Category: Uncategorized

Trajector Art Fair 23-25 April 2010

Published 23/04/2010 by Platform

Hotel Bloom 23-25.4.2010 in Brussels

CFL was going to offer couples in love a hotel night for free in exchange for the story of how they met. In the hotel room during the fair there would’ve only been a video – shown in the hotel tv – of one person at a time telling a story of how he or she met her beloved. An intimate

However, this happened during a time that in European history will be known as the week in 2010 when the air space was completely empty due to a certain ash cloud that erupted from the Icelandic vulcano with the – at least for French people – unpronounceable name.

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Platform Live Wednesday 21.4.2010

Published 21/04/2010 by Platform

Kuntsi Modern Museum of Art in Vaasa

irma_mope08 — Image – Irma Optimisti at mope08. (Photo Joakim Hansson)

Platform, in collaboration with Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, starts a new series of live art happenings called Platform Live. On the program for this first edition are performances by Tari Ito (Japan) and Irma Optimisti (Finland).

Tokyo-based Tari Ito is one of the most important female performance artists in Japan and East Asia. Her performances deal with feminism and female sexuality, seen through the historical ways of representing womanhood. Ito has performed all over the world, and she has also organised an international network of female performance artists.

Like Ito, Vaasa-born Irma Optimisti is a leading female performance artist, especially in Europe. This time, her performance will have a sculptural dimension. The process will be presented as it is.

Free entrance. Welcome!

Wednesday April 21st at 7pm – Performance artists Tari Ito (Japan) and Irma Optimisti (FI)

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Artist talk 5.2.2010, Ritz

Published 05/02/2010 by Platform

Jenny Baines | Artist in residence February and July 2010

Jenny Baines’ artistic practice exists in various forms that are all intrinsically linked by hope and the possibility of failure. When making films, Jenny performs repetitive actions for the camera, documenting herself carrying out apparently futile yet defiant physical feats. These actions can seem like a romantic response to, or an urge to escape from the space in which they are performed. The works are process-based, using the limitations of the equipment or her own physical endurance as a basis and frame in which to be created. The repetitively performed action is often absurd or pointless.

Examples of work include the film Untitled, Victoria Park, in which she attempts to climb a lamppost before the wind-up mechanism of the 16mm Bolex camera runs down, which is never possible as the film cuts before she can achieve this. And ‘Against the Tide’, where she swims against a tide too strong for her, resulting in being continuously washed out of the frame. The resulting films become absurd attempts to achieve pointless tasks.

Jenny graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MFA in 2006. Her work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial (2007) and other venues outside the UK in New York, Warsaw, Berlin, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Film screenings include Studio 1.1, London, Format Film Festival, Derby and Videoholica, Bulgaria. Her work is to be found in various collections including Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, QUAD and Videoholica, Bulgaria. Jenny is currently an artist in residence in film at Kingston University.

“The films I shot when artist in residence at Platform deal with the same concerns in my practice and are made using the same techniques.

Mergere (working title) is from various locations (both in and close to Vaasa) where I filmed people ice-swimming. Using the wind-up mechanism of the 16mm camera, I was attempting to time the filming of each person entering the water so it would wind down and cut as they submerged, hoping for the result of the film showing a constant flow of people disappearing into the ice.

Rather than performing the action repetitively myself, I was more interested in the place, framing and observing of an action that was already happening naturally in front of me over and over. This was for practical reasons also.

I made a series of almost photographic films both in February and in July – where the films are a static shot of something I found slightly absurd. For example, a motor boat frozen into the sea and a lighthouse flashing at night. The only movement, other than that of the film, is of either snow blowing past in the first instance, or the light faintly flashing in the second.

On viewing the material on return I’m interested in combining architectural elements with some – bringing the film into the room with the viewer so they exist as an installation. In the case of Mergere, this would work well if projected floor to ceiling in a room with a white floor so the viewer could almost step into the image.

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CFL, Tammisaari (Ekenäs) February 2010

Published 01/02/2010 by Platform

Land we have / Land vi ha

Vasa 2010 | Exhibited in Elverket, Tammisaari (Ekenäs)

The project is a site-specific initiative that explores notions about identity, and relationship to place and patriotism. The work is an audiovisual interpretation of an experiment where CFL members invited persons from different origins based in Ostrobothnia to sing the regional Swedish national anthem together.

To sing in a choir is about accepting that the presentation of the expression of the group has a greater impact for the cultural experience than the individual influence. Through the conventions that choir-singing assume as an artistic expression, CFL wants to make visible universal patterns of how human beings express cultural belonging and raise questions and interpretations relating to fellowship, alienation, identity, time and place.

The project was part of a regional project where different collectives were invited to work on the concept of Ostrobothnia. Exhibited in Elverket, Tammisaari (Ekenäs) in February 2010.

CFL: Albert Braun, Dragos Alexandrescu, Ulrika Ferm, Hannah Kaihovirta-Rosvik, Jimmy Pulli, Tuomo Väänänen, Maria Ångerman
Guests: Mikael Heikius (FIN), Edmond Nushi (KOS), Ilias Missyris (G), Oyeyiola Francis Bamidele (GH), Roberto Urrutia (PE), Ronan O’Hara (IRE), Hanne Larsen (NO), Carolin Koss (DE), Courtney Hodgkin (AUS), Jenny Baines (UK)

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Last landscape of pleasure 21 January 2010

Published 21/01/2010 by Platform

Jaša | Artist in residence December 2009–January 2010

On January 21st Platform was pleased to present a new project by Jaša (Slovenia). It was developed during the residency period and took place in the Platform Studio, Vasa.

Art historian Jernej Kožar wrote about the artist: »Jaša found a way how to reinterpret the question of ecology, consumership and the area of intimacy. Profilation of materials is a statement of it’s own-materially and esthetically. Jaša’s narrative work, which is never told in one way, sometimes shock us with their flashy colors and inferior materials, but in this dynamics never become self-sufficient and function incredibly unified and in tune with the contemporary way of life. Jaša managed to complete installation with performance and create a wholesome art work which is efficiently described in a book Radical Chick. The creative overview of this millennium’s first decade is captured in Radical Chick which was published in 2009 and represents a turning point in presenting Slovene art. The book is a catalogue/résumé of Jaša’s nine years of creating, but it surpasses a set form of an art catalogue and invades the area of books about artists.«

http://www.jasha.org/

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Genealogy – Släktforskning – Sukututkimus

Published 06/11/2009 by Platform

RACA | Artist in residence November 2009

During the period of November 6th to 10th RACA performed as squirrels interacting with the region of Vaasa. The mission was set to investigate the narrative of the flying squirrels, in Finnish “liito-orava”. The animals are told to be living in the area of Vaasa but few people have actually seen them. However, the animals have become part of the place’s identity and a social subject for conversation.
The encounters and dialogues made became the driving force and the decision maker for the next place and narrative. Some of the places visited were the Vaasa church, an old people’s home, a ski resort, the meteorite site, a fur farm and the giant shopping mall in Tuuri.

The documentation of the project was shown as a slideshow in the window of the pet shop Vaasan Akvaarioliike between November 24th–30th.

More info: http://www.raca.dk

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Platform Parasite Art Event Friday 25.9.2009

Published 25/09/2009 by Platform

Istanbul – Vaasa 2009

The event was part of an ongoing collaborative art project that Cheap Finnish Labour (CFL) started as a social intervention in Istanbul and realised in parallel with the inauguration of the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Between the 8th and 15th September, fourteen artists and cultural workers who run the Platform Contemporary Art Space in Vaasa, attended and explored the centre of Istanbul and the venue of the Istanbul Biennale. Inspired by Bertol Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, distancing as an artistic and staging effect, the CFL group explored distancing as a source for art practice in Istanbul. By generating situated and relational interventions between artists, cultural workers, arts, public space and audience, CFL generated interpretation spaces for dialogue on the contemporary human condition. CFL highlighted the outcomes from the intervention by stressing Parasitism; an activity where the parasite stays alive by creating a symbiotic relation to the host.

Now, back in Vaasa, CFL invites you to a continued dialogue by framing a Platform Parasite Art Event where the documentation of CFL’s Istanbul experience is presented as a replica and postproduction of the Istanbul atmosphere. The Platform Parasite Art Event is composed as a concentrated social zone including Istanbul staging, guides, exteriors, interiors, noise, music, flavours and movements.

CFL Dragos Alexandrescu, Albert Braun, Ulrika Ferm, Joakim Hansson, Rasmus Hedlund, Marcus Lerviks, Eija Leinonen, Maria Lundström, Maria Nordbäck, Peter Rosvik, Tuomo Väänänen, Maria Ångerman, Hans Österblad.
Guest Guillaume Aubry (FRA)
Curator Hannah Kaihovirta-Rosvik

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Intimate Economies

Published 01/09/2009 by Platform

Sarah Browne | Artist in residence September-October 2009

On residency in Vaasa during September and October, Sarah Browne is researching the production of muscha (moonshine). She is also developing a new film work that deals with natural and bodily metaphors, particularly ideas of love, control and intoxication used to discuss moments of crisis and breakdown within capitalism and ’the economy’. The result of the research will be shown in an exhibition at Kuntsi museum of modern art in Vaasa next year.

Browne’s research-based practice addresses this notion of ‘the economy’ as the dominant metaphor for contemporary social and political relations, and attempts to locate, create and value alternative interactions within these existing systems. She is concerned with the creation or documentation of intentional economies and temporary ‘communities’. These small-scale gatherings tend to form and be formed by forces of intention or desire, and are typically influenced by emotional affects. She often works on a domestic scale, using amateur, craft or semi-professional technologies such as upholstery, knitting, flower-pressing, carpet-knotting and film-making (super 8 and 16mm).

On 22nd October, Browne hosted a film screening of Bob Quinn’s Poitín in the Platform residency studio. (Poitín is the Irish equivalent of moonshine/ muscha). The choice of film is linked to her research into illicit alcohol production, relationships between economy and place, and pseudo/ethnographic film. Widely regarded as a classic of Irish cinema, this is also the first film made in the Irish language (English subtitles).

http://sarahbrownenews.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/screening-at-platform-studio-kasarmi-14-vaasa/

Recent exhibitions and commissions include the Irish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne; Noughties but Nice, Twenty First Century Irish Art, Limerick City Gallery and touring (both 2009); A Romantic Interlude, commissioned for New Sites, New Fields, Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2008); A Model Society, solo exhibition at the LAB, Dublin; and Sweet Futures, commissioned for Visualise Carlow (both Ireland, 2007).

http://www.sarahbrowne.info

http://www.kennedybrowne.com

http://www.irelandvenice.ie

http://www.sweetfutures.org

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Jussilandia 7.–20.8.2009

Published 07/08/2009 by Platform

Mattias Olofsson | Nordic residency July-August 2009

Artist statement
During my stay at Platform’s residency in Vaasa, Finland, a newspaper debate had been going on about the name of a residential estate planned by the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. According to Aalto all the wooden semi-detached houses that form the area should originally have been painted in pastel colors. But due to changes that ABB Strömberg, a local factory, did to the houses – that were planned to be rented out to the factory’s employees – upset Aalto and he suggested that the houses should instead be tarred. The dark colour of the tarred houses made the local people name the village Neekerikylä (FI)/ Negerbyn (SE) – the “nigger village”.

Even though the houses today are painted in a light color, the name still remains as the official post address to the village; regardless that the inhabitant association has appealed to the city authorities since 2003 to change the official name of the area and a sign with the name ‘Aalto park’ having replaced the former sign of the village. After following the debate in local newspapers and blogs I explored the fact that changing the name of a place is not as self-evident as it might seem.

The series of photographs that I call Jussilandia is inspired by the local tradition of knitting. The original inspiration for the specific pattern that has caught my interest comes from the Korsnäs-pullover that was locally knitted by women who, together, knitted on one shared pullover. Out of these traditions the Jussi-pullover was born in the 1920s. With its simplified design and its square patterns the Jussi-pullover has hit it big time. The symbolic and identification value of the pullover is strongly rooted in the region. Originally named after Jussi Harri, the main character in a film from 1925 called Pohjalaisia, which celebrates the regional population, the pattern can nowadays even be found on sport jackets. The Finnish brand and online lifestyle clothing supplier extremeduudsonit.com, merely a variation of MTV’s Jackass, also uses the pattern as tattoos on their models. This is actually making popular culture out of cultural heritage and of the regional knitting tradition.

About the artist
Mattias Olofsson is based in Umeå, Sweden. Questions about identity in relation to belonging and exclusion are themes that reappear in his work. He is inspired by roles, masks and mix-ups and situations where identity is created through the subject taking place or being placed, or given a role, in a bigger structure. In one recent project Olofsson slips into the role of Stor-Stina, borrowing the identity of a Sami-woman who lived in the nineteenth century, belonging to the Scandinavian nomadic population. Stor-Stina never stopped growing, which also gave her the name Stor – referring to Big Stina or Stina the Great. Stor-Stina was sent around Europe to be exhibited as a human spectacle. Slipping into her identity Olofsson explores what the experience of otherness in a particular look can lead to. The traditional Sami dress she would have been wearing, worn by Mattias Olofsson, signifies not only history or tradition repeated, it is also about the displacement of the tradition that raises issues of, for example, cross-dressing. Touching the ever-reoccurring question in Olofsson’s art is: In which way does history affect us?
Olofsson’s latest shows including this theme are: Vem bryr sig om Snövit och Rödluvan? (Who cares about Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood?), Skellefteå konsthall (2009); Guest of Honor : Sweden, Indian Hall COEX, Seoul (2009); Rightfully Yours, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2007); Svenska Hjärtan, (Swedish Hearts), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2004); Strategies of learning, Periferic7, Iasi (2006).

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Artist’s talk 18.7.2009

Published 18/07/2009 by Platform

Mattias Olofsson and Jimmy Kuehnle

Artist talk with Mattias Olofsson, based in Umeå (SE) and Jimmy Kuehnle based in St. Louis (US).

Mattias Olofsson is the residency artist at Platform during July-August 2009.

Jimmy Kuehnle is the residency artist at Ateljé Stundars during June-July 2009. Ateljé Stundars is part of the international Artist in Residence programme hosted by KulturÖsterbotten.

“The simultaneous proximity and distance of people in urban centers motivates the core of my art practice. Members of society are disconnected from one another despite almost daily contact in a monotonous cycle of daily tasks. I seek to challenge the public in order to break it out of its repetitive cycle. Humans are very adept at assimilating the world around them to the point that unusual experiences quickly become commonplace. Many wonders and sublime experiences are overlooked.

I make sculpture and performance props using materials ranging from heavy steel to light inflatable fabric to create novel experiences for the viewer. The work is a hybrid of sculpture, performance, new media and interactive practices. My recent inflatable suits have allowed me to take the work into the streets for direct contact with the public. My sculpture and performances are intentionally absurd to the point that traffic stops, pedestrians gather, and interactions occur.”

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