Jan Anderzén
Sula Insula
What are the walls wailing for? What is the cabinet asking? Where does the gate open to? A terrible climb: a step pyramid! Lane, strip, horizontal stripe, bandwidth. A dropped stitch, a fracture in
the grid, a hole in the knit, the mind goes blank.
How does a step pyramid emerge from fabric? Through framing and intuition. Intuition is asking: “Will it start to vibrate?” Well that’s up to you! Framing is shaping the language: the signs defining another sign’s form. The cut of the fabric, a bean or a circle, and the space around it. “The dream is to verbalize this process – or should I take back what I just said?” The images have their own language. “Splashes on a grid.” A gathering of gnomes, a line of the undifferentiated, a chain of hearts. Frugal patterns. Materials from recycling: second-hand fabrics and some old photographs. Colours from the architecture and sculpture of antiquity – they were not white, nor immaculate.
“I like the way you observe.” Perhaps these worlds – the ruins, the buildings – welcome him. A bureau of the unconscious, or the hut of an ornamental hermit. A decomposing taco in the palm of your hand. Easter grass. An almond-shaped opening, a grave and a womb. Revelation. Encounter. Amusement park. A field of initiation. A figure creeps into the field of perception. The perceiver awakens.
The builder plays with scale, and plays hide-and-seek with representation. Like a level in a platform game or a field of text. A blind reader gropes their way up the stairs and across the landings, bewildered. The pyramid is someone’s costume. The abundance of the surroundings, joy and jubilation, noise. Graphic notation. “I’m looking at these as possible music.” Pattern recognition, the first literacy. Charged meaning and the game of chance. Gate. Monitor. Route. Sound waves, seismic waves, a surge. The joy of collapse. A desolate smile, toothless.
― Jonimatti Joutsijärvi
Jan Anderzén is a collage artist originally from Nekala who has since become a Kaakinmaa local. Sula insula consists of large-scale textile works and Joskussaaret, a record by Kemialliset Ystävät.
Thank you Art Promotion Centre Finland for the support.
Jan Anderzén is a multidisciplinary artist working with images, video, print, performance and sound. He combines rule-based systems and chance-based methods with slow craft techniques such as mosaic and textile collage. Using digital tools tailored to his needs, he assembles compositions from an ever-growing image bank, which includes patterns from traditional crafts, nature themes from early computer games and photographic observations of the environment.
Anderzén’s works oscillate between order and chaos, wildness and domestication, and also the sacred and the mundane. The works explore themes related to technologies, myths and the possibilities of being together, although the whole often seems to elude clear linguistic definitions.
His works have been exhibited widely in Finland and internationally, including at Blank Forms, Onassis Cultural Center, Mänttä Art Week, Sorbus and Porvoo Art Hall. He has performed at art institutions such as MoMA PS1, CCA London and ISSUE Project Room, as well as at festivals such as Sónar, Roskilde and Flow. His compositions have been performed at the Helsinki Festival, Musiikki Ajas and Tampere Biennale. His public art can be found at the Turtola tram stop in Tampere.
HEMULOORDI
New Testament
HEMULOORDI (b.1989) is a Helsinki-based sculptor who works mainly with ceramics and videos. HEMULOORDI describes their work as follows: “In my works, I deal with the contradictions of identities and how capitalism flattens and controls them. Sometimes the society we live in is so horrible and absurd, but life is also so wonderful at the same time that things somehow then unfold as art. I do a lot of self-portraits and my works are always quite psychological.”
HEMULOORDI graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, but has previously also studied art at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Art School Maa and Savonlinna Art High School. HEMULOORDI’s works have been seen, among others, at the Mänttä Art Weeks, the Nuoret2015 exhibition and the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in Copenhagen. You can spot HEMULOORDI’s public video artwork in the lobby of Nokia Arena, where “Kiitos 19.30-20.00” has been running since 2022. HEMULOORDI’s works are also in the collections of Kiasma, the State, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, and the Helsinki Art Museum. In 2020, the Raimo Utriainen Foundation scholarship committee (Tuomo Tuovinen and Alma Heikkilä) described HEMULOORDI’s work as follows: “In a global digital environment, Hemuloordi senses echoes of the Finnish unified culture, where literacy is learned from Donald Duck and shouting is learned by watching ice hockey. In Hemuloordi’s psychedelic-substyle mythology, motifs, characters, and phenomena from popular culture, online forums, politics, computer interfaces, and art history fluctuate between the screen and the dimensional world, constantly changing their shape.”
Inka-Maaria Jurvanen
Dustland
The themes of the Dustland exhibition are memories and their construction, inevitability and surrendering. The title came about while I was working at the Villa Karo residency. In Beninese culture sacred objects and statues play a central role, and the time and dust that has accumulated on these objects are not disturbed or cleaned away – they are accepted. This was a transformative and profound experience for me.
What do “imprinting on the mind” or “a real memory” mean?
Memories are organized and arranged in conceptual and concrete structures. These structures are like gardens, in which plants and things are placed in artificial combinations, in arbitrary layers. Memories are kept within a distance, and an attempt is made to control them, to look at them from above. At the same time, the connections and significations are strengthened and distorted; they rise to greater value than before or descend into nothingness. The shadows of things also sometimes appear as protagonists, forgetting their source, growing into shadow plants. And around all this, the anarchistic winds blow, the invincible dust gnaws and the eternal sea churns.
Memories and gardens are never completed. The process leads to surrendering – of communities, of things and ultimately of ourselves. We cannot choose otherwise, to not surrender.
Will human-centeredness change even in the end? What do we let go of when the structure melts?
When we leave, alone.
Pencil drawing is at the center of my artistic work. I have long used plywood as my base material. In my latest works, I have strived to take drawing towards three-dimensionality and installation.
For the Dustland exhibition, I have created works on the surface of prop-like plywood structures, a plywood pentaptych, old wooden water jugs, gray granite pieces, a wooden bread shovel, and a piece of bone found in a forest.
Dustland is the third part of the exhibition trilogy I started in 2010. The themes of the trilogy are defining and structure, the breakage of structures, and memories and surrendering. The first part of the trilogy, Attribute, was exhibited in Gallery Katariina, Helsinki in 2010 and the second part, Windthrow, in tm Gallery, Helsinki in 2023.
Inka-Maaria Jurvanen (b.1980) is interested in time, its passage, and the representation of simultaneity and succession through two-dimensional images.
Jurvanen has held solo exhibitions and participated in curated group exhibitions in Finland and internationally since 2007. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Texas, USA) and the State Fine Arts Commission. The Finnish Art Association awarded Jurvanen the William Thuring Prize 2023.
The exhibition is supported by:
Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Finnish Arts and Culture Agency, Arts Council of Helsinki Metropolitan Region
Mediabox