Private Universes Home Exhibition

The house is our corner of the world. This is our first universe, is really the cosmos.
A world-wide acceptance of the term.
The poetics of space. Gaston Bachelard.

Janna Kokko / Home is a Poem

The word home is used to designate the place where the person lives, grows, and feels safety and calm. People designate home as the physical place, with four walls and defined by tangible elements, but it is a non-physical space as well, furnished by emotions, experiences, feelings, .. which make it up and make its existence possible.

The exhibition Private Universes - through the work of artists composed of video installations, performances, photographs and paintings - intends to show how the home becomes an extension of the individual. As it becomes the place where man builds his identity, recognizing in the treatment which is established with the space that welcomes him and makes him become himself. Hence the fact of the exhibition being realized in a private apartment. In addition to causing a reflection about the exhibition spaces and the differentet possibilities of them, the aim is to show the symbiotic relationships between the private space that we call home and the individual.

Welcome.


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EXHIBITION 09.05.09 – 23.05.09


OPENING Friday 8th of May 18 – 21h

Open entrance to the EXHIBITION: 9 and 10 of may from 12h to 17h

For the next two weeks private guides will be the only way for access to the exhibition. Contact me and you will have a special private guide. The closing party is only for the people who have visited the space during the exhibition.

Location: A private apartment located in Punavuorenkatu 2 00120 Helsinki


Entrance contact:

privateuniverses@gmail.com

http://privateuniverses.blogspot.com

+358466648476


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Artists involved

Oliver Whitehead

Juhana Moisander

Panagiotes Balomenos

Annette Arlander

Johanna Lecklin

Janna Kokko


Curated by Jon Irigoyen

Artists

OLIVER WHITEHEAD / Borders and Wallpaper.
Mural in wall / 1 x 3 meters

For centuries wallpaper has reflected the aesthetic and historical trends of the Western world. Wallpaper is a construct of our social and everyday environment. Interiors of homes are decorated with floral decorations and patterns, bringing images of nature and abstraction into the spaces of; homes, institutions, offices, hospitals etc. My wall drawings explore the pattern making that is intrinsic to wallpaper design and they way decorative embelishments are arranged. Wallpaper does more than just cover or decorate walls, it is also a form of adorment thatcan signify, among other things, power and intimacy simultaneously.

http://www.oliverwhitehead.net/


Bio
Oliver Whitehead born in England has lived and worked in Helsinki, Finland since 1971. He has exhibited in Finland and abroad. He was also the director of the Media department in the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki from 1991-97. Whitehead is one of those versatile contemporary artists whose multidisciplinary production and many-sided approach to art is defies easy, reductive categorizations. When it comes to the choice of artistic means of expression, he has been frequently characterized as one of the very few 'unpredictable' in the Finnish art scene, where he has been active since the early '70's. For Whitehead, any medium that comes to hand and can be applied to his respective needs is practicable: he moves comfortably within painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, film and video, often applying a combination of the techniques. More recently he has begun to work in cooperation with bands with live experimental video projections.



Failsafe 1992 Charcoal drawning 2m sq. Helsinki




JUHANA MOISANDER / The suitcaselady Video. 2009
Mixed-media installation

The suitcase is left at the lobby. Someone is leaving and someone is left longing. The lobby is the room from where people enter or exit the house. It leads to the rest of the rooms and it is the place where you usually say goodbye. A suitcase is traditional vessel that one carries around when traveling. The things you pack inside creates your temporary home in your new location. My videoprojection the suitcaselady is reflecting these aspects of certain room of a house and the theme of leaving and longing.

http://www.juhanamoisander.com/


Bio
In my art I create scenes or spaces that attends to create an opening or a crack to expierience something that attends to link us with the natural environment itself or to the meaning strucktures culture concerned has build from the expiriences of the surrounding world and has found worthy of remembering and passing on. My methods have been linked to ethnographical approach. I study old and new stories and visual representations produced on the subject, interview people and reseasch museum collections and archives. I collect material from certain issue or an area and combine historical material with todays phenomenons in order to create a story or a scene. The artwork takes form in installations combining sculptural elements, digital prints, sound and video. I work with the possibilities in the given space, in or outside.



The suitcaselady 2009




PANAGIOTIS BALOMENOS / bedroom stories
Performance

The artist will be dressed in a tailor made uniform out of a multicoloured cotton elastic textile that will cover entirely his body, from the head to the feet, positioned into one of the apartment’s bedrooms. There is not script or plan for the performance in question done before hand to follow. This live event will proceed independently of the audience’s positive, negative, active or passive participation, without sense of beginning or end. Although the artist will be covered entirely with this second – skin – like uniform his inner world composed by fantasies and his most hidden subconscious senses, is completely undressed in front of the spectators.


Bio
He has shown his work both in solo and group shows in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany and Belgium. The subject in his art practice is individual and collective portraiture of human existence expressed through sensuality, uncommon fantasies and passionate behavior. Formally his concerns are expressed through different mediums such as performances, sculptures/installations, tailored – made costumes, drawings, watercolours or just videos that function like documentation of performances or as independent works per se.


”Sílvio – V.I.A.”, 2007. Performance




ANNETTE ARLANDER / Good Morning
Performance

Annette Arlander performs (with) a video documenting the view from her bedroom window every morning during the year 2006.

http://www.harakka.fi/arlander/


Bio
Annette Arlander is professor of performance and theory at the Theatre Academy, Finland, Doctor of arts (1999), theatre director (1981). Her art work is focused on performing landscape by means of video or recorded voice.

Shawls eli Livets Dans Video 16m 2008




JOHANNA LECKLIN / Tomorrow - Huominen
Video installation. 16 mm film transferred to video.

Tomorrow is a short film where a little girl wonders about the meaning of the concept tomorrow. The story is based on a childhood memory recorded within the Story Café project. Jeanne, a French visitor to the Story Café in Helsinki in autumn 2006, told the original story and it is the first Story Café story to be made into a short film. The events of the film unfold in a home in Finland in the 1970s. A little girl demands that her father explain what tomorrow means. Dissatisfied with the answers she gets, she decides to stay up until midnight and wait for tomorrow to come.

http://www.johannalecklin.com/

Bio
Johanna Lecklin works in the field of video, film and photography and she has expanded her practice towards live art recently. She is experimenting with a fragmented use of narrative, with voice-over, with multiple projections and with a combination of different materials such as Super 8, 16 mm film and digital video in her videos and moving image installations. She also makes interviews; video portraits of people. These works are on the border of documentary and fiction. Some of her works can be seen as filmed performances, where the performer is commanded by a voice-over coming from an invisible source. Especially her early works have a feministic approach and deal with power relations. Her Story Café project is exploring communities on both local and global level. She collects people's stories and shows stories that she has recoded in previous countries. Her work deals with similarities and differences in culture. She offers people a space for free, where they can come and spend time, tell stories, listen to other storytellers and look at short films based on the recorded stories.


Tomorrow - Huominen. Video installation. 16 mm film transferred to video.



JANNA KOKKO / Home Is a Poem
Video and 5 framed diptych portraits

Poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote about the lives of people in St. Petersburg, Petrograd and Leningrad, died in 1966. Today a group of women guard and act as guides at her home on the Liteyny Prospect. I was interested to learn more about these women. I asked them if I could visit their homes and take their portrait photographs. My approach was conceptual. Instead of portraying a historical person, I wanted to concentrate on living ones. Instead of portraying an object, I wanted to focus on what’s human.

http://www.jaanakokko.com

Bio
I am an artist living in Helsinki. I work with video, photography, installation, drawing and text.
In my work I am interested not only in the exploration of the expressive and historical aspects of art, but I find it equally important to understand and be aware of the fact that a finished piece of art and the act of displaying it publicly are political comments.

Considering the political act as a guideline for creation is in my opinion not a restrictive but a freeing viewpoint.

I graduated from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki (2002) after studying new media, scriptwriting and photography. In 1999 I graduated from the Helsinki School of Economics.

Jaana Kokko

Portrait of Jelena Romanovn Chigvinzeva 2007