What is the state in which an artwork continues to exist after its finalization, after the last stroke, last edit, last rehearsal, last dot has been laid down? What happens to it when it is left unfinished? Art demands activation to be able to gather meanings. Art seeks sedimentation through repeating a choreography of performing and being perceived. To construct an archive is to construct a continually activated value- and meaning- making machinery, one that produces the constant representations, the constant reiterations that provide both the mass and velocity that the aura of a work of art desires to consume.

KIRJASTO / LIBRARY delves into the processes of archiving and the archival modes of being. The exhibition explores the rituals of dormant archives that artists naturally form everywhere they work, in their studios, their homes or any place where artistic labour gathers. The exhibition focuses on these personal archives of artists through an exploration of what happens in these processes of constantly re-performing and mutating systems of representations becoming exclusively implemented within the exhibition setup.

INDEX CARD
The exhibition invites you, the guest, to become an excavator of the archive. Narrated on the cards is a closeup depiction of the artists’ thoughts on their practice, their works, their core values, an anecdote related to the process of making and more. The artists’ identities are hidden behind abbreviations of their names. Through the act of searching, you will be puzzling together bits of the narration into an entity.

ABOUT THE CURATORIAL TEAM
The curators, Jonni Korhonen, Lin Chih Tung, Noora Lehtovuori and Ria Andrews, are from The Praxis Master’s Programme in Exhibition Studies in University of the Arts Helsinki. They are interested in possibilities that the group dynamics bring to the creative processes and curatorial labour. Their aim in this exhibition is to find different ways for the audience to engage with experiencing the artworks in the gallery space