Veikko Björk
Tracks
The small wooden sculptures are a kind of fragments of life, which emerge from sedimentary layers of memory when I carve wood. I remember buses, small buildings, roads, a whole little village, which we built as children. There my brother and I could completely immerse ourselves into the magic of play.
My intention was to connect these sculptures to each other with a structure similar to a neural network. During the working process, the weft has shrunk into short spirals, a bit like umbilical cord clips, as a reference to connection. I thought about the decay of memories, death, the cycle of carbon atoms. The environment becomes spirited, and I imagine the presence of the deceased in plants, trees and stones. The plastic debris I find on the seashore, carries past fossilized life that has been condensed in oil. Now these objects are thrown into the sea as waste. I press a piece of plastic to my ear and hear the pounding thunder of dinosaur footsteps.
The exhibition is supported by Svenska Kulturfonden.
Veikko Björk (b.1960) carves memories of lived life in wood. Tree is sunlight twisted into a spiral, which supports life on Earth. Veikko Björk lives and works in Helsinki and sometimes also in his birthplace Kitee. He graduated with a master’s degree from KUVA (1999).
Salla Myllylä
Tuhkimontie 10
The video installation Tuhkimontie 10 depicts the renovation of a 1950’s apartment building in an Eastern suburb of Helsinki. The 10-channel video work follows views from the interior to the exterior in four apartments for the duration of two years. Weather and seasons outside evolve in parallel with the progress of renovation inside. During the work, the interior surfaces of the building are peeled revealing materials last visible at the time of construction.
Roihuvuori represents the first wave of suburban growth in Helsinki and, as such, is important in the history of architecture and urban planning in Finland. Tuhkimontie 10, designed by the architects Tarja Salmio-Toiviainen and Esko Toiviainen, completed in 1955, is a ‘serpentine house’ curving its way along the street with a total of nine stairways. Myllylä lives opposite the building, therefore the video work depicts also her own everyday environment.
Structured framing of the environment provided by the window grid of the building intrigued Myllylä. Having looked at the building from outside for years, she temporarily had access to the apartments and could look at her living environment from the points of view of others. When filming time-lapse sequences from a fixed camera position the framing of the image is speculative: one sets the limits of the image and waits for something to happen.
A subset of the videos was shown in a pop-up exhibition in the club room of Tuhkimontie 10 in May 2024. In the installation in Forum Box, the videos are detached from their place of origin and their context. They are projected on the rough walls of a cold storage space built under the Lönnrotinkatu bridge in the beginning of 1930’s and renovated to a gallery space in the end of 1990’s.
The exhibition is an artistic component of Myllylä’s doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki.
Lighting design: Nanni Vapaavuori
Thank you: Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, Renevo, inhabitants of Tuhkimontie 10
Salla Myllylä is a Helsinki-based visual artist working in site-specific moving image. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki in 2014 and is currently continuing her studies there as a doctoral student. Her research deals with the relationship between the concepts of place and framing. Myllylä’s works have been presented in exhibitions at e.g. Mänttä Art Festival (2024), Finnish Printmakers’ Gallery G (2021), Hietsu Pavilion (2021), Gallery Huuto (2015, 2013), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2014), Charlottenborg Kunsthal, (2017, 2012).
Aleksi Tolonen
In a Time of Chimpanzees I Was a Monkey
Working in the studio is an endless puzzle, with dozens of two- and three-dimensional pieces of work going on at the same time, and a myriad of potentially matching pieces and cut-outs all around me. It is constant cutting, gluing, fetching, matching. It is filing and remembering, creating a system so that one day something you are looking for can be easily found. And in the end, it’s about finding, if not the perfect combination, then a combination that fits. One where everything finally falls into place – subject, colour, size and all the other possible variables are just right. It’s also about finding something new, when the plethora of material gives you an option you didn’t even think to consider in the first place, and yet there it is in front of you, better than what you originally went for. It’s when two pieces of paper that you hadn’t thought of together end up next to each other by chance and make a perfect pair. It’s the volume of stuff and it’s messy spreading, so that those happy accidents can happen sometimes. It’s the humility to realize that as an artist you don’t always have to make and create, you can just accept what you find in front of you. That’s also a decision you make.
For the last couple of years I’ve come to the studio, sat down and started going through all the material I have in my studio: an endless number of paper scraps and magazines and books for more cutting, and also all the three-dimensional stuff I’ve collected from flea markets, junk heaps and streets and forests. In addition to collages and paintings, the exhibition includes works in clay. I like the tangibility of clay and the fact that I am always discovering something new as I mould. From clay I create a wide range of works, from precise to clumsy, from beautiful to grotesque, whatever the process is willing to give me.
For In a Time of Chimpanzees I Was a Monkey, I have approached the making of the exhibition in a different way. I wanted to enjoy making art and being in the studio, so I didn’t set out to make something pre-planned, instead I did what came to me and felt natural. The idea was to give more room to chance and I believe that the decisions I made during the process ultimately led the work in a certain direction. A kind of thread emerged within the work as if by stealth, it didn’t need to be sought or forced. The works wound up having a strange sense of humour, a concern for the state of the world and a helplessness as to what can be done about it.
This exhibition is supported by VISEK and Taike.
Aleksi Tolonen (b. 1974) is a visual artist from Helsinki who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. He has participated in several exhibitions both in Finland and abroad, most recently in New York. Tolonen’s art is material-driven. He has done two- and three-dimensional works, everything from serigraphy to large installations. The focus of his works is curiosity and playfulness, even though the starting points of the works are often serious.
Mediabox