Reviews
Close Watch exhibited at the National Finnish Pavilion at Venice Biennale, 2022, is a multimedia installation that, at its core, utilises the artist themself as an embodied intervention within a focused area of artistic research and apparent critique. In the context of this work presented as an exhibition at the national pavilion and its implications of somehow representing Finnish Art, this text seeks to question whether issues pertaining to embodiment and social intervention – and by extension, research conducted and artistic practice developed through it – can ever be free of the power relations implicit in the political, identity-driven understanding of society today.
READWho watches whom? ruminations on power, gaze, and field through Pilvi Takala’s Close Watch
As artists working with technology, we can explore the most poetic horizons of this endeavour, but we should not shy away from scrutinising it from within. Despite not delving full-on into their inquiry, I feel the ALOES are on a swing, floating between those postures. And I like their dancing.
READPlaying the Bitter-sweet Symphony of Technology: A Review of ON || OFF || ON: the shop as gadget-heaven
Is it possible for a white institution to say it presents the articulation of people of colour? Is it possible for a non-indigenous institution – which through its national identity participates in the theft of indigenous artifacts and bodies – to say it is giving a place to the ideas and thoughts of the indigenous people? How can an institution talk about the disappearance of universal value judgements and the need for diversity in values within society when it is the final harbinger of value judgements and its permanent staff, which wields this power, is itself not diverse? How does it claim to judge what “diversity” or the subaltern articulate and what of this articulation should be in a museum? What are these claims based upon? The choice of artists? The act itself of legitimizing a voice? Unless the very foundations of this system change, we are all just playing along.
READProblematizing Perspectives and Positions: A Review of ARS22
Do such exhibitions choose not to include other genders, as it would be too complex and difficult to explain these lived experiences and identities to their crowds? And, what about power structures and safety within the curatorial practices when working with underrepresented* artists? Who was prioritised? Who gets to speak, and on whose behalf? Whose needs were taken into consideration, and whose desires? Who felt safe, and who didn’t? Who felt understood and seen, and who didn’t? What happens to the artist’s autonomy over their own identity and artistic practice when taken under curatorial work within established institutions?
READLoving Women: Loving Labels
The Adventures of Harriharri is one such ‘other-worldly’ space where we can experience each other’s dreams. The live game performance uncovers the overlapping of territories, the unsettling of institutions, and the linking of languages and sites of exploitation. It investigates what migration can teach us about contemporary forms of community and encourages us to search for that which goes beyond them.
READCrouched! Crouched Is My Position: A Review of the Adventures of Harriharri
The Real Housewives franchise has a special place in my heart: it’s a beautiful, messy, infuriating mixture of entertainment and escapism. It’s almost like a twisted sociological experiment where rich people’s vacuous thoughts, money obsessions, and malignant narcissism are exposed.
READThe Real Housewives Franchise: series of problematic -isms and car-crash TV at its finest
Third Culture Kids Suomi Finland teases out the multidimensional layers of culture and identity. What does it mean to be born in Finland and know Finland as your place of residence and socialization, to be a native Finnish speaker and be spoken to in English, to have a white Finnish parent, and get asked where one is really from? What does this do to one’s sense of belonging?
READTell Your Story, Though Your Voice May Shake: a review of Third Culture Kids Suomi Finland
I am an immigrant in Finland. I have had to move houses three times in the past year, and this small book, published by quince editiones [1], seems to get me: it has an itinerary similar to that of a freelance cultural worker, designed in Mexico, edited in Finland, and printed in Estonia.
READ“A Very Marketable Commodity”
Plantasy, or “a garden for dreaming” centers around the ideas of togetherness, community building, and the realization of utopias. These kinds of concerns are currently very popular with art spaces as they all vie to create, or at least make the illusion of hospitality, safer spaces, and non-exploitative working conditions. The actualization of these goals seems very simple yet challenging at once because collective work is complicated when an attempt is made to make space for everyone’s needs and desires.
READPlantasy: On the ABCs of TLC
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of cancel culture is that it almost always focuses on individuals. This might not be the initial purpose – when actresses came out with stories of abuse by Louhimies, they were discussing the Finnish film industry and how it glosses over abusive behavior as much as he does.
READNoise: A Review of Vaiti by Laura Malmivaara
All I’m saying is, I want equity, I also want space; I want to use technology for my neuro-hacking and biohacking to affirm my gender-pro-choice. I’ll have what he’s having please. Until I reclaim my basic human rights, I resist the binary, refuse the insufficient status quo.
READEjaculation Falls: a Queer Diasporic Review
Fionde’s story is based on four central elements, which are firmament (represented by the balloons), desert (place), wind (sound) and stars (lights). I have built my review using these elements as titles for each section.
READFIONDE: Unbinding the lost play within us
MATA is a story situated in the Amazon, one that is true, topical and impactful. As MATA is a story, the review will also start as a story.
READMATA: Not a forest, but a killer field
It is high time more events happened in Helsinki, led by Indigenous peoples. In this way, the venue naturally becomes a place of belonging, a place where attendees free themselves by just following their own rhythm while speaking up for care towards nature and acknowledging the need to have a night diverse in identities, languages, and musical traditions.
READDarkness Into Flashing Rhymes: Ailu Valle and DJ Uyarakq’s Opening Night Club at the Baltic Circle Festival
The following creative review is inspired by the theatre event entitled “Undertone: a Proposal for Legal Loitering”, an all-night-long amalgam of performances from 08 pm - 05 am that took place in Tiivistämö on November 27th of 2021. The show was put together by a group of creative associates that were convened by Geoffrey Erista. The show expresses the subcultures of electronic music and the ballroom scene, all the while paying tribute to the active creation of safe spaces.
READTransformations: The Secret Worlds Inside Baltic Circle Festival's "Undertone"
As one of the central themes of HIFF this year, a diverse selection of African films took Finnish audiences across the culturally rich continent and into the vast imaginations of African filmmakers. The eclectic selections were further complimented by the five extraordinary short films chosen for the African Express – Short Station. Each of these short films was able to deliver a wealth of human experiences in under 30 minutes of cinematic splendor.
READAfrican Cinema Takes Center Stage
Apples takes place during a fictional pandemic that erases people’s memories on a random basis. Such is the case of the main character, Aris, who is struck by oblivion while riding the bus. Once a person has forgotten, they are taken to the hospital and usually claimed by their loved ones. When nobody comes looking for Aris, he is enrolled in a reintegration programme where he is given the task of performing various activities and documenting them in photographs.
READApples: The fragility of identity constructs
Our Western popular culture is youth-obsessed and having elderly people as main characters is a rare sight. And when it comes to queer representation in cinema, there aren’t enough lesbian movies. A movie about lesbian elderly women? Well, definitely there isn’t enough of those either, and that makes Two of Us, a French film written and directed by Italian director-writer Filippo Meneghetti, a welcomed yet flawed addition to queer representation.
READTwo of Us: On Ageing Queer Love & Aged Queer Stereotypes
Lan Yu is a story about a melodramatic love affair between an architecture student, Lan Yu, and a wealthy businessman, Han Dong. They keep on finding each other throughout the years till time runs out.
READLan Yu: Attraction of opposites; between symbolism in Beijing Comrades
‘Bliss’ (2021), written and directed by Henrika Kull, stars Adam Hoya and Katharina Behrens. The film follows a relationship between Maria (Hoya) and Sacsha (Behrens), two women who meet each other while employed as sex workers in the same brothel in Berlin.
READBliss: With a Light Touch, With a Tender Gaze
A review on ‘Sarajevo Roses and Clouds of June’ exhibition by Samra Šabanović and Sheung Yiu at Third Space, Helsniki.
READThe (un)disputed portrait of the middle-class
A I S T I T – coming to our senses is a traveling exhibition with a satellite programme, a publication and three part podcast and it happened/will happen in various locations in Paris, London, Berlin, Helsinki, and Ghent. Since the exhibition deals with the senses my plan for the review was to try and experience it primarily from a non-visual perspective and focus on how the exhibition brings in the audience and allows them to experience and feel their way through the works.
READA I S T I T – coming to our senses: a review in three paths
I often wonder if it is a specific language that working-class families speak. When the possibilities of the world feel so limited through money and social power, are we even allowed to dream? Knowing how the world can derail dreams, the parents of these families assume the role of society before their children ever leave the home.
READHello World: Tell Me If Something Bad Happens
But is there some kind of inner logic or consistency in this film? I experience that consistency is expressed as the constant chaos of human identity and existence. We try to manage our identity and see our lives as a comprehensive, logical narrative and consistent journey. In reality, we are more or less lost as to our identity and ourselves all the time.
READThe Nowhere Inn: a shrewd and comical meta-documentary
Never Gonna Snow Again really raises the concerns around environmentalism. It’s trying to tell this message of a failing world through some humour and fantasy. The protagonist’s integration into this Polish community is like a wake-up call to the inhabitants, who many seem to be oblivious to the growing issue of climate change.
READNever Gonna Snow Again: a hypnotic take on the environmental downfall
The captivating nature of Memoria depends on the work of some notable artists. The eccentric Tilda Swinton stars as the leading figure, Jessica, whose life suddenly starts revolving around a strange, unrecognizable sound that keeps interrupting her everyday life. The urge to find it is intertwined with and partly hidden in the subtlety of her obsession for more. Swinton’s acting is stripped of emotion but not unfeeling, for she has the great skill of reserving considerable emotion behind the minimalistic expression.
READMemoria: On Remembrance and Stillness
To be received by the artist, to be held by their presence and attentively guided into and through the work, in a personalised performance feels timely. After a long period of self-containment and social isolation— protecting each other and ourselves through reducing contact—this personalised care and shared intimacy with another feels like tending wounds. As a guest, you are “hand-guided” through artworks dealing with uncomfortable “subjects”, ones that puncture our boundaries and explicate the uncontainability of our bodies and interdependencies with others.
READI versus Us versus I
In this piece, I explore the interrelatedness of visuality, black displacement and black diaspora. Diaspora Mixtapes makes apparent the efficacy of visual representations as an artistic genre that implicitly addresses questions of border regimes, queer belonging, and self-representation. Furthermore, Diaspora Mixtapes exemplifies the contemporary inclination to make visible black cultural exchanges.
READDiaspora Mixtapes: Towards a politics of black filmmaking
It was a sensation that returned to me again this summer, when I found myself approaching the Mänttä Fine Arts exhibition space, Pekilo: A feeling of warmth, comfort, familiarity. A feeling of homecoming. I mark that this too came on the heels of enduring isolation.
READMèconnaissance in Mänttä
Iduozee believes that especially in the United States, the political climate has been operating by pitting mostly poor white people against minorities. However, Iduozee finds this narrative narrow, as it overlooks the middle-class and upper-middle-class people who benefit from racist and unequal structures. Racism is not just perpetuated by poor white people. The narrative that suggests this, is classicist and allows the middle-classes to feel superior and to distance themselves from far-right rhetoric and ideology.
READPrivilege is in the EyE of the Beholder
Arriving at a particular watershed moment, Six years in the Third Space is an online publication that earmarks a key milestone in the course of the physical space existing in the city since 2013. It embodies and carries forward the hybridised in-betweenness which the physical space attempts to live by. Informed by a large network of collaborators and shared stories, the collection becomes a living organism, an orbiting satellite — autonomous and yet, carrying the identity of the body that it takes after.
READBut not without a few battle scars
Though a small-scale artist-run institution, Sorbus presents itself in the back cover of Wasted Years as creating conditions and generating alternative approaches through art activism.
READSix Years
It is productive to imagine commoning as a digital network, where, unlike with embodied presence, it’s impossible to be simultaneously present and absent – you are either online or not.
READProducing and Practicing Presence. Digital Commoning Practices in Oksasenkatu 11.
To write this review in a post isolationist time, it actually took me three trips to get my head around the exhibition, the feel of the island, the spring, and the memories. Especially after coming across a rumor that the independence of Taidekoulu MAA and other private institutions like it are being threatened by cuts in funding. This review is a description of my trail through the exhibition, followed by ruminations on the situation that MAA is facing, based on a chat I had with MAA’s current principal, Minna Henriksson.
READFrom memories through the soil to the future
The elation of being able to travel, being able to see an art exhibition in the first place. I pranced around the space in wonder and confusion. Art objects are still being brought together in rooms. My body gets to be here and I don’t know exactly what to make of it.
READTo be a Verb sometimes, sometimes a Noun
Kirjasto/ Library does not formally announce a thematic drive at its outset, but situates itself within an abstract idea ‘archiving’, or of what a collection, library, or an archive could be.
READA longing for something written in memory
