Exhibition guide

(Un)naturally Exhibition guide May 15 - Aug 30, 2009 . 4th floor please, return the text is available for printing: www.kiasma.fi room 4 Jan-Erik Andersson room 3 Jukka Korkeila Jouni Kujansuu room 2 Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger Viggo Wallensköld room 1 Harri Pälviranta Kari Soinio landing Pekka Niskanen 4th floor (Un)naturally The exhibition explores new angles on art by male artists, with a view to illustrating the diversity of gender. Man, masculinity, femininity and the man’s world appear in the works as shifting notions that are open to discussion. The exhibition challenges established ideas of the object of the gaze, the viewer, suitable subject matter, contemporary media imagery and the traditions of art, as well as reappraises notions of what is natural and what is unnatural. CURATORS Marja-Terttu Kivirinta ja Leena-Maija Rossi Pekka Niskanen You Want to Know, 1996 Another Person 1 and 2, 1997 The subject matter of Niskanen’s works is such as is seldom encountered written in tall letters on a wall, an exploration of the natural and the artificial in the boundaries of gender and sexuality. The woman posing in the pictures in You Want to Know is proportioned like a professional model, yet her clothes and poses represent a marked departure from traditional images of women perceived as feminine and attractive. The text behind the figures asks if it is possible even in principle to leave one’s sexuality undefined. Would it be possible for desire not to take any gender as its object, but that the erotic in both sexes could actually be excess fat? And who is it that actually wants to know, and what – and about whose gender and sexuality? The billboard Another Person is an intervention into conventional Western imagery. What we see in it is the hairy back of a crouching naked man. The male figure on the other wall would seem to be keeping an eye on the naked man. The text in the pictures is a quote from a proposal for the 1997 amendment of the Criminal Act. In the proposed amendment, a man could also be the victim of rape. The texts also draw attention to an existing contradiction: are different types of relationships and families equal in the eyes of society, even if criminal law would say they are? BIOGRAPHY Pekka Niskanen (b. 1961) enrolled in the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki to study visual communication in 1980. Towards the end of the decade he abandoned graphic design for visual art, ending up as a postgraduate student in the Rijksakademien in the Netherlands. Combining text and visual elements, Niskanen’s billboard works challenge contemporary media imagery and have been exhibited in many venues, including exhibitions of the Museum of Contemporary Art in the 1990s. He has subsequently used film and video to explore such themes as identity, political activism and refugees. He has been a lecturer in the University of Art and Design Helsinki, the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and the TAMK University of Applied Sciences. Harri Pälviranta Playing Belfast, 2009 Playing Belfast / Interface playgrounds: #1 (New Lodge), #2 (Shankill, Woodwale), #3 (Shankill, Townsend), 2009 Northern Ireland is known for political conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. Its capital, Belfast, seems calm, yet full of tension, in Pälviranta’s pictures. The happy children fooling around for the camera in playgrounds inhabit suburbs that are defined by political dissension. The political conflicts and power struggles can be seen in the empty playgrounds in the form of surveillance masts and walls separating residential areas. Although the conflict cannot be read in the children’s expressions, the continued presence of national-political undercurrents can be deduced from the boys’ football jerseys. In his photos, Pälviranta investigates how children live in spaces filled with the vestiges of violence. He wants to draw our attention to the fact that breaking the vicious circle of violence and hate will probably take a time period spanning more than one generation. Although the subject of Pälviranta’s photos is violence, he does not show us violence; rather, he laconically records its impacts and consequences, its arenas and instruments. Violence in his photos is not ahistorical. It has roots that are deeply embedded in the conflicts, whether the dissension is a conflict between nations or just masculine belligerence. It must also be noted that the roles of hatred and bitterness are often passed on to those who were not even born when the events that led to the conflict occurred. BIOGRAPHY Harri Pälviranta (b. 1971) began his photography studies in 1996. His first solo exhibition was about men, their roles and identity. For his graduation project at the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Science, Pälviranta presented photos of World War II combat fields and other sites of violence under the title Badscapes. He continued to explore the connections between the world of men and violence in his 2007 exhibition Battered. Pälviranta found the people in the photos when he accompanied the police in Turku in their investigations of violence at night. Apart from taking photographs, Pälviranta also writes about photography. He is currently preparing his doctoral dissertation for the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Playing Belfast is part of his research. Kari Soinio From the series Why Don’t Boys Play with Dolls?: Maiden, 1992; Mother, 1992 Karoliina 23.8.2008, 2009, Karoliina 2.4.2009, 2009 From the series Scent of a Man: Scent of a Man #17-#19, 2005 Kari Soinio’s Maiden, attired in an evening gown, is walking the dog, and the tired Mother is dangling her baby in her hand. The photos are a departure from the conventional format of photography. The figures in them look back at the viewer from a backgroundless frame like large paper dolls. The two-dimensionality of the photos is also broken by the objects and toys that reach out from the frame. The works are part of Soinio’s series completed in 1992 in which children mimic adults: girls pretend to be women and boys men. In their play, the children reproduce the rules of the adult world and the prevalent notions of gender and its boundaries. Through roles children learn to know what is considered a suitable profession for a boy, or what gestures are interpreted as being seductive when made by a girl. The series challenges these traditional roles by questioning the inviolability of such learned boundaries. The Karoliina works can be seen as a kind of continuation of the Why Don’t Boys Play with Dolls? series. They show the same girl as an adult, now pregnant, and as a mother – in roles that are often unquestioningly associated with biological womanhood. But how inviolate are gender boundaries, and are they even necessary? The boy floating in deep water in Soinio’s triptych from the series Scent of a Man seems to be asking the same question. He seems sunken in thought, divorced from the world and expectations. BIOGRAPHY Kari Soinio (b. 1962) began his studies in photography at the Lahti Institute of Design under Arno Rafael Minkkinen and continued them later in the University of Art and Design Helsinki. He first presented pictures of nudes in his graduation show in Lahti in 1989, posing in his own photos. Over the next twenty years, Soinio created several photographic series that question masculinity, the gaze and traditional men’s roles, and also in them the artist is both subject and photographer. The theme of challenging the boundaries of the body and masculinity becomes meshed in Soinio’s work with an interest in the importance of site and landscape as factors contributing to the construction of identity. Soinio has also explored the potential of the blurred image and the use of three-dimensional, sculptural forms in the presentation of photographs. Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger A Black Fountain, 2009 Kalle Hamm: Fall of Man, 2008 The artist duo got the idea for the fountain when they were in Iran, collecting material for their work. A Black Fountain is a reminder not only of the thousands of refreshing fountains in Iran, but also of the controversial source of the country’s riches, oil. The artists themselves see different things in their work. Kamanger associates it with water in the fountains in mosques that the devout use to wash themselves with before prayer. The clarity of the water is only apparent, however, for in confrontations that involve power, even the cleanest values become sullied. Hamm, on the other hand, is reminded of other fountains he built earlier. For him a fountain that runs ink instead of water is an allusion to the medium of drawing, a kind of primordial drawing where all individual lines are still an undifferentiated mass of liquid. The Fall of Man series of drawings Kalle Hamm made in 2008 puts men in the centre. The series has 36 parts divided into classes based on 12 professional groups and men’s names. The figures in the pictures range from Hector of antiquity to persons in different contemporary cultures whose names refer to Mohammed. Most of them have or have had some kind of encounter with love between men. In current terminology, we would speak of homosexuality, and yet some of the persons in the pictures were opposed to it. Hamm has found the persons and the accompanying English comments from encyclopaedias and the Internet. The compendium of male images becomes an installation that evolves into a statement on the long and convoluted history of homosexuality or other things considered contemptible and forbidden. BIOGRAPHY Kalle Hamm (b. 1969) and Dzamil Kamanger (b. 1948) have been making community art since their first meeting when they were both working in a pizza restaurant in 1999. Their joint projects explore multinationality and the global flow of goods and people from different perspectives. The treatment is often quite personal. The exhibition series that started off with the title Pizzeria Babylon was transformed into a fictitious production company that has produced such a marvel as the Spice Trade computer game. Premiered in Galleri Sinne in 2007, Afaryan was a work that documented the fate of an abandoned Kurdish village in Iran. Kalle Hamm was born in Finland. He graduated as a Master in Fine Art and art teacher from the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Dzamil Kamanger from Iranian Kurdistan studied ceramics at the Kermanshah University of Fine Arts. He is steeped in the craft traditions of Kurdish culture. Viggo Wallensköld The Family of a Prince, 2007, Sister and Brother, 2008, Henrietta, 1996, A Room, 2007, Afternoon, 1997 Viggo Wallensköld’s paintings shun all conventional ideas of beauty. The youth, nudity and budding sexuality depicted in the works are a titillating theme, but Wallensköld presents them in a curiously different way than one might first think. There is always something too much or too little in his pictures. The girl in Afternoon is lacking a leg, while the girl in A Room has no limbs at all. The mother in The Family of a Prince as well as Henrietta both sport a thick beard, disturbing the world of gendered signs. Rendered in cheerful colours and soft brush strokes, Wallensköld’s paintings are gentle portraits of the undepictable. The space in the pictures is often private, a bedchamber or a living room, a place where people can be themselves, safe or sometimes even isolated from others. The one thing common to the works is that their peculiar subjects are painted in the time-honoured idiom of portraiture, in celebration. There is a quiet pride in the figures, the right to be just what they are. BIOGRAPHY Viggo Wallensköld (b. 1969) first studied art history in the University of Helsinki in 1988. The following year he moved to the Academy of Fine Arts, extending his passion for drawing to oil painting. The theme of his graduation show in 1994 was life of fat and lonely women, and it foreshadowed his later thematic concerns with human deviancy. Wallensköld received the Ducat Prize of the Finnish Art Society in 2002, and in 2005 he won the title of Young Artist of the Year. In addition to the lost and lonely, freaky and amputated figures in his paintings, Wallensköld has also written a book about a curious character – the fictitious mycologist Anatolij D. Mbdrinov. Jukka Korkeila Prisoner of the Stripes, 2009 Russian Elegy, 2008, Mao’s Red Moon, 2007, Untitled (Resting Satyricon), 2003 Jukka Korkeila is not satisfied with paintings as isolated objects hung on a wall. He constructs installations instead, by combining wall paintings and smaller pictorial surfaces. In this exhibition his works also extend to the floor, almost pulling the viewer inside the works’ totality. The works do not add up to some preconceived story, but allow viewers to move inside the piece and create their own world of associations from the fragmentary details. Korkeila hides all sorts of details and visual puzzles in his work for viewers to work out. The works often depict nude males with bulging Buddha bellys and small penises. Korkeila’s subject matter can be called atypical; the male body is seldom shown in public imagery as being huge, with engulfing fleshiness, while at the same time an object of desire. Intermasculine desire in the works is also hidden in a more personal world of images. By highlighting the non-presentable and the deviant in his images of men, Korkeila challenges our notions of what ultimately is ugly and what is beautiful, what is natural and what is unnatural. BIOGRAPHY Jukka Korkeila (b. 1968) took a circuitous route to the study of painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, first in the Department of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology, and then in the degree programme for interior architecture and furniture design at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. For Korkeila himself, his artistic coming out was the diptych entitled Hope, which he presented as his graduation work in the Academy in 1996. One half of the piece shows the large figure of a naked, obese man, on the other is a non-objective colour extravaganza. Since 2002, Korkeila has extended the scope of his work from canvas to include walls. He has subsequently worked as a lecturer in painting at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. His other home for many years now is Berlin, where he works today as an independent artist. Jouni Kujansuu Escape, 2009 Conceptuality in Kujansuu’s art sometimes takes the guise of combining things that at first sight seem to have nothing in common. He may insert some disturbing or even embarrassing element into an otherwise solemn and serious context. Such a disturbance can be an audio device inside a bun loaf that plays sounds of a man grunting. The combination of shifting colour fields on monitors and the sound of farts can also be a disturbing element in an art gallery. Juxtaposing the personal sphere, such as sexuality or intimate bodily functions, with a minimalist style introduces a flaw into the way we keep things in separate categories. Escape consists of a large inkjet print and videos on two monitors. The large colour photo shows an empty elephant pen in the Berlin Zoo with bars, fences and surveillance cameras. The calm of the photograph is disturbed by the electronic images moving on the monitors positioned in front of the photo. The videos show a black square on a white background, which is transformed into a white square on a black background, and back again. The continuous motion of the squares is monotonous and endless, dejected even. There is no escape from the prison. BIOGRAPHY Jouni Kujansuu (b. 1962) began his art career in the early 1980s in the then University of Industrial Arts. He initially studied to be an art teacher, but switched to textile art, only to give that up too after a few years. Kujansuu’s art acquired a conceptual dimension at the end of the 1980s, around the same time that he stopped painting. He continued his art studies in the Drawing School in Turku, where he graduated in 1993. Currently Kujansuu works with photographs and installations. Jan-Erik Andersson The Triangle, the Square and the Circle Meet the Fast Food Boat, 1988 Life on a Leaf house, 1999-2009 (in collaboration with Erkki Pitkäranta) Real-time webcam on the Life on a Leaf house www.anderssonart.com/leaf Life on a Leaf is the theme of Andersson’s artistic doctoral dissertation for the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. The house is also the future home of his family in Turku. Andersson has been building his leaf-shaped house for ten years now, together with architect Erkki Pitkäranta and other artists. The construction project was inspired by a fairy tale, written by Andersson, about the love story between King Erik of Sweden and his wife Karin. The purpose of Andersson’s project is to imbue modern architecture with the presence of the human mind through the use of fairy tales and stories. In his artistic dissertation, Andersson ponders whether a leaf-shaped house can be considered architecture, and on whether it is possible to live inside an image. The construction of the decorative total work of art can be watched in real time via Andersson’s website. The protagonists of The Triangle, the Square and the Circle Square Meet the Fast Food Boat are Andersson’s parents, Mom and Dad Andersson. At the prow of the fast food boat stands a plaster cast of the artist’s father, while the plaster mother sits behind the counter in the kiosk. The boat has a plastic tub in tow with a plaster baby in it, the artist himself as a small child. The work itself is a comment on the history of Western art, while offering visual delicacies served up in the styles of modern and postmodern artists. Viewers can choose their favourite dishes from the wide range of forms and styles on offer in the fast food boat. The installation also includes an imaginary interview from the international art journal Flash Art. In the framed clipping hung on the wall, the artist interviews himself in his native language, Swedish, but hides behind the name of AndersJan Eriksson – another comment on the contemporary art scene. BIOGRAPHY Jan-Erik Andersson (b. 1954) is a versatile artist whose work spans everything from drawings to performances, from paintings to installations to architecture. He studied art in the Drawing School in Turku at the turn of the 1970s and ‘80s. Since the early 1990s he has explored the life of man in his eating performances made in collaboration with Kari Juutilainen and Pertti Toikkanen. In 1995, Andersson lived in Gallery Sculptor in Helsinki, playing the role of Saint Scrubbing Brush while cleaning the empty gallery for a period of three weeks. He has exhibited his work publicly since 1980. Andersson’s writings on art have been published in several art journals in Finland, and he has taught art in both Finland and abroad.