Browne | Artist in residence September-October 2009

 

On residency in Vaasa during September and October, Sarah Browne is researching the production of muscha (moonshine). She is also developing a new film work that deals with natural and bodily metaphors, particularly ideas of love, control and intoxication used to discuss moments of crisis and breakdown within capitalism and ’the economy’. The result of the research will be shown in an exhibition at Kuntsi museum of modern art in Vaasa next year.

Browne’s research-based practice addresses this notion of ‘the economy’ as the dominant metaphor for contemporary social and political relations, and attempts to locate, create and value alternative interactions within these existing systems. She is concerned with the creation or documentation of intentional economies and temporary ‘communities’. These small-scale gatherings tend to form and be formed by forces of intention or desire, and are typically influenced by emotional affects. She often works on a domestic scale, using amateur, craft or semi-professional technologies such as upholstery, knitting, flower-pressing, carpet-knotting and film-making (super 8 and 16mm).

On 22nd October, Browne hosted a film screening of Bob Quinn’s Poitín in the Platform residency studio. (Poitín is the Irish equivalent of moonshine/ muscha). The choice of film is linked to her research into illicit alcohol production, relationships between economy and place, and pseudo/ethnographic film. Widely regarded as a classic of Irish cinema, this is also the first film made in the Irish language (English subtitles).

http://sarahbrownenews.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/screening-at-platform-studio-kasarmi-14-vaasa/

Recent exhibitions and commissions include the Irish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne; Noughties but Nice, Twenty First Century Irish Art, Limerick City Gallery and touring (both 2009); A Romantic Interlude, commissioned for New Sites, New Fields, Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2008); A Model Society, solo exhibition at the LAB, Dublin; and Sweet Futures, commissioned for Visualise Carlow (both Ireland, 2007).

http://www.sarahbrowne.info

http://www.kennedybrowne.com

http://www.irelandvenice.ie

http://www.sweetfutures.org

 

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