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Category: Uncategorized

Performance Night 16.4.2009

Gwendoline Robin | Platform

Gwendoline Robin associates the object with the body in space to create ever more complex installations and performances in which object responds to space, movement to fire, light to the sound of the explosion, and in which the artist’s body can explore, perform and dance with the danger and the poetry of fire.

There is immediacy in Robin’s work; a relationship with the present moment given by the suddenness of the explosion, the very essence of fire, the evanescence of smoke. It confronts us with surprise, fear, danger, relief, and with wonder, too, and humour. (extract of Gwendoline Robin in conversation with Tania Nasielski)

Website : www.gwendolinerobin.be

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One Day Show

Johan Lundh | Nordic residency April 2009

 

One Day Show is a project by Johan Lundh in collaboration with Dragos Alexandrescu, Eva Forsman, Joakim Hansson and Therese Sunngren. It is a project exploring contemporary art through a speculative study of artistic, curatorial and discursive production. During an all-day workshop, the participants have developed an exhibition together from scratch.

One Day Show was divided into three 3-hour long sections (excluding breaks): research, production and presentation. The first segment included an introduction and collaborative research. The second segment involved the collaborative production of the exhibition. The third segment comprised of the opening reception. The goal of One Day Show was to examine the risks and generosities involved in collaboration in a playful way.

Biographies

Dragos Alexandrescu is a visual artist from Romania who is now based in Vaasa, Finland. He became an active member of Platform in 2008.

Eva Forsman is a visual artist living in Jakobstad, Finland, and a member of Konstverket and Platform. For more information see:http://www.konstverket.fi

Joakim Hansson is from Hofors, Sweden, now living in Nykarleby, Finland. Joakim tries to combine different disciplines to create new angles in ways of audiovisual communication.

Johan Lundh is an artist, curator and writer, dividing his time between Stockholm, Sweden, and Vancouver, Canada. For more information see: http://www.firtheaglandlundh.net

Therese Sunngren is a visual artist living in Jakobstad, Finland, and a member of Konstverket. For more information see: http://www.konstverket.fi and http://theresesunngren.wordpress.com/

 

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SPECTACLE 14.3.2009

Toby Huddlestone | Plan 9 exchange

 

Toby Huddlestone performed his new artwork SPECTACLE, a public intervention and documentation project. 100 volunteers were needed to ‘create’ a spectacle by coming together and participating – no acting skills were required. All participants received a print of the work as a thank you for taking part.

 

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Man the interior designer

Mark Harris | Artist in Residence March 2009 | Plan 9 exchange

On March 13th Mark Harris and Toby Huddlestone, both based in Bristol, presented their work in an artist’s talk at Platform.

Mark Harris

Currently my art revolves around two practices; installation and drawing both of which are different though intersect conceptually and dialectically. The defining elements that are significant and continue through my works are those of space, movement, and material. Most importantly the common notions of understanding that binds them together, for example: an inherent understanding of inside / out, public and private, are simple points of a collective awareness that enables everything to exist in and navigate life. The alteration of such signifiers leads to a new understanding or a reflection on the meaning of space and environment.

In addition to installation, my practice has started to envelop drawing. With drawing I am able to add or separate additional elements to or from my foremost practice of installation. Drawing intersects my installation in a more ephemeral way, and generally hidden from public gaze. Drawing aids in a clearer focus towards a more subliminal space, a space that exists only in the media, newspapers or the internet.

Environment 1: No place.
Currently showing at the Oliver Holt Gallery, Dorset, UK. 28 February – 22nd March 2009.

“This environment does not guarantee the possibility of a happening but provides a pregnant space where participants must hang-on for a deferred experience. Indeed, like Kaprow’s, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) ‘no place.’ is experience by its audience only in sections. This is only a part of a larger, geographically and temporally disparate project, and it is unlikely that a participant can experience or grasp the totality of the work, certainly not from the episode presented here at the Oliver Holt Gallery. Understanding demands travel demands commitment to a global perspective, a claim to universality, ingrained in the acting out of the work. Sherborne is the most Southerly point of the three part project that arches beyond between Bristol and Vaasa, Finland. The spaces that Harris presents are performances from which all action has been stripped, the possibility for effective action is questioned, awaits interrogation. Feuerbach has said, ‘Without a doubt our epoch prefers the image to the thing.’ Harris insists on the importance of the act of the spectator in the movement away from things, with their increasingly dubious claims to authenticity, to simulacra with their desirable approximations and cinematic truth. The Situationist International demanded the elimination of all forms of representation, as a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real”
Text by Andrew Stook, curator / director of the Oliver Holt gallery.

Environment 2: Man the interior designer.

Installation. Platform. Vaasa. Finland. Friday 20th March 2009.

“We are beginning to see what the new model of the home-dweller looks like: ‘man the interior designer’ is neither an owner nor a mere user – rather, he is an active engineer of atmosphere. Space is at his disposal like a kind of distributed system, and by controlling this space he holds sway over all possible reciprocal relations between the objects therein and hence over all the roles they are capable of assuming. (It follows that he must also be ‘functional’ himself: he and the space in question must be homogeneous if his messages of design are to leave him and return to him successfully.)”
Baubrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, Verso1996. Pp25

‘Man the interior designer’ as with ‘No place’ will be a built environment that imposes a starkness of object yet implies a vast presents of possibility. ‘Man the interior designer’ will be a place that is built to stand in and contemplate, contemplate notions of structure, placement and contrived decision-making. Once again the entire space will be engulfed by the artwork creating an environment / installation. Within this next installment of the three works platform will play host to the final primer for the finally show at Plan 9 in Bristol UK

Environment 3: Institute.
Duo exhibition, Mark J Harris / Duncan Mountford. Plan 9, Bristol, UK. 14TH May – 30th May 2009.

 

 

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Virtual Transcendency 6.12.–11.12.2008

Tomasz Szrama

An enormous ambiguous eye stares from the window. It appears physically and psychologically trapped in the confines of the window frame and alludes to a larger body within. Perhaps it merely observes, maybe it controls, … or positions itself in judgment. Perhaps it’s the eye of a neighbour, Big Brother, or an all-seeing God. Perhaps it is confused.

Tomasz Szrama (b. 1970, Poland) graduated in 1998 from the fine art graphics department of ASP in Wroclaw. Szrama shifts between multiple disciplines, including video, installation and time-based works. He uses a variety of appropriate platforms to disseminate his practice including the web, the gallery space and the found public venue.

Tomasz Szrama lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

 

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“Tomma händer – Tomma händer – Empty hands”

Jörgen Erkius | Nordic Residency December 2008 – February 2009

 

The film “Tomma händer” is based on a poem by the Finnish poet and playwright Josef Julius Wecksell (1838-1907), namely the second of three fragments. It represents an early vision on later modernistic litterature and was written during the time of his mental breakdown. Probably in the year 1862 at the age of 23.

“Tomma händer
Mörka stränder
Sorgsen våg och tyst
Varifrån komma
Ord som blomma
Döden allt ju kysst”

 

14’00. In the roles of Josef Julius Wecksell: Sue Lemström and Julia Johansson.

The film had its premiere at Ritz, Vaasa, 12th February 2009.

 

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O! Children! 23.11–14.12.2008

Kalle Brolin | Platform

In a near future, child labourers and working street children have formed their own unions. They refuse to be represented by adults and have organized to demand better working conditions – not an end to child labour. It’s a pragmatic adaptation of the present conditions, where families are dependent on the extra income (as are the street children). Even today there exists a trade union for child labourers in Peru (Manthoc) and one for street children in India (Bal Mazdoor Sangh).

O! Children! adopts the uncomprehending outside perspective of the adults who look on and wish that things were different. The children themselves are not visible, only the traces left by them. In the exhibition at Platform, several works are included:
– a poster series, calling for participants in the first international gathering of trade unions for child labourers;
– a film showing night descending upon a slum where the singing of children can be heard from far away, intertwined with an agitated older worker and union activist attempting to comprehend the new youth;
– traces of a mobile print workshop of working street children, where they have been working on producing a mascot (mighty mouse Pico, printed with woodblocks) and a logo (the second star to the right, sewn over the original brands on different baseball caps).

Kalle Brolin is an artist from Sweden. He has had several solo- and group shows in Moscow, Kaliningrad, Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Köpenhamn, London, New York, Buenos Aires etc. He now works with social science fiction, which means identifying a marginal social trend or phenomenon and extending this into a near future scenario, which is then presented through speculative aesthetics.

While in Vaasa, he has met up with school children producing “time travels” to former factories, and has also been inspired by photos at the workers’ museum in Brändö.


More information on this and other works found at www.kallebrolin.com

 

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Ode to The Guard 1.11.-14.11.2008

Stephan US | Platform

George Orwell’s Big Brother was outdated a long time ago. In the 21st century questions like “Who supervises who” and “What are the boundaries of public and private areas” aren’t easy to answer anymore. In this era of mobile communication technologies and global monitoring systems both public and private spaces become controlled and monitored. And the consciousness of this leads humans to change their behaviour.

German artist Stephan US lets the visitor play with these questions in his installation Ode to the Guard. During his stay in Vaasa in September 2008 he investigated numerous monitoring and control systems in the public areas of the city, which will form one part of a three-part multimedia work. The others are a network of monitors and more than 150 surveillance cameras, installed at the Platform gallery. The game nears it’s boundaries: Who is really the guard and who observes who?

Stephan US is based in Münster, Germany, and has since 1994 worked mainly with performance and installation. During November he is artist in residence in Nykarleby.

More information: www.archiv-des-nichts.de

Note: Stephan US’ performance nonobody at Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Vaasa, Friday 31.10.08 at 20.00 (Museum Night)

 

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Art Swap Europe 11.10.–12.10.2008

Berlin

 

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Nordic Performance Art Seminar & Live Action 2008

Gothenburg | 7.10–12.10.2008

 

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