Is All
2021
Digital video
Duration: 9′ 18″
Sini Pelkki‘s video work Is All (2021) brings together different elements, through which text and image meet as material and gestures. The work reflects on time, its transience and presence, through interpretation, repetition, and the resulting alterations. The texts in the work, read out and to be read, are Emma Hammarén‘s and Mikko Kuorinki‘s variations on Sini Pelkki’s photographic works, that are not named here. Pelkki in turn varies the texts again in her video piece. The words read aloud by Emma Hammarén first come to the viewer as instructions (do this, watch like this), but their relationship to the flow of the work is not that. Once more, with feeling, the voice says and together with the images words create again new gestures, new variations. Hands and the things they do repeat in the text and pictures – they are an element often present in Sini Pelkki’s works. Hands, still and in action, emphasize the physicality in the act of viewing and the space created by Pelkki’s images, moving and still. Hands, together with images and thoughts in Pelkki’s work open up, close down and make measure in the bundles formed by images, sound and written text.
–Petronella Grönroos
Photography, editing: Sini Pelkki
Texts, variations: Emma Hammarén: EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE LIGHT; GREEN (2020), Mikko Kuorinki: Sentences for departing shadow (2020)
Human figure, performer: Päivi Eräpuu
Voice, reader: Emma Hammarén
Sound Design: Anne Tolkkinen
Post Production: Antti Peltoranta
Supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre of Finland
Thank you Emma Hammarén, Mikko Kuorinki, Petronella Grönroos, Päivi Eräpuu.
Sini Pelkki (b.1978) is an artist who works with photography, moving image and installation. She is interested in the subjectivity of the gaze, the limits and possibilities of seeing, emotional conceptuality. Spatiality and movement, spaces within spaces. Recent years her work has moved towards different kinds of collaborations and interactions that have taken shape in photography, moving image as well as performance and events. Pelkki’s film Departing Shadow was part of the exhibition Dance! Movement in the Visual Arts 1880-2020 at HAM Helsinki Art Museum in 2022 and at Monitoimitila O. in Decemeber 2020. Solo exhibitons include meaningful meanings at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte (2021), Sheet No4 at HAM Gallery (2018), Length at Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum (2016), Arranger’s Choice Galleria Sculptor (2013), Embarkation, Taidehalli Studio (2011). Her films have been shown in several film festivals Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, EMAF, Videoex, International Film Festival Rotterdam among others.
Emma Hammarén (b. 1979) is an artist who works with poetic language, in the form of installation, drawing or performance. The works take place in the room as large-scale sculptural text, abstract drawings or compositions for voice. The starting point is either the artist's own writing or found material, for instance different types of instruction manuals, technical and mathematical descriptions, horoscopes, philosophical texts or poetic quotes. The exploration of rhythm and change through writing and spatial composition is central. Hammarén studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London (MA Fine Art), Biskops-Arnö College of Writing (Poetry and Fiction) and Södertörn University in Stockholm (Philosophy, Aesthetics). Previous projects include exhibitions at Tyresö Konsthall, Konstnärshuset, Studio 44 and Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, Remap in Athens, Tadu Contemporary Art in Bangkok and 1Shanthiroad in Bangalore, as well as residencies at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art Seyðisfjörður, IASPIS/1Shanthiroad Bangalore, Surface Arts/H
Gallery Chiang Mai and Institut Suédois Paris. Based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Mikko Kuorinki was born in Rovaniemi in 1977. He started his artistic practise when he was 15- years old by releasing zines and music. Nowadays he lives in Helsinki and works mainly in the context of visual art by making installations, publications and happenings out of objects and texts. Materials of the works can be objects, rooms, texts, bits of songs, found and manufactured. Certain idea of documentarism is in the center of Kuorinki’s practise: he grabs on to what is at hand because of ten it is this seemingly meaningless and mundane material unfolds to him as a mystery.
There are three steps to the media art space Mediabox, but the work is also available for viewing on a tablet by request.
Mediabox is Forum Box gallery’s space dedicated to media art. The program is co-curated with AV-arkki.