Platform

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

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.

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/

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

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

Artist statement
During my stay at Platform’s residency in Vaasa, Finland, a newspaper debate had been going on about the name of a residential estate planned by the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. According to Aalto all the wooden semi-detached houses that form the area should originally have been painted in pastel colors. But due to changes that ABB Strömberg, a local factory, did to the houses – that were planned to be rented out to the factory’s employees – upset Aalto and he suggested that the houses should instead be tarred. The dark colour of the tarred houses made the local people name the village Neekerikylä (FI)/ Negerbyn (SE) – the “nigger village”.

Even though the houses today are painted in a light color, the name still remains as the official post address to the village; regardless that the inhabitant association has appealed to the city authorities since 2003 to change the official name of the area and a sign with the name ‘Aalto park’ having replaced the former sign of the village. After following the debate in local newspapers and blogs I explored the fact that changing the name of a place is not as self-evident as it might seem.

The series of photographs that I call Jussilandia is inspired by the local tradition of knitting. The original inspiration for the specific pattern that has caught my interest comes from the Korsnäs-pullover that was locally knitted by women who, together, knitted on one shared pullover. Out of these traditions the Jussi-pullover was born in the 1920s. With its simplified design and its square patterns the Jussi-pullover has hit it big time. The symbolic and identification value of the pullover is strongly rooted in the region. Originally named after Jussi Harri, the main character in a film from 1925 called Pohjalaisia, which celebrates the regional population, the pattern can nowadays even be found on sport jackets. The Finnish brand and online lifestyle clothing supplier extremeduudsonit.com, merely a variation of MTV’s Jackass, also uses the pattern as tattoos on their models. This is actually making popular culture out of cultural heritage and of the regional knitting tradition.

About the artist
Mattias Olofsson is based in Umeå, Sweden. Questions about identity in relation to belonging and exclusion are themes that reappear in his work. He is inspired by roles, masks and mix-ups and situations where identity is created through the subject taking place or being placed, or given a role, in a bigger structure. In one recent project Olofsson slips into the role of Stor-Stina, borrowing the identity of a Sami-woman who lived in the nineteenth century, belonging to the Scandinavian nomadic population. Stor-Stina never stopped growing, which also gave her the name Stor – referring to Big Stina or Stina the Great. Stor-Stina was sent around Europe to be exhibited as a human spectacle. Slipping into her identity Olofsson explores what the experience of otherness in a particular look can lead to. The traditional Sami dress she would have been wearing, worn by Mattias Olofsson, signifies not only history or tradition repeated, it is also about the displacement of the tradition that raises issues of, for example, cross-dressing. Touching the ever-reoccurring question in Olofsson’s art is: In which way does history affect us?
Olofsson’s latest shows including this theme are: Vem bryr sig om Snövit och Rödluvan? (Who cares about Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood?), Skellefteå konsthall (2009); Guest of Honor : Sweden, Indian Hall COEX, Seoul (2009); Rightfully Yours, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2007); Svenska Hjärtan, (Swedish Hearts), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2004); Strategies of learning, Periferic7, Iasi (2006).

Artist talk with Mattias Olofsson, based in Umeå (SE) and Jimmy Kuehnle based in St. Louis (US).

Mattias Olofsson is the residency artist at Platform during July-August 2009.

Jimmy Kuehnle is the residency artist at Ateljé Stundars during June-July 2009. Ateljé Stundars is part of the international Artist in Residence programme hosted by KulturÖsterbotten.

“The simultaneous proximity and distance of people in urban centers motivates the core of my art practice. Members of society are disconnected from one another despite almost daily contact in a monotonous cycle of daily tasks. I seek to challenge the public in order to break it out of its repetitive cycle. Humans are very adept at assimilating the world around them to the point that unusual experiences quickly become commonplace. Many wonders and sublime experiences are overlooked.

I make sculpture and performance props using materials ranging from heavy steel to light inflatable fabric to create novel experiences for the viewer. The work is a hybrid of sculpture, performance, new media and interactive practices. My recent inflatable suits have allowed me to take the work into the streets for direct contact with the public. My sculpture and performances are intentionally absurd to the point that traffic stops, pedestrians gather, and interactions occur.”

One Day Show is a project by Johan Lundh in collaboration with Dragos Alexandrescu, Eva Forsman, Joakim Hansson and Therese Sunngren. It is a project exploring contemporary art through a speculative study of artistic, curatorial and discursive production. During an all-day workshop, the participants have developed an exhibition together from scratch.

One Day Show was divided into three 3-hour long sections (excluding breaks): research, production and presentation. The first segment included an introduction and collaborative research. The second segment involved the collaborative production of the exhibition. The third segment comprised of the opening reception. The goal of One Day Show was to examine the risks and generosities involved in collaboration in a playful way.

Biographies

Dragos Alexandrescu is a visual artist from Romania who is now based in Vaasa, Finland. He became an active member of Platform in 2008.

Eva Forsman is a visual artist living in Jakobstad, Finland, and a member of Konstverket and Platform. For more information see:http://www.konstverket.fi

Joakim Hansson is from Hofors, Sweden, now living in Nykarleby, Finland. Joakim tries to combine different disciplines to create new angles in ways of audiovisual communication.

Johan Lundh is an artist, curator and writer, dividing his time between Stockholm, Sweden, and Vancouver, Canada. For more information see: http://www.firtheaglandlundh.net

Therese Sunngren is a visual artist living in Jakobstad, Finland, and a member of Konstverket. For more information see: http://www.konstverket.fi and http://theresesunngren.wordpress.com/

Currently my art revolves around two practices; installation and drawing both of which are different though intersect conceptually and dialectically. The defining elements that are significant and continue through my works are those of space, movement, and material. Most importantly the common notions of understanding that binds them together, for example: an inherent understanding of inside / out, public and private, are simple points of a collective awareness that enables everything to exist in and navigate life. The alteration of such signifiers leads to a new understanding or a reflection on the meaning of space and environment.

In addition to installation, my practice has started to envelop drawing. With drawing I am able to add or separate additional elements to or from my foremost practice of installation. Drawing intersects my installation in a more ephemeral way, and generally hidden from public gaze. Drawing aids in a clearer focus towards a more subliminal space, a space that exists only in the media, newspapers or the internet.

Environment 1: No place.
Currently showing at the Oliver Holt Gallery, Dorset, UK. 28 February – 22nd March 2009.

“This environment does not guarantee the possibility of a happening but provides a pregnant space where participants must hang-on for a deferred experience. Indeed, like Kaprow’s, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) ‘no place.’ is experience by its audience only in sections. This is only a part of a larger, geographically and temporally disparate project, and it is unlikely that a participant can experience or grasp the totality of the work, certainly not from the episode presented here at the Oliver Holt Gallery. Understanding demands travel demands commitment to a global perspective, a claim to universality, ingrained in the acting out of the work. Sherborne is the most Southerly point of the three part project that arches beyond between Bristol and Vaasa, Finland. The spaces that Harris presents are performances from which all action has been stripped, the possibility for effective action is questioned, awaits interrogation. Feuerbach has said, ‘Without a doubt our epoch prefers the image to the thing.’ Harris insists on the importance of the act of the spectator in the movement away from things, with their increasingly dubious claims to authenticity, to simulacra with their desirable approximations and cinematic truth. The Situationist International demanded the elimination of all forms of representation, as a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real”
Text by Andrew Stook, curator / director of the Oliver Holt gallery.

Environment 2: Man the interior designer.

Installation. Platform. Vaasa. Finland. Friday 20th March 2009.

“We are beginning to see what the new model of the home-dweller looks like: ‘man the interior designer’ is neither an owner nor a mere user – rather, he is an active engineer of atmosphere. Space is at his disposal like a kind of distributed system, and by controlling this space he holds sway over all possible reciprocal relations between the objects therein and hence over all the roles they are capable of assuming. (It follows that he must also be ‘functional’ himself: he and the space in question must be homogeneous if his messages of design are to leave him and return to him successfully.)”
Baubrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, Verso1996. Pp25

‘Man the interior designer’ as with ‘No place’ will be a built environment that imposes a starkness of object yet implies a vast presents of possibility. ‘Man the interior designer’ will be a place that is built to stand in and contemplate, contemplate notions of structure, placement and contrived decision-making. Once again the entire space will be engulfed by the artwork creating an environment / installation. Within this next installment of the three works platform will play host to the final primer for the finally show at Plan 9 in Bristol UK

Environment 3: Institute.
Duo exhibition, Mark J Harris / Duncan Mountford. Plan 9, Bristol, UK. 14TH May – 30th May 2009.