| ART
OF INHABITATION -MODULATIONS
OCTOBER
11TH -NOVEMBER 9TH 2008
PICTURA,
DORDRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS
Kim
Bouvy, Kaarina Haka, Aletta de Jong ,Kalle
Hamm& Dzamil Kamnager, Tiina
Mielonen, Chris
van Mulligen, Anu Suhonen and Karin Suter & Annu Wilenius.
In connection
with the project Kalle Hamm has stayed as artist-in-residence at Stichting
B.A.D. and Kaarina Haka at Stichting Kaus Australis in Rotterdam.
Art of inhabitation: Modulations approaches questions
of multiple perspectives, ruptures, and shifts of various kinds. At
the core of this exhibition is the question of how we exist in the
world. Specifically, an exploration of what it is in our experience
that shifts and alters, and what still remains the same as we travel
from one place to another, from culture to culture, and from one age
to another. In this exhibition, certain issues inevitably emerge,
such as: belonging, being at or away from home, and the things that
create or symbolize these experiences, as well as those that may destroy
and change them.
ART OF INHABITATION: MODULATIONS
It is not important to be in any particular somewhere, but it is important
to be particularly somewhere.
– Taina Rajanti
“Art of Inhabitation: Modulations” approaches questions
of multiple perspectives, ruptures, and shifts of various kinds. At
the core of this exhibition is the question of how we exist in the
world. Specifically, an exploration of what it is in our experience
that shifts and alters, and what still remains the same as we travel
from one place to another, from culture to culture, and from one age
to another. There are many reasons for change, whether they be physical
or mental. Mobility and flexibility, but also durability, are essential
themes in considering change: there is no sudden jump from one thing
to another, but rather a process of gradual adjustment. It is these
transitional processes that we like to think of addressing as modulations.
In this exhibition, certain issues inevitably emerge, such as: belonging,
being at or away from home, and the things that create or symbolize
these experiences, as well as those that may destroy and change them.
Ideals
on a Drift
One theme in the exhibition is the change of land and cityscape imageries.
Kim Bouvy has been consistently working with urban spaces, and she
has a particular relationship with Rotterdam.
The slide series, City of imagination (2007) combines images of Rotterdam
collected from found materials and photographs taken by Bouvy. Rotterdam's
image as a brave and daring city – Rotterdam durft! –
is tightly integrated with the city's distinct architecture. This
ultra-modern cityscape has served as a stage, for instance, to various
car commercials. Bouvy, again, has been exploring the city's imagery
and the city itself, for some years now, and her City of imagination
series presents a new perspective of this city. Here, the haunting
and often empty scenes are not there to criticize the leftover spaces
of highbrow architecture, but to enliven a sense of beauty in the
actual city spaces we inhabit. The spooky atmosphere of impending
doom that Bouvy has created with her slideshow create the ambiance
of a science fiction story depicting a city that is no longer what
it used to be. Tellingly, these materials also form the basis for
the book entitled, Phantom City – a Photo Novel (2008). Here,
the city has been emptied, its infrastructure changed and time stopped.
Looking at her work, one begins to wonder how much of all this ordinary
devalued urban rubble would be missed if everything suddenly would
be gone. It serves as a reminder of the turmoil that the city of Rotterdam
experienced in the Second World War.
In Tiina Mielonen's paintings, this impending sense of abandonment,
neglect and a tensed atmosphere is also present. Seemingly innocent
in lush colors and eye-catching surfaces, Mielonen's paintings deal
with much more than reproducing tourist imagery, from which the images
originate. Mielonen's rupture in the idyll plays with the immediate
recognition of the majority of the situations and places that she
depicts. While looking a moment longer, or an inch deeper at her work,
the expectation of the obvious in broken. Where do these places exist
really? What exactly is happening?
A different shift of landscape images and questions of recognition
arise in Karin Suter & Annu Wilenius' photo-installation, The
4 Page-Landscape – A Walk with a Landscape (2008).
The inspiration for their work originates from a shared experience
in northern Mongolia, where both Suter and Wilenius felt that the
surrounding landscape of meadows, lakes, and mountains appeared familiar,
as if it collided with their own personal memories and ideas of landscapes.
Returning to Europe Suter & Wilenius built a miniature of this
landscape to match four pages in a book. The following year, they
physically turned the miniature landscape upside down and covered
it with perfectly grown grass lawn carpeting, placed the structure
on wheels, and took it for a walk to the Rotterdam airport. In a sense,
the idea of taking – or in this case dragging – not only
plants but the whole landscape into a different environment, seems
to be deeply rooted to the history of landscaping. For example, the
English landscape garden was created to be the image of the Mediterranean
arcadia of rolling green hills and clusters of trees and so the English
countryside was changed to match this ideal. Some hundred years later,
when planning the first ever National Park in the US its creator F.L.
Olmstead was thinking of the English landscapes, in order to create
a scenery that the Americans would understand and appreciate. Landscapes,
as well as people and ways of life, immigrate, settle, take root,
and set out on travels again.
Whilst the landscape and cityscape imagery mostly address the outdoor
environment, Aletta de Jong's works explore the use of interior spaces.
She, too, shares a concern in botany: for years de Jong has had an
interest in working with plants. For the first Art of Inhabitation
exhibition in Helsinki, de Jong created a poster with plants that
she found between the two Huuto galleries located within a few hundred
meters of each other. Tracing back the origins of the plants, she
integrated a layer of botany history into the everyday observations
within the cityscape. In Pictura, we will see de Jong's video diptych
Tropical Garden / Reading Room (2006), where two spaces seem to dislocate.
The videos are straightforward documentations of a tropical green
house and a reading room in Basel. Choosing two very controlled and
functional environments of this kind, de Jong's video can be seen
paralleling these two modes of preservation and cultivation. The work
also underlines the paradoxical nature of the ideals between the two
space-times: the categories of nature and culture seem once again
tightly intertwined as we observe the various technological finesses
that it takes to sustain a tropical garden of various plants with
different needs. Likewise, the supposed silence of a reading hall
vanishes somewhere under the continuous and insistent sounds of bodily
movements, tics and sighs that are required to keep the mind fed.
Traces of Time
Anu Suhonen's Shooting People (2003) and Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger's
Afaryan Monolog and Afaryan Memories (2007) bring forth more acute
questions of violence and belonging. Hamm & Kamanger's videos
about the village of Afaryan, abandoned Kurd village in Iran, are
an attempt to overcome the village's destiny of oblivion. A small
village of some thirty houses was abandoned by its inhabitants mainly
due to land reform and civil war. Finally, the placement of an army
base near the village changed everything, so that the traditional
life-style that had existed for centuries soon vanished, leaving nothing
but a wreck and constellation of memories in the minds of those who
had survived. In their work Hamm & Kamanger attempt to trace the
story of the village as it is remembered by the people. The work also
takes a step into the future, by presenting a 3D animation that depicts
a new awakening of the village. Unlike the standard architectural
3D animations that are made to sell brave, new plans, in this work
the 3D animation used serves as visualization tightly connecting to
the history of the villagers.
In Shooting People, Suhonen found bullet holes in shop and café
windows in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and placed herself with her
camera behind the window-glass and "shot" people walking
in the street by pushing the trigger just when someone passed the
already existing bullet-hole. Passers by become part of a re-enactment,
staged as potential victims of crimes taking place in the imaginary
world of photography. From the spectator’s perspective, the
images situate us behind a double isolation: we are both behind the
camera and the glass. The latter could be seen as becoming a screen,
in a sense of a shield or protection. In Shooting People we become,
perhaps more than somewhere else within photography, witnesses or
observers that do not take part. The only mediation between the passersby
and us seem to be the hole in the glass, the act of targeting bullet-holes
on the passers by.
Suhonen's piece is not without irony on the role of the photographer.
But could Shooting People simply be thought of as a visual game with
bullet-holes? If we look at the series from another point of view,
the photographs might pose a whole different scenario. Perhaps this
small fracture could also serve as a blind spot: For one thing, on
visual level, this image brings to mind that we are isolated from
the surroundings in the image. How else could we notice such a glass
if it weren't for the defile? Simultaneously, the mark and rupture,
show us a point where we cannot see. In a way, it seems that Suhonen
is playing with the traditional idea of trompe l'œil where the
spectator is lured into thinking that he or she could simply reach
out their hand and enter the world of a painting. Here, the isolation
from the outside world is emphasized in a way that easily makes one
feel uncomfortable and unsheltered. Maybe it is us that the bullet
has been heading at. Here, the rupture nails us into our places, turning
the image upside down, placing us as the targets. From another viewpoint,
we could say that the fissure marks our own seeing: It is actually
our own blind spot, the area of the eye that cannot or does not want
to reach, like the backs of our necks, our very own seeing, or perhaps
our darkest fantasies. It is all a question of point-of-view.
At this very moment, in anticipation of the opening of the exhibition
within a few weeks, the connotations of Suhonen's Shooting people
also extend towards a deed of violence that took place in a school
in Western Finland, taking the lives of eleven people. Once again,
the community is horrified, as there seems to be no way to understand
what happened. Moreover, what is more haunting, perhaps, is the idea
that there is no guarantee that we ourselves are not responsible for
what took place. From this particular point of view, also another
series by Suhonen titled Camouflage (2006) seems to raise important
questions. Camouflage shows a series of photographs where a green
bell pepper turns orange, in order to fit into the surrounding environment
– a fruit basket of oranges. Is this a peaceful acclimatization,
a voluntary blending into one's surrounding or are we actually watching
an act of mental violence, of forced unification? The title "camouflage"
would hint at there not being real accommodation, but simple adjustment
of the surface in order to fit in. Is the bell pepper, at heart, still
at war with the world?
Perhaps in a slightly parallel way, Hamm & Kamanger's Colonial
Grocery Store (2008), brings forth issues of adjustment. Colonial
Grocery Store seems to trace the footsteps of colonizers, but in an
altered form: The store gathers evidence of all those who have moved
half way around the world from home, but still want the food stuffs
and other specialties that they are used to consuming back home. In
this featured shop, the artists have collected one product from every
country in the world – as far as they were able to find them
in Rotterdam. There are 193 countries that have been internationally
acknowledged. The version of this project created this summer in Helsinki
contained 96 products. The Colonial Grocery Store poses the questions
of accommodation, and explores the logic of global economics and its
desire to promote certain products, while leaving others marginalized
and unwanted, outside the trade routes ordered by big corporations.
Modulations of the Mundane
The original intent of the Art of Inhabitation project was to bring
forth the invisible and transparent elements in our everyday living.
The subtitle of this exhibition, "Modulations" refers to,
among other things, adaptation and alteration. It incorporates ambivalence:
For instance, within music, modulation can serve as a vehicle of change,
so that through modulation music becomes established in a new key.
Likewise, the Art of Inhabitation: Modulations exhibition refers to
some fundamental questions concerning inhabitation. The project also
turns towards something that was not brought forth and articulated
when we began, namely questions on history and ethics. In that sense,
the experience of this exhibition involves the chore of modulation.
Is it possible to see whether things simply continue, or whether they
have already shifted away from their original state, or phase? Has
there been adaptation, or has the original been invaded entirely by
something new? In a sense, the Modulations exhibition and its historical
and political references touch matters that could be thought of as
more important than just the "transparent everyday". And,
yet, as an Irish ambassador reflected in a seminar on reconciliation,
sometimes when reaching understanding in the "big issues"
is found impossible, the only way to go further is to start from the
small and the mundane to build up trust and understanding.
Saara Hacklin & Annu Wilenius
Maastricht and Pori, October 1st 2008
ART
OF INHABITATION - PART I
Asuttautumisia rotterdamilaisittain, Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, Finland
22.11 – 3.12. 2006
FOREWORD by Annu Wilenius
ESSAY - Space Diving
by Saara Hacklin
Galleria Huuto
Viiskulma and Uudenmaankatu present a joint exhibition by thirteen
Rotterdam-based artists. Participating artists - Nic Bezemer, Kim
Bouvy, Jason Coburn, Noëlle
Cuppens, Peter Dijkshoorn, Rolf Engelen,
Marjan Greijn, Dineke van Huizen, Aletta de Jong, Chris van Mulligen,
Christine
Saalfeld, and Nayv (Nathalie
van den Burg & Yvonne van der Helm)-discuss the art of inhabitation,
namely the various ways of experiencing and interacting
with the environment we live in.The artworks contemplate subject matters
as diverse as architecture to house plants: Aletta de Jong presents
a selection from ongoing video series which traces different ways
to perceive home, and in which people describe their own homes by
using various objects. The piece traces different ways to perceive
home. Noëlle Cuppens covers furniture with felt and creates installations
where these everyday objects produce their own, strange and alienated
worlds. Rolf Engelen’s ”Vlinderbuurt becomes neighbourhood
of twigs” draws attention to
the way
we relate to nature and shared space – the piece made in Rotterdam
consists of thousand bronze twigs
affixed to the facades of the houses. Kim Bouvy is interested in the
various visual and textual ways cities brand themselves.
Moreover, the exhibition raises questions about a change of environment:
The population densities, climates, and histories of The Netherlands
and Finland are very diverse.How does this affect the works, artists
and viewers?
In connection
with the exhibition HIAP
project space hosts an event “Art of inhabitation presents:
Locating
Rotterdam” on Wednesday 22nd November 6 to 8 pm.
In addition the
participating artists are presented in a publication Art of inhabitation
(Proba 0004 -series,
Studio
3005, 60 pages).
The exhibition is produced by Galleria Huuto with Annu Wilenius, Saara
Hacklin, Tiina Mielonen and Dineke van Huizen, in behalf of Stichting
Kaus Australis, as project managers.
The exhibition
has been realised with support from Arts Council of Finland, The British
Council, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam, Dienst Kunst en Cultuur
Rotterdam, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Helsinki,
JuustoliikeLentävä Lehmä, ProAV and Studio 3005.
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