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Category: Uncategorized

Father

Published 20/03/2002 by Platform

Per Hüttner | 27.3–28.4.2002

As a four year old Per Hüttner and his family had a car accident. His father was badly injured and died inhospital a few weeks later. Hüttner was brought up by his single

mother with his older sister.

During most of his grown-up life Hüttner has ignored the fact that this event and growing up without a father has affected him and his development as a person. Almost to the day 30 years after the fatal accident the artist produced a triptych video entitled ‘Who’s your Daddy? The video was the start for Hüttner’s artistic and emotional investigations into the effects of the tragic event and a life without a father. The current exhibition is clearly a product of these investigations.

In the centre of the space Hüttner has created an enormous clay phallus, which rises from floor to ceiling. For the opening it looked potent, shiny and impressive. As the exhibition progressed the clay dried, withered and eventually dropped off.

Hüttner also showed the above mentioned video triptych ‘Who’s your Daddy? In the first video a body-builder ‘substitutes’ the father figure repeatedly and in slow-motion lovingly tosses the smiling artist up in the air. In the second video Hüttner is held by one arm and one leg as the same man spins him around repeatedly. At the end of the short seque

nce the ‘father’ loses control, drops him and exits the image frame and Hüttner is abandoned, left alone on the ground.

In the last of the three videos we see the artist in a more embarrassing situation. We see him with his pants pulled down as he is receiving a spanking by the same muscular man as in the two other videos. The ambiguityof the videos raise issues about sexual identity, but also about punishment and how we are clearly coloured by the domestic situation that we are brought up in – and then particularly in our relationships to our parents.

Per Hüttner is a swedish artist based in Paris.

 

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Nigerian Girls

Published 22/02/2002 by Platform

Josep Maria Martin | 23.2–22.3.2002

By Josep Maria Martin + Linnea Ekstrand, Lotta Eriksson, Eva Hertzberg, Marko Hynynen, Sanna Jokiaho, Timo Konttinen, Jessica Lindholm, Anna-Kaisa Lukka, Tiina Pitkäjärvi, Jimmy Pulli, Niina Rintala, Markku Ruotsalainen, Henna Sjöberg, Johanna Torkkola & Tuuli Tuikka

Platform was transformed to a livingroom – the wallpaper consisted of cartoons showing information for prostitutes how to avoid getting diseases. The opening was a roleplay, a prostitute form Nigeria is leaving, going back home, and a going away party was arranged for her. In the other room a video was shown of french students doing role plays of being prostitutes.

I´m from Nigeria.

I´m 20 years old. I´ve been a prostitute since I was 17. Many bad things have happened to me, but I´m still alive. I´m not stupid. I have dreams.

I believe in life, I think about the future and smile. Every day is a gift to me. I believe. Everything is going to be ok.

I´m a strong woman. Someday my dreams will come true.

 

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Nika Spalinger | 18.12.2001–3.2.2002

Published 15/12/2001 by Platform

For the duration of the exhibition a table top matching the gallery dimensions was installed into the gallery. Inset into this surface was a slotcar racetrack made by Tyco, a lap counter and two speed regulators for each racing car.

The Tyco track had been selected for its construction ratio of 1:87. Most other producers of racetracks favor a ratio of 1:32, resulting in larger cars that are easier for children to pick up and hold. These larger cars are also more durable – a feature that is important to the children who are the main consumers of these products.

Matchbox, the classic producer of model cars (and incidentally, along with Tyco, a subsidiary of Mattel) also produces a track with a 1:87 ratio. Such a ratio helps participants to identify with the drivers of the cars (who can also be controlled by the participants), and in this way to become more integrated into the race. The aim of the game contained within the sculpture is, more or less, to drive around in circles. The lap counter indicates how many laps have been completed and resets itself to zero after the completion of 50 laps. Although the general aim is to clock as many laps as possible as fast as possible, too much speed, particularly in corner situations, may result in the car spinning out as it loses contact with the racetrack.

 

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Sunrise 5 am

Published 15/10/2001 by Platform

Petra Lindholm | 20.10–11.11.2001

Petra Lindholm ‘s video is located in a flat. Nobody is at home. The images are still and harmonically composed, the foundation being in the study of light and colour usually connected with painting and photography. Petra Lindholm has also composed the soundtrack, which constructs various emotional layers together with the images. The video is accompanied by a series of photographs.

The sun is the great star. Nothing goes on. Days pass by. Someone is singing a song somewhere. One moment it is far in the background, another too close. The sky outside is never the same. The room yearns for sunlight. The pictures of the rooms were never shot. They are in the mind of someone. She thinks of these rooms while beeing away. She stays with that thought during the day. Considering her life and the plants by the window, how they will manage without water for so long. There is simultaneously striving and withdrawal in the image. The classical sign for uncertainty: two steps forward and one back. That is formed in the audiotrack, which knows no hurry, single sounds creep in to rest. The telephone rings. At the first signal it is afternoon, by the last the day has darkened: she has given up and left the day before, and missed the call she waited for.

 

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Tyco not Tyco

Published 15/09/2001 by Platform

Klaus Jörres | 20.9–14.10.2001

For the duration of the exhibition a table top matching the gallery dimensions was installed into the gallery. Inset into this surface was a slotcar racetrack made by Tyco, a lap counter and two speed regulators for each racing car.

The Tyco track had been selected for its construction ratio of 1:87. Most other producers of racetracks favor a ratio of 1:32, resulting in larger cars that are easier for children to pick up and hold. These larger cars are also more durable – a feature that is important to the children who are the main consumers of these products.

Matchbox, the classic producer of model cars (and incidentally, along with Tyco, a subsidiary of Mattel) also produces a track with a 1:87 ratio. Such a ratio helps participants to identify with the drivers of the cars (who can also be controlled by the participants), and in this way to become more integrated into the race. The aim of the game contained within the sculpture is, more or less, to drive around in circles. The lap counter indicates how many laps have been completed and resets itself to zero after the completion of 50 laps. Although the general aim is to clock as many laps as possible as fast as possible, too much speed, particularly in corner situations, may result in the car spinning out as it loses contact with the racetrack.

 

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Artists

Published 01/06/2001 by Platform

Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani | 1.6–22.6.2001

“Imagine this room is your studio. There is a mega exhibition coming up, and you are invited! The curator wants you to create a new work. Something great, extraordinary, extreme. There is a lot depending on this show and it’s not much time left. He’ll step by and you have to present your idea. Play/explain it in front of him, without giving him a paper, cause he doesn’t like that.
Today is the day: You meet your friends, you’ll find something.”

A casting for a feature-length film about young artists. A new generation. A small group of artists on their way to success. All about strategies, all about money, all about friends, lovers, partners. All about gallerists, curators. All about art-fairs and world-around-tickets. All about how to get a prepaid vacation and earning money by travelling. All about ideas, and where to get them. Where and how. All about luck, circumstances, context and environments.”

For their exhibition-project at Platform, Vaasa, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani were looking for the co-operation of some artists/art-students and actors /-students. They gathered a fictive, international artist-group and brought them together in a casting-like situation where the participants developed ideas for new artworks in couples or in small teams. The process was documented on video and shown at Platform.

 

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Meeting Point

Published 05/05/2001 by Platform

Finn Fem Fel | 4.5–27.5.2001

One of contemporary art’s most characteristic features has been the attempt to take art out of the art institutions and into life and society, so as to create points of contact and networks on a neutral plane, using unconventional forms. With our site-related project we have consciously tried to go in the opposite direction, to bring life/society into a new space for contemporary art in Vaasa.

The Meeting Point Project was divided into two parts. The first started with a series of concrete events, in which invited guests and visitors played an active roll. This part was concentrated and limited in time. The second part was the temporary exhibition in Platform’s gallery space. This was accessible whenever the gallery was open. The results of the work, which arose out of discussions, lectures, documentation, transformations and so on, became physical material in the project room. In the gallery the office landscape met neo-expressionism.

Meeting Point was intended to break the ordinary pattern of one-off visits to exhibitions, and instead to focus on conversation, lectures, actions and more. Here, FinnFemFel had the role of consultant rather than producer, thus acting as a kind of filter. The events organized were informal and simple, and were devoted to exchanges of ideas and to the possibility of producing new or unexpected connections. They took on their own visual shape, so that content and form complement each another. The boundaries between the different areas became fluid.

The character and aims of the events varied; they were about establishing contacts between people who live in the town and those who are visiting with the primary goal to bring together people from various areas of art, knowledge and society.

During the project, Meeting Point used various media – the daily press, radio/TV, the internet and so on – simultaneously, to reinforce the interaction, or to complete the circle between art and life. The movement described above, from outside into the gallery and from there out again, creates new identifications and interfaces for all those who were actively or passively involved in the project.

 

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Certainly not art

Published 05/04/2001 by Platform

Cesare Pietrouisti | 5.4–22.4.2001

One hundred things that are certainly not art was a project proposed by Cesare Pietroiusti and realized together with a group of artists; Eija Leinonen, Tuomo Väänänen, Serafima Borotinskij, Ulrika Ferm, Mia Damberg, Fia Antus, Albert Braun, Maria Nordbäck, Hannah Kaihovirta-Rosvik and Peter Rosvik. These artists asked 100 persons in Vaasa to show them something that is certainly not art and then to lend it for the exhibition. A certain number of objects and descriptions or documentation where therefore collected and exhibited and later a catalogue was published with all the 100 things.

Invited to exhibit at Platform, the Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti, sent a list of seventy-five proposals (his so called Non functional thoughts) among which the group of Vaasa artists could choose one to be realized for this occasion. In order to promote, within the local community, a discussion on the limits, and on the possible meaning of contemporary art, these artists decided to make an investigation on what is believed to be “certainly not art”. By exhibiting these “certainly not art” objects in an art gallery an interesting paradox arises. The different levels of authorship represent another important aspect of this project. The authorship, in fact, ranges from the initial proposal of one artist, through the active cooperation of a group of artists, to the final decisions and choices of one hundred people.

With Cesare Pietroiusti´s words, a Non functional thought can be “a way of observing fragments of reality, of creating connections among events, people, places, perceptions, or beliefs… an idea that is not directly determined by carrying out an activity, and therefore appears without a reason”. His practice is “an attempt to better articulate these thoughts by building a communicative context in which they can be recognized by others as part of a shared patrimony.”Hopefully such recognition can contribute, in a simple way, to offer different ways of thinking, perceiving, and looking at things.

The second room was an video installation picturing some homeless people living in a back yard; drawings of faces on big papers in rolls, standing by themselves on the floor; and the garbage produced during the construction of the exhibition was left on the floor, strengthening the stinking atmosphere of a shabby backyard. racetrack.

Cesare Pietroiusti is based in Rome, Italy.

[The beginning of a text by Ralf Andtbacka, writer, based in Vaasa. The text is a reaction to the concept ‘nonfunctional’ and included alongside the objects in the catalogue]

The plan is as follows: to walk from my home at Skolhusgatan 47 in Vasa to Platform, at Kyrkoesplanaden 19, not by taking any of the ordinary routes, but by relying on an element of chance. My route will be determined by flipping a coin, for instance at street corners. I will flip the coin at points I consider ‘natural’ or interesting. If there are more than two options at any point, I will first make a selection and then use the coin. One of the two choices will always be a route taking me closer to the gallery. If I arrive there I will be delighted, but I will consider my mission fully accomplished even if I end up somewhere else. There is no given purpose either to the process or to the outcome of it. Similarly, there are no given metaphorical or therapeutic implications. The text is open to any interpretation. It is partly inspired by the concept of non-functional thought, which Cesare Pietroiusti describes in the following manner: Each idea that is not directly determined by carrying out an activity, and therefore appears without reason, can be considered non-functional. This impractical idea, even if superfluous, is lived in a non-compulsory and non-neurotic manner. It is an apparition whose appearance cannot be predicted, and whose purpose is not clear. During my walk I will record various facts – i.e. the time, my location, people and things I encounter – but I will also allow myself to react on any impulse, however whimsical. These imaginative acts do not provide a key to the project. Since this is a commissioned text, there is an aspect of necessity involved; but I am also very much aware of the fact that I can choose not to write it or, even better, let the coin make the decision for me, here and now. […]

 

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Poissa

Published 15/12/2000 by Platform

Jouni Partanen | 8.12.2000–07.01.2001

Poissa. Joni Partanen works in different medias. In Poissa he used old drawings of penises, which he copied so that only details could be seen; a white string running through a black paper. The copies he used for papering the first room of the gallery. It looked like a forest of birches – a three that is a popular symbol of Finland. On the floor there was a metal sarcophagus, which also was used on different locations in town; the “box” had the shape of a humanlike body and two holes for the eyes. Partanen used this “box” in performances where he would lie inside unnoticed until someone looks down through the holes and sees his eyes.

The second room was an video installation picturing some homeless people living in a back yard; drawings of faces on big papers in rolls, standing by themselves on the floor; and the garbage produced during the construction of the exhibition was left on the floor, strengthening the stinking atmosphere of a shabby backyard. racetrack.

Jouni Partnanen is a finnish artist based in Lahti.

 

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