Gingerbread house
Bird spikes
sand bags homemade with ca. 80 % post-consumer textile materials, sand from Harjavalta
water and root-forming cuttings in glass containers
perforated air barrier building paper in roll-up stands
two-channel video installation with padded cables (HD, duration 19 min)
watercolour cut-outs on paper between two tempered glass plates depicting timber wall samples of woodworm Anobium punctatumâs presence
woodworm frass powder from the walls of the artists' house
Dead hedge
Portable geodesic aluminium ball structure
Houseflies gather round the laptop computer. I transfer them out one at a time in a 370-millilitre glass jar. This time of the year, all doors and windows are already closed, and flies must crawl inside through other cracks in the house. Air heated by the machine’s processor flows out from the ventilation gaps on the back. The screen is tempting, too, it is warmer than the surrounding space and with its lights may appear like some kind of passage. The two-winged critters don’t care about the mouse cursor’s movements, they just sit and rest, head down, and clean their frontmost pair of limbs by rubbing their feet together. Then they wash their faces, forcefully bringing their forelegs from the neck over the eyes and back again. Black, flexible, springlike limbs vibrate and are sharply etched against the UHD screen. A bunch of reddish-brown, fairly sizable parasitic ticks are attached to the abdomen of one of the flies, one hangs right behind the proboscis. I cannot tell whether this fly appears to suffer more than its conspecifics, which don’t appear to have visible parasites. Parasitic ticks, too, have parasitic ticks, and they have parasites. My sensory system is not at all capable of observing them. From a book on insects I find out that flies’ sense of taste is located in the soles of their feet. Immediately upon landing, houseflies know whether there’s food about and what it tastes like. In a pleasing spot, they vomit a protein-dissolving enzyme on their meal, and enjoy the mix with their sponge-like proboscis.
In October, a stable fly strays indoors. It lands on my sweaty back and sucks blood through the skin. It takes a few stinging rounds before I realise that the fly is eating me.
1.â31.3.2019 Ars Libera, Kuopio, FI
Jake has died. His limbs and body segments have become paper-thin in the final stages. The days stick together in drizzly clumps that are difficult to tell apart from each other afterwards. The graph for average temperatures in November in Helsinki and SodankylÀ looks like the teeth of a predatory animal, dragging itself diagonally upwards in the direction of reading to the 2010s and onward towards the future.
In Finnish, November is marraskuu. In Finnish folklore, âmarrasâ means one who is dead or dying. After a short period of below-zero temperatures, the world stops, when the damp topsoil freezes for a while into an immobile armour . Then there is a thaw again, and during the daylight hours, I dig holes in the garden. The ground is muddy only in the hollows, under the vegetation-covered bulges, the loamy soil is fragrant and crumbly, and the roots of the couch grass come loose easily in a black-and-white skein of dotted lines. Every now and then, the spade hits the tunnel of a water vole, in its winter storage there are at least some grains of intensively-farmed wheat from the birdsâ winter-feeding site, they have swollen in the damp and are about to sprout. Later, when it gets too dark to see, I wash the mud off my face in front of the mirror in the toilet. Thereâs always some in my eyes, too.
What was there for me to lose? Nothing more than what everyone will lose anyway.
7.1.â15.3.2015, Areena, Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA, Espoo, FI
mesh/mÉÊ/ is an installation and/or an interactive process with the audience in the Areena showroom that is created and disappears in the course of the exhibition period.
mesh/mÉÊ/ starts off with an empty space and ends with a lecture at the conclusion of the show. Using presentation equipment found in the museum storage and nomadic elements brought in by the artists, the venue becomes filled with temporary structures and compositions that are assembled and dismantled as needed.
The objects create places of encounter the formation of which is governed by randomness or momentary need and which change their form in time. The artists work in the project space almost daily, following a weekly schedule. Their work results in maps and diagrams on the walls of the gallery. One of them borrows its form from network diagrams. A network diagram is a graphic representation of a network, a way of examining functions, dependencies and the critical path of a project.
The title theme of the show, mesh/mÉÊ/, refers to a complex sequence of events in which things, situations, people and objects are all entwined or enmeshed together. It also refers to the mesh made up of the nodes and loops in a network or a fishing net.
nabbeeri have invited composer Timo Tuhkanen to collaborate in their project. He creates a soundtrack for the show from materials emerging in the showroom in EMMA. Timo Tuhkanen (b. 1983, Muscat, Oman) is a composer, poet, publisher and visual artist. He studied composition, improvisation and conducting at Brunel University West London, graduating in 2009. Tuhkanen lives and works in Helsinki.
group exhibition w/ Riikka KerÀnen
2.â25.9.2016 Ama Gallery, Helsinki, FI
Laskuvesi paljastaa jÀlleen vÀliaikaisesti hehtaareittain limaista erÀmaata Skotlannin laitamilla; vedenalaiset hiekkadyynit, porrastuneen rantakivikon, kalmarin, kivettyneen kengÀn. Nostan ylös möykyn, jonka toisesta pÀÀstÀ kasvaa jokin haiseva vesikasvi. Huokailemme syvÀÀn ja muistelemme ÀÀneen 3D tulostetuista kivistÀ muodostuvaa rantaa.
/
/
Suojaisassa poukamassa merimetso saalistaa kalaparven keskellĂ€. NĂ€en sen jo kaukaa rantarinteen ylĂ€tasanteelta. Itse saalistus nĂ€kyy avaruuteen saakka. Liikerata â on toistunut mekaanisesti jo vuosia. Tulimme tĂ€lle rannalle varta vasten nĂ€hdĂ€ksemme mekaanisen merimetson. Löysimme eksaktin sijainnin satelliittikuvien perusteella. Kuvat pĂ€ivitettiin viimeksi kaksi viikkoa sitten.
6.6.â29.8.2015, former Turku county prison, FI
The strange thing is that the more one's own space becomes cramped, the more it becomes encumbered with appliances and objects. It seems necessary for this personal place to become denser, materially and emotionally, in order to become the territory in which the familial microcosm is rooted, the most private and dearest place, the one to which one enjoys coming back at night, after work, at back-to-school time after vacation, after a stay in a hospital or the military. When the public sphere no longer offers a place for political investment, men turn into 'hermits' in the grotto of the private living space. They hibernate in their abode, seeking to limit themselves to tiny individual pleasures. Perhaps certain ones are already dreaming in silence about other spaces for action, invention, and movements. On a neighbourhood wall in June 1968, an anonymous hand wrote these words: 'Order in the streets makes for disorder in our minds.' Reciprocally, social despair restores imagination to power within solitary dreams.
[Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard & Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life Vol. 2, p. 147â148.]
group exhibition w/ mirko nikoliÄ, Elina Vainio and Sylvia Grace Borda
15.6.â20.8.2016 Mustarinda, Hyrynsalmi, FI
â Shock tube detonators beachcombed from the bays of the Suomenlinna Island, they have been placed in old nail holes and in the tunnels of the larvae of violet tanbark beetle (Callidium violaceum)
â On a styrofoam wall, an unfinished copy of Donna Haraway's article published in e-flux in September 2016
â A rya rug, depicting a fur beetle larvae (Attagenus woodroffei) feeding on oat flakes
â Kuvarica, an adaptation of traditional Serbian embroidery craft
â 3D animation, HD, duration 30 min 16 s, plywood boards found from the storage, adjustable clamps
â watercolour on paper, clips, wooden rods, biopolymers
group exhibition Edge Effects â Active Earth, w/ Elena Mazzi & Sara Tirelli, mirko nikoliÄ, Tuomas A. Laitinen and Jaakko Pallasvuo
curated by Jenni Nurmenniemi | HIAP
7.11.â3.12.2017 Art Sonje Center, Seoul, KR
poster by Joosung Kang
đ· by Yeonje Kim
x
18.9.â23.12.2021, The Nordic House, ReykjavĂk, IS
Donât break what you can keep intact. To brrreak is easy, to rrrebuild and to create new is difficult, darning and patching tedious and tiresome.
The end is an extension of temporality; weâre already in it, writing in a downward motion. Necropastoral: glyphosate, Solomons-seal sawfly, smut fungus, potato blight, chocolate cyst.
Peat burning fumes are carried by the westerly winds, and the bioeconomy rally that the frosty winter enabled makes the house tremble every day. The barren sod grass farm draws the inconsolable horizons of plantationocene. Yet somewhere on the fringes of monocultures and simplifications, the possibilities of building good life and death emerge among the beings of the inhabited world.
4.â14.11.2021, FLASH3, Light and Death, 3rd Finnish light art biennale
curated by Alexander Salvesen & Jere Suontausta
Suomenlinna, Helsinki, FI
đ
relics: the ones breathing through their moist skin and those with air tubes piercing their chitin exoskeletons grow scarcer / the saints' dried cuticles, limbs, wings, sensing organs go round in the projector carousels.
*The title of the work, 'mutant and nondurable', is borrowed from Joyelle McSweeney's poem Bug Time: Chitinous Necropastoral Hypertime against the Future in her book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults published by the University of Michigan Press in 2015.
đđȘ°
21.5.â7.8.2022, Kunstbanken Hedmark Kunstsenter, Hamar, NO
Donât break what you can keep intact. To brrreak is easy, to rrrebuild and to create new is difficult, darning and patching tedious and tiresome.
The end is an extension of temporality; weâre already in it, writing in a downward motion. Necropastoral: glyphosate, Solomons-seal sawfly, smut fungus, potato blight, chocolate cyst.
Peat burning fumes are carried by the westerly winds, and the bioeconomy rally that the frosty winter enabled makes the house tremble every day. The barren sod grass farm draws the inconsolable horizons of plantationocene. Yet somewhere on the fringes of monocultures and simplifications, the possibilities of building good life and death emerge among the beings of the inhabited world.
26.8.â26.11.2023, FĂ€rgfabriken, Stockholm, SE
d/l Laura Suurhasko's text Undone to emerge again
đ· by Johan Ăsterholm
In parasitism, it is usual that
the parasites are not fatal to
their hosts, although sometimes
disadvantages may occur.
mutaa-toimijuus
auta minua minun WiheljÀisydeni mudasta
minÀ istun kijni sywÀsÀ kirouxen ia syndein mudasa
minÀ macan mielellÀns temen mailmaijsen Elemen hekuman warjosa, caisilois ja mudasa
muta-gentskap
hielpa mig ur gyttian av min ElÀnde
jag sitter fast diuper i forbannilses och synders dy
jag ligger mig gÀrna i skuggan i detta vÀruldsliker Lifs luste, i sÀf och mura
5.6.â15.8.2021, The Nordic House, Torshavn, FO
Spectres consist of:
âą large quantities of deceased arthropod exoskeletons salvaged from human construction
âą post-consumer goods
âą mourning as an always unfinished process
âą how to handle the by-product leftovers of progress
d/l catalogue for more info
5.2.â30.4.2022, Taide- ja museokeskus Sinkka, Kerava, FI
thinking of invertebrates
2017â
a changing constellation of objects and elements
(useless tributes to larvae and other metamorphing kind)
âą fallouts, watercolour on paper from a series of photogrammetrical postnuclear studio views
âą plastivore bojagis, adaptations of traditional Korean patchwork craft that have been devoured by speculative plastivorous critters
âą an episodic 3D animation (HD, duration 30 min 16 s), a conversation starter
âą segmented feeding cords
âą clay paintings resembling slime trails
âą token of sea, hand harvested marine litter from TjĂžrnuvĂk, Faroe Islands
âą rya rug shirts that could warm the fur beetle larvae (Attagenus woodroffei), depicted feeding on oat flakes
âą an unfinished handwritten copy of Donna Haraway's article published in e-flux in September 2016
âą a styrofoam compost wall modified by garden ants
âą kuvarica, an adaptation of traditional Serbian embroidery craft depicting critters with protest signs stating things like "Invertebrates for peace", "We are the 97 %!", "Spineless not heartless!", "Phylogenetic justice", and "End taxonomic greed!"
âą earthworm knots, stained glass from series Ăstivation, shows earthworms that wrap their bodies into tight underground knots during unfavorable conditions
âą grandma's worm I & II, customer displays with poems
there's a worm living inside my grandma's body, eating its way around, more often than not mapping an area just out of her reach, digging tunnels between her shoulder blades, calves, back of the arms
the worm is always there, grandma knows it's there, though she has never seen it, she can feel the worm proceeding, she tells me where it's irrevocable movements can be felt today
* The title of the work has been scavenged from Joyelle McSweeney's poem Bug Time: Chitinous Necropastoral Hypertime against the Future in her book The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults published by the University of Michigan Press in 2015.
watercolour on paper, sound
Ă 23 x 31,5 cm
46 paintings & soundtracks
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma collections
đ· by Pirje MykkĂ€nen, Kansallisgalleria / Finnish National Gallery
January 16, 2011
The sea hurls extra materials against the inner walls of the studio, then draws away, closing the door behind it. Everything is scrambled. Unrecognizable modules and parts of dismountable objects are lying around, scattered across the floor and the tables. Orderliness is utopia, yet it seems like the only alternative amid the chaos. Everything must be named and catalogued. An INVENTORY needs to be made.
The cycle of the material that has drifted into the studio:
1. Finding the items
The most usual places: garages, âhelp yourselfâ baskets, Internet auction sites, rubbish skips, streets, basements, recycling centres, flea markets, fields, beaches, garbage sheds, attics, warehouses
2. Storage of the items
The most common methods of storage (September 2010 â January 2011):
cardboard boxes 44 %, plastic bags and baggies 19 %, plastic and tin buckets 17 %, plastic baskets 6 %, paper and cloth bags 6 %
3. Cataloguing the items in storage
The catalogue was written in font-size 11. It includes 9 pages and 3,496 words.
4. A closer analysis of the items
The analysis results in 46 accurate paintings and verbally articulated catalogues of all the containers in the studio, including their contents.
5. Handing over the items
The items will be returned in as good shape as possible to conditions that resemble the environment in which they were originally found.
