Kate Stone, Kultapalmut:

Conjuring Tricks

Kate Stone is a Brooklyn-based artist working across photography, sculpture, installation and animation. Her work explores the domestic uncanny, psychological space and the ways in which both natural and mythological forces shape our environment. In her animations the uninhabited rooms are psychological spaces – the fuzzy architecture of dreams or memories – that are often in the midst of transformation, being overtaken by natural, supernatural or invisible forces. These forces serve as stand-ins for the anxiety that current world events bring into our personal lives and private spaces. Kate received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She has been awarded the Tierney Fellowship, The Lotos Foundation Prize, an FST StudioProjects Grant and a Kone Foundation Grant.

Pauliina Mäkelä: images, overhead projector projections

Topias Tiheäsalo: electric guitar, electronics

In Kultapalmut, the visual and aural dimensions create a phantasmagoric, modern-day magic lantern performance – like an experimental laterna magica. Live image and live sound are present simultaneously. The duo makes a kind of real-time movie, each one always forming in its own way. There is experimentation and chance involved: a single performance is never repeatable as such.

Mäkelä and Tiheäsalo use old analogue technology. Images projected by an overhead projector and concrete reflections are accompanied by the sounds of an electric guitar, a transistor radio and a camera flash. In their analogy, Kultapalmut performances are direct, concretely comprehensible experiences. Experience yesterday’s future today!

Pauliina Mäkelä works between illustration, visual art, comics and performing arts. Pauliina is known for her abundant and ambiguous pencil drawings that blur the line between the real and the imagined, creating a space for wonder. In her imaginative parallels and juxtapositions she explores the uncertainty of being through playful and fragile interspeciesism. Through illusions, dream-like narratives and analog experiments she plays with the congruence of lie and truth, and teases out the treacherous aspects of human experiences. Pauliina received the prestigious Illustrator of the Year Award in 2021.

Topias Tiheäsalo is a guitarist focusing on improvised and experimental music, who also makes music programmes for Yle Radio 1. He was nominated for the best original music for the film Bayoneta at the 2019 Ariel Awards in Mexico.

Tytti Rantanen is one of the editors-in-chief in niin & näin, a philosophical magazine. She works as a programme coordinator in AV-arkki, the centre for Finnish media art. Rantanen also contributed to the research project “Dangers of Narrative” (University of Tampere & Kone Foundation, 2017–2020