Riikka Aihinen — Concealed
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –
Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting –
That Cooler Host.
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase –
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter –
In lonesome Place –
Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.
The Body – borrows a Revolver –
He bolts the Door –
O’erlooking a superior spectre –
Or More –
—Emily Dickinson
I have tried to avoid excessive interpretation and reasoning to find a hiding place where the unconscious lurks. Creating the paintings for this exhibition has been a slow and drawn-out process – and rightly so. The subject matters holds something from the past, something from the present and something from the future. It’s a matter of surrendering, of giving up but also receiving. In their freshness, the works are still partly a mystery to me. Intuition guides my work more and more, especially in the early stages. In the art creation process, I primarily focus on presence, honesty and courage.
Material costs for the exhibition have been covered by the Arts Promotion Centre of Finland.
Riikka Aihinen (b. 1976) is a painter from Turku. She graduated as a visual artist from the Lahti Institute of Fine Arts in 2004. Furthermore, she studied art at the Lahti Institute of Design (basic art teacher studies) in 2005-2006. During her career, she held several solo exhibitions and participated in group and joint exhibitions in Finland. Her latest solo exhibitions were at the Poriginal Gallery in Pori in 2023 and at the tm-gallery in Helsinki in 2022.
In her art, Aihinen examines her inner world of experience and thus structures her existence. She strives to identify emotions in the mind and body and their origins, and then convey them through her paintings. The works of recent years have dealt with duality in different ways. This can be seen in the distribution of the image surface and image pairs. Ideas arise from the interest in the relationship between mind and body, as well as the conflicts within the mind.
Ewa Górzna & Katarzyna Miron — Watchful
Watchful is a video installation exploring the relationship between human and nature and our coexistence with other species.
The work reflects on the people’s desire to approach, observe and comprehend their non-human neighbours in the wilderness and at the same time, it relates to the human disturbing interference in the environment.
It is a journey through diverse terrestrial and aquatic habitats, guided by non-human protagonists. Wild animals’ presence and viewpoints are emphasized in an artistic attempt to create animal-focused storytelling and balance the typically human oriented relationship between a man and a wild animal.
The video installation combines documentary footage with expanded, narrative soundscape where multiple sonic stories resonate and intertwine. Real-life scenes unfold simultaneously on several screens in a dreamlike manner, revealing unexpected interspecies encounters and various points of views.
Watchful is our fourth collaborative documentary project exploring human and non-human relationships following three short films: Encounter (2016), From a distance (2020) and Surround (2022).
The exhibition has been supported by Kone Foundation, AVEK and Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).
CREDITS:
Concept: Ewa Górzna & Katarzyna Miron
Cinematography: Katarzyna Miron
Camera assistants: Ewa Górzna, Natalia Kozieł – Kalliomäki
Trail camera assistant: Heikki Räisänen
Editing & color grading: Ewa Górzna
Sound design: Katarzyna Miron
Projection screens: Natalia Kozieł – Kalliomäki
Installation assistants: Daniel Motola, Teo Paaer
Thank you: Gabriel de la Cruz, Szymon Miron
Ewa Górzna and Katarzyna Miron are visual artists working together in the field of moving image. In their artistic practice they are interested in human relationship with nature and our coexistence with other species. Their artistic methodology balances on the border between observatory documentary and fiction, exploring various forms of visual and sound narratives. Both artists hold Master of Fine Arts degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Their films and installations have been shown at various exhibitions in Finland and abroad and screened on numerous international film and video festivals. Currently they live and work in Helsinki.
Sara Pathirane — Hyacinth Cracks
Visual artist Sara Pathirane‘s exhibition Hyacinth Cracks features an installation consisting of silk paintings and a video work. In the works presented in the exhibition, the painting process is connected to natural processes; the painting becomes a trace that binds a person to their environment, as the inner movement flowing in the body becomes visible in the paintings, and stands side by side with nature.
In the silk paintings hanging from the ceiling to the floor, a hyacinth-colored egg (the one about which one of Sappho’s preserved poem fragments talks about) hatches into the space, revealing the mystery of the life hidden within it; the barbarous attempt to be born, take shape, and become something. A butterfly’s larva is transforming into a butterfly in its cocoon, but the species splits, the host plant changes, and the larva takes another direction in its metamorphosis.
Hyacinth Cracks shows a two-week period of a hand-painted silk painting becoming part of the ecosystem of two royal palm trees in the hills of Costa Rica, a country home to almost 5 percent of the world’s living species. In the video documentation, nature slowly takes over the silk painting, a human imprint on nature, as the wind, sun, rain, insects, and lizards react with the painting. During the process, nature shapes the silk painting into new forms as the painting becomes part of nature’s organic visual language. Finally, the documentation of natural processes culminates when a golden silk orb-weaver spider weaves a web just above the painting.
The video work continues Sara Pathirane’s long-term interest in capturing natural forces interacting with aesthetic actions of humans. The works of Hyacinth Cracks reach towards Pathirane’s dreams of what painting can be.
The completion of the exhibition’s works has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Helsingin Saskiat ry with a 75th anniversary scholarship, and Kuvauspaikka Mauser Ecohouse in Costa Rica.
Sara Pathirane (b. 1985) is a visual artist from Helsinki, she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree in 2014 and has worked for almost twenty years with painting and video art both internationally and in Finland. The last time her work was exhibited at Forum Box in Mediabox in 2016 and in the 2015 jubilee group exhibition CATCH in 2014. In 2021, her and Henrik Amberla’s work proposal Ikiaikaidan was awarded second in the public art competition Taidetta Jätkälle coordinated by Forum Box.
The continuation of the Hyacinth Cracks body of work is on display this year at ECC’s group exhibition in Venice and in a joint exhibition with visual artist Linda Jasmin Mayer at NUCLEO in Ghent. Pathiranen’s silk paintings will be seen at the end of the year as part of choreographer Laura Pietiläinen’s stage work at Nykytaidetila Kutomo in Turku and next spring at Mad House Helsinki.
Mediabox