Reviews
The works, in relation to each other, successfully embody the curatorial statement, ‘we are an inseparable part of nature and therefore always connected to each other.’ They weave together the concepts of life, love and death, therefore, establishing a coherent larger framework of the exhibition. This thematic consistency is also visible in the aesthetic production with a striking palette of cool earth tones. While the composition of the works within the confines of the gallery makes perfect sense, the overall exhibition raises more questions than it answers in regards to its larger socio-political implications. Collectively their works hardly do justice to the subject matter that they deal with.
READOn Love? A Review of the Exhibition ‘Unity’ at SIC Space
Najia Fatima iterates how it is crucial to remain critical of spaces that claim universality without adequately centering marginalised voices.
My point of view in this review revolves around the interpretation of the two-fold structure of The Woodcutter Story. Underneath the film’s exterior of entertaining black comedy exists a poetic-existential interior. My actual question in this review concerns the relationship between these two layers. If the “deep” concern of the film is the existential question of whether senseless suffering could generate a sense of meaning, it cannot be answered directly without a recourse to religious register. In that case, no authoritative answer can be given except by appeal to the “superficial” level of the actual events and their logic.
READMay you live in interesting times: A Review of The Woodcutter Story
Who gets love in popular culture? I have been thinking about this question for a decade now. Soon after its release last August, I went to watch a film that surprised me in ways I had never imagined. Pa Ranjith’s latest film, Natchathiram Nagargiradhu, which translates to ‘a star shoots across,’ seems to have answered all our questions about the idea of contemporary love. Trust me, there is an interpretation for everyone - inter-caste, inter-faith, queer love, inclusivity, sexuality, woman as a category, genderless casteless love.
READWho Gets Love in Popular Culture? A Review of Pa Ranjith’s Film Natchathiram Nagargiradhu
How can a film reverse the language of cinema in its aesthetics, gaze, and culture formed by shared histories, collective experience, solidarity and a movement of assertion?
When I reflected on the works from Speed Records, I questioned if there was supposed to be an element of parody. Was the use of the candy-colored paint intentional to comment on the glorification of US mass consumerism, specifically within the subculture of motorsports? Many works were created out of resin; was this to comment on the permanence of US-American mass culture? Or even the permanence of US-American cultural hegemony within the vast amounts of consumed nostalgia? Like consumable products, cultural media omnisciently persists through microplastics, carbon emissions, or successful propaganda.
READWhen Home Follows You Home: A Review of Anssi Kasitonni’s Speed Records
Gabriella Presnal review focuses on reflective versus restorative nostalgia and the Americanization of Finnish visual and contemporary culture.
The exhibition opens with a series of sculptural elements installed in the first of Titanik’s two exhibition rooms. The dominant colour is a peachy orange, and the materials range from glazed ceramics to smooth silicone and fluffy fake fur. Some objects are similar to everyday things related to keeping cats, a climbing tree, climbable shelves on the wall, and cat beds. This everyday impression gets nudged toward the uncanny by some extra elements. From a shelf of the climbing tree, some sort of goo is dripping onto the floor, like a cat had lost the surface tension holding it together and became shapeless matter.
READThe Unbearable Existence of Kittens: A Review of Reija Meriläinen’s Snugglesafe
The first thing to say about the value of documentaries, and about the Love & Anarchy festival selection that follows is that they tend to be about people, and they tend to articulate the possibilities of a changing world. Against all odds, even the faintest possibility of ‘a world’, or rather ‘worlds’ that are transforming, can inspire hope.
READConfessions of a Documentary Junkie: 2022 Love & Anarchy Festival Picks
I 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.
READFinding 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?
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
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.
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
How can the subaltern be meaningfully and non-performatively brought into the museum?
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
How does the imagined ‘personality’ of a device influence our willingness to communicate with/through it?”
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
Gladys Camilo’s review questions about the future of queerness within art institutions and queer art. How can queer curating exist and change what art institutions look like?
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
Uzair Amjad articulates how a live game performance uncovers the overlapping of territories, the unsettling of institutions, the linking of languages and sites of exploitation.
