Break 3: The Works at the Exhibition

All the works in the exhibition reflect the artists’ ongoing processes of investigation and present a selection from the wealth of material gathered so far in the project.

Christopher Barr
Dispositions

Chris Barr approached Helsinki searching for key monuments, Alvar Aalto’s buildings. The swiftly drawn maps are tangible clues to the exchanges this mission encouraged between the visitor and the locals. The directions to a number of architectural landmarks generated a complex map of the city, where the collective codes entwine with personal views. The layered significations of these buildings are tapped on also in the models that bring everyday elements into dialogue with the monumental forms. The little heater he customised and placed outside the gallery appeared as yet another gesture towards the city and its inhabitants, an attempt to mark out a new kind of a space.

Simo Brotherus
Becoming Ecstatic (A Proposal for a Public Monument)

Simo Brotherus has focused attention in his research to shared urban codes or even ethos that affect our engagement with and within cities. The suggested monument celebrates surrender to ecstacy, letting go of the performed public roles and dependencies on social structures, becoming absorbed in individual emotional and sexual fulfilment. Classical formal language with all its symbolism lends itself to the contemporary performance of the self as the boundaries of public and private as well as cultural and natural blur. Whether considered as realisable or just a suggestion, the proposal works as an affirmative opening for discussion and re-signification. Both as a conceptual and a concrete intervention it makes space for experience that troubles the structures and norms that shape the social realm and our participation in it.

Irit Garty & Isaac Layish
Monday to Friday

The work is a week in pictures as provided by the free newspaper “Metro”. As Irit Garty was unable to travel to Helsinki with Isaac Layish, the artists decided to synchronize the papers from the commuting routes of the two cities over the duration of a week in order to see what would arise by comparing two identical formats with parallel target audiences, each creating their own metropolitan bubble of reality. In a reversal of the idea of magic ink, whereas a written message appears only after time has passed, they chose to remove the titles, captions and any text from the front pages, in an attempt to afford more space to the emotional impact and personal meaning of each photo, and to discover the inner structure of a newspaper’s front page.

Anu Pennanen
Anonymous (Primrose Hill/Canary Wharf)

Primrose Hill is a high grassy hill in a wealthy residential area in North West London. Canary Wharf is corporate office building area in East London. The work of Anu Pennanen connects these two sites by adding into a video and a soundtrack from Primrose Hill an audio recording of a man talking into his mobile phone in a square facing Canary Wharf station. The video camera moves and stops to create anonymous portraits of the people who have climbed up to Primrose Hill lookout spot and are looking towards Canary Wharf in a late autumn Sunday.
Many thanks for: Chris Barr for showing Canary Wharf in the map. Irit Garty for bringing us to Primrose Hill. Minna Suoniemi for lending me her camera. Antoine Verhaverbeke for helping with the sound.

Abigail Reynolds
Universal Now

Focusing on the public faces of the cities Abigail Reynolds has been creating her own archive out of old picture books from Helsinki and London, comparing images of the same landmarks over decades and merging these documents of different eras together. The monuments appear, thus, as sites of temporal layers, suggestive of the historical shifts and complex stratas of urban life they have participated in both as wittnesses and as signifiers. The cut designs that link the two moments represented in the pages suggest possible portals for timetravel, like openings within the frames of the books. The customised books are presented in a sculpturally improvised display cabinet, not unlike the designs themselves chiseled out of an old table.

Minna Suoniemi
En Route

Minna Suoniemi approached London, for her a completely new city, with a focus on how the locals inhabit their own environment. She attempted to map and make sense of the city by observing the routines, routes and rhythms of being in this urban space. She was drawn to the different ways people make space for themselves in the public realm and, for example, try to justify their uncomfortable inaction in it when forced to pause and wait. The speed of constant movement and the charged stillness of stopping appear as specific to London yet also touch on shared codes and conventions of urban dwelling.