Essays
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READFocusing on movement exploration and feminist performative rewriting of the myth of the Western love goddess, this essay discusses the origin of the work Venus by Janina Rajakangas, performed during the Baltic Circle Festival 2022. It reflects on the collaborative creative process and puts in focus the erotization of young girls and the loud ideas about beauty and desirability that aggressively frame today’s gendered norms, the attention economy of social media, and the patriarchal views on seduction that shape it all.
Venus, in the Threshold of the Screen
Focusing on movement exploration and feminist performative rewriting of the myth of the Western love goddess, this essay discusses the origin of the work Venus by Janina Rajakangas, performed during the Baltic Circle Festival 2022. It reflects on the collaborative creative process and puts in focus the erotization of young girls and the loud ideas about beauty and desirability that aggressively frame today’s gendered norms, the attention economy of social media, and the patriarchal views on seduction that shape it all.
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READThe Russian invasion of Ukraine should be stopped as soon as possible, but how? The world is showing great solidarity with the suffering side, but should it go hand in hand with humiliating, neglecting, and demonizing Russian passport holders? Can the problem be solved by putting more limitations and borders on ordinary citizens already oppressed by an authoritarian state?
Taking Off a White Coat: Notes From Under Sanctions
Adel Kim considers the perspectives of different art-workers under sanctions and associated with the arts in Russia.
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READAfter all the materiality of the world has been grasped, the next natural step of the Great Devourer - capitalism - is to go deeper into the immaterial within the confines of our minds. As we go about our days, we seep valuable information that can be monetized directly and made into codes of control, redirection, and upkeep. A new frontier has been unhinged by cracking our minds open, where the laws are all but settled. Is the immaterial world beyond our ethical discussions and legislative apparatuses too ethereal to be real, or can a reasonable amount of responsibility be demanded everywhere?
Cracking the mind: You Are What the Attention Economy Wants
Sami Juhani Rekola questions the concept of “consent” and a “new work paradigm” in the era of post-peak attention economy, capitalism and polarizing contents.
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READIn Samoa, an archipelago situated closeby to the said line, this border was however not abstract. It wasn’t something that could be as easily ignored throughout the remaining year. The line was too close to overlook. By way of geographic proximity, the island chain was more likely touched and disturbed by it. In 2011 the government of the territory thus took matters into their own hands. It decided to change its own future by changing its own place in time. To achieve this modification, Samoa decided to get rid of December 31 2011 in order to be able to slip through the thread of time. While the world had remained in its configurations of time, the island had, with a blink of an eye, altered its own configuration of time. By disappearing December 31 2011, by erasing twenty-four hours, Samoa catapulted itself twenty-four hours ahead into the future.
Jumping Rope With Time
Sinthujan Varatharajah writes on how Europeans subdued and reorganized formerly distant natures, people, and cultures according to their own industrial needs with the help of different technical ‘innovations’, including the infamous clock.
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READWhere the striped hyenas are is not only a place in the imagination or in the past. Where the striped hyenas are is also a possibility for what the future could bring. It’s where they lie, waiting for their turn to return from their exile. Where the hyenas are is also where the ghouls and the djinn are, behind seven mountains, dreaming and chasing their world into being again.
Where the Striped Hyenas Are, or, A Tale Is a Map and a Compass: Some Fragments on the Fantastical, Land and Remembrance
Shayma Nader on how can the fantastical embody the political; what if all fantastical creatures were to rise up against the dispossessions and alienations from the lands that sustain them, to which they belong?
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READIn my view, Sonia Boyce’s presence in Helsinki is complicated by Finnish institutions’ treatment of black people in Finland. This essay thus considers the conditions of possibility that Boyce’s presence catapults for black cultural productions in Finland. To be clear, I am not implying that for black cultural production to make sense in Finland, outside-Finnish-borders blackness needs always to be present; instead, I want to trouble this very tendency that many Finnish institutions seem to rely on.
Noise, Sound and the Ongoing Project of Black Cultural Production: An Essay Reflecting on Sonia Boyce’s Recent Visit to Finland
Milka Njoroge on the fraught dynamics that structure the relation between art institutions and black people.
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READWith this text, I’m probing into ongoing processes at Aalto University in the last five years, which, among other things, led to the administrative decision to remove the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) program in 2021. The story starts in 2016 when something quite special was cooking in the Art, Design, and Architecture School, and a truly radical form of transdisciplinary education was lived and enjoyed by many, thanks to UWAS. I want to make sense of the sad fallout from such dream; a fallout that happened despite countless protests at different levels of the organization’s pyramid.
Transdisciplinarity in Higher Education: Wicked Problems, Dreams, and Nightmares
On the ongoing processes at Aalto University in the last five years that led to the administrative decision to remove the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) program in 2021.
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READIn 2018 three Aurat March chapters across different cities - ostensibly non-hierarchical, avowedly self-funded - announced their Aurat Marches in their respective cities. There was an effusion of radical feminist digital art and hashtags, fiery debate and declarations, and mobilization on the streets, including street art murals, posters and solidarity building with working-class women’s organisations and marginalized communities. That first year, the marchers were modest in number, but the idea of women marching, singing, dancing, and shouting on the streets that were otherwise hostile to them every other day of the year had an extraordinary impact. Pakistanis sat up and paid attention - but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The march has happened every year since and has spread to smaller cities, including Peshawar, Quetta, Multan, Faisalabad, Hyderabad and Sukkur. And the backlash against it from mainstream media, government institutions, and religious militant organizations has continued to escalate and exponentially exceed its own scale.
5 Years of Pakistan’s Aurat March: The Young Feminist Movement Shocked the Nation Into Paying Attention. But Where Is It Headed?
Hira Azmat on the meaning, losses, achievements, external threats, and internal conflicts of Pakistan’s young feminist movement, Aurat March.
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READNuori Taide and other cultural youth work organisations need funding from the state to guarantee that art and culture services are accessible for all young people, regardless of their living situation. What worries me is how the changes in the government may change youth policy and its funding. We hope that future criteria for youth work funding will better take into account digital youth work as well as the nature of artistic hobbies.
Nuori Taide: A Forum for Young Art Makers
Anni Rupponen brings together throyughst and artworks of Ansa Kurola, Karoliina Kuusisto, Tiia Tammi, Moona Rantanen, Jenny Idman who share their thoughts on their creative practices and what they wish for in art.
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READFormal modes of engineering the well-being of the population are oppressive and exclusionary. Activists, scholars and citizens of the world have to find compassionate and strategic ways to enact their power of adaptability. Memes allow us to challenge conventional and restrictive forms of education, policy and collective action, fostering effective solutions for a broken system. Memes, as the new toolkit adopted by Internet users of India, has the potential to nurture democracy and pluralism, with the hope to preserve freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom to resist.
POOJA, What Is This Behaviour?: Memes as Political Participation & Toolkit of Digital Resistance in India
Abhinit Khanna discusses meme culture, misinformation, trolling, and data-muddying in times of pandemic and war using the visual language of digital artworks.
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READI wish the nurses, doctors, therapists, and psychologists in Transpoli would see all the art Finland’s trans community produces. Would it make them drop their blinders and see us beyond their questionnaire? As deep-sea creatures? As the deep time-travelling bodies? As the air seeping through the saxophone player’s lips? As the space, that is quite a lot of things and can become even more.
Some Ways in Which a Gender May Be Felt
What if the nurses, doctors, therapists, and psychologists in Transpoli could see all the art Finland’s trans community produces?
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READClub Dia is a ‘daytime haven born out of a need for a safe and well-thought-out regular open-air venue and hangout in Helsinki’. Surrounded by a wall of shipping containers and nestled against the Swerock cement factory in Verkkosaari, it comprises a dancefloor, bar, food truck and community radio studio. Decorated with disco balls that sit atop towers of wooden cable reels, its aesthetic speaks of its industrial setting, but the colour scheme and clientele are reminiscent of hip, gentrifying areas such as Kallio.
The Value(s) of Verkkosaari: Urban Safety and Subculture in Gentrifying Helsinki
Unpicking the ‘problem’ of safety in Helsinki’s underground music scene and what it ‘can and does do’ in processes of urban change.