Reviews
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READIf the problems that individuals face in their personal lives are rooted in systemic issues, then it is unrealistic to expect them to find lasting solutions solely through individual self-improvement efforts. Individual change is not simply a matter of personal effort but is also shaped by the broader social conditions that individuals find themselves in. Abril’s work highlights this hypocrisy of the oppressor in a perverted patriarchal society in which women are blamed and ridiculed for showing symptoms of distress—Mass Hysteria.
Our Bodies Protest on Our Behalf: A Review of ‘Laia Abril – On Mass Hysteria’
Laia Abril’s work On Mass Hysteria at The Festival of Political Photography challenges the focus on individual diagnosis, prompting the question, can photography be a tool for social diagnosis and change?
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READAïnata (2018), shot in South Lebanon, is the debut documentary by the Lebanese research-based artist and filmmaker, Alaa Mansour. The memories being reconstituted in the film are those of Aïnata, a town in South Lebanon nestled within olive and tobacco farms, plagued for decades by Israeli occupation and violence.
Memory and the Fractured Image: A Review of Alaa Mansour’s ‘Aïnata’
In her review, Shams Hanieh explores how Alaa Mansour’s film Aïnata (2018) uses visual fragmentation and reconstruction to more truthfully represent memory under colonial violence. When our world and histories feel so distorted, what other form could their representation take?
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READHow will Flow Festival respond to criticisms about its relationships with its free workforce, security contractors, Helsinki Police and its Zionist holding company? Will it align with or distance itself from the actions and affiliations of its financial backers?
Flow Festival: A Retrospective
Billion-euro changes in Flow Festival’s ownership signal a strong intent to continue commercializing. The Flow Festival, the locals once cherished, has been hollowed out by business interests and now emits the stench of globalist capital.
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READClose 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.
Who Watches Whom? Ruminations on Power, Gaze, and Field Through Pilvi Takala’s Close Watch
Ali Akbar Mehta’s review questions whether issues of embodiment and social intervention can ever be free of the power relations in the political, identity-driven understanding of society today.
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READThere is no universal ‘the’ trans body. Where does this article ‘the’ come from and what does it do? To us it seems that to look at something through the lens of ‘the trans body’ is claiming to know something that is situated in some imagined universal trans body – ultimately projecting one’s own body as that universal human in the trans context; the same universal human that the work claims to critically dismantle. White, non-disabled, thin, masculine and middle-class.
The Trans Body in Venice: A Critique of Universalising Transness
This review of Teo Ala-Ruona’s ‘Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture’ explores the implications of universalising language, such as ‘the trans body’, in describing marginalised experiences within large-scale, nationalist, and artistic contexts, including the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
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READThe struggle and violence that When We See Us attempts to circumvent is not self-inflicted. The exhibition as a format presents liberal humanism’s trajectory, highlighting how it is, at its foundation, a vehicle for a particular genre of being. To highlight joy through liberal humanist grammars contributes to this trajectory. In times of concurrent genocides, in an effort to interrupt liberal humanism, it would be more honest to acknowledge and take a critical position against it.
Black Joy™ in the White Cube: A Review of ‘When We See Us’
Bringing over a hundred years of Black portraiture into view, the exhibition’s tonal optimism about Black self-representation belies the complex histories of race, power, and visibility it mobilises. What does it mean to celebrate “Black joy” within the architecture of liberal humanism and under the shadow of corporate complicity?
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READAn activation by Palestinian artists Maen Hammad, Dina Salem, Sari Tarazi, and Ahmad Alaqra was hosted at DoubleDummy, Arles, between July 1-7, 2024, during the opening week of the Rencontres d’Arles. It conveys a timeline of the ongoing genocide in Gaza using information shared via alternative messaging platforms like Telegram.
Radical Re-imagining of Visual Order Amid the Ongoing Genocide of Palestinians: A Review of ‘Against Abstraction’
An activation by Palestinian artists Maen Hammad, Dina Salem, Sari Tarazi, and Ahmad Alaqra was hosted at DoubleDummy, Arles, between July 1-7, 2024, during the opening week of the Rencontres d’Arles. It conveys a timeline of the ongoing genocide in Gaza using information shared via alternative messaging platforms like Telegram.
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READThe wealthy are equated with such minorities as if being wealthy were a specific cultural phenomenon or even an identity based on a form of discrimination. Veering through notions of whether wealth improves mental well-being or is taboo in Finnish society, Eetu Viren peruses the exhibition’s banality and ridiculousness to expound on questions of wealth and power and why the Finnish National Museum hosted an exhibition that characterizes the wealthy as a “minority group.”
The Poor Rich People: A Review of ‘The Philosophy of Wealth’
Eetu Viren on questions of wealth and power and why the Finnish National Museum hosted an exhibition that characterizes the wealthy as a “minority group.”
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READI could see a lot of love. But I was still trying to find the anarchy that breaks through and what it breaks through. I wondered if I should write about the positionality of the festival in what can be termed as its cultural intervention into events and processes that affect us today.
Finding Anarchy: A Review of Helsinki International Film Festival
How can organizations dismantle power and operational structures within the world of film festivals to make them speak to the city’s various layers of inhabitants and their lives?