Middle Eastern artists on show at Finland’s Kiasma museum
UAE and Iraqi artists feature in ‘ARS22 — Living Encounters’
Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art
Kiasma has reopened in the Finnish capital post-COVID with a newly renovated interior and a sprawling exhibition that fills the building’s five floors.
“ARS22 — Living Encounters,” which will run until October 16, brings together work by 55 artists from 26 countries, including Iraq, the UAE, Australia and Mexico, to explore the exhibition’s themes of coexistence, our relationship with the world, and the challenges facing the planet and humanity.
“The idea behind ARS22 was to build an entity where multiple voices would coexist together. To create a museum as a platform for encounters, we curated an exhibition where many narratives, instead of one linear storyline, would exist,” said Piia Oksanen, who curated the exhibition alongside museum director Leevi Haapala, chief curator for exhibitions Joao
Laia, and a team including her twin sister Satu Oksanen, Saara Hacklin, Kati Kivinen, Patrik Nyberg, Jonna Strandberg and Jari-Pekka Vanhala.
“This is why invitations were sent to artists from different backgrounds, from different geographical areas, working with a variety of media,” she continued.
Several artists from the Middle East were invited to take part in ARS22, including Kholod Hawash, a self-taught textile artist from Iraq; Emirati visual artist Farah Al-Qasimi; Michael Rakowitz, an Iraqi-American multidisciplinary artist; and Slavs and Tatars, a collective of unnamed artists founded in 2006 by a PolishIranian duo.
Al-Qasimi told Arab News: “It’s always great to be able to show work in new environments. Survey shows are exciting because of the dialogues they propose between artists who work in different ways.”
The Abu Dhabi-born artist is known for her color-saturated photographs, many of which are on display on the museum’s second floor, including images of a woman watching anime on her iPhone, butterflies sitting on an orange slice, and an injured falcon being treated at a hospital. “You have to witness the works one at a time,” Al-Qasimi said. “The work in the exhibition is part of my research on ideas of paradise in contemporary culture; specifically, in religion, and in the leisure and entertainment industries. There are references to the small ways that people try to embody their own versions of idealism in day-to-day life, through shopping, nature or worship. It’s joyful, but also a little critical at times.”
This year’s edition of ARS is the first time that the show has included older pieces of work, something that Slavs and Tatars believe is important.
“We’re thrilled to have our work included in the first iteration to include works from past decades, given that Slavs and Tatars was conceived, in part, to counter the amnesiac emphasis on the new, the present, the actual,” the artists said.
Their work on display includes 2012’s “Mother Tongues, Father Throats” — a five-meter-tall hanging carpet that depicts a diagram of the mouth showing which parts are responsible for pronunciation of the letters of the Arabic alphabet. In the middle (the throat), the artists added the Hebrew and Cyrillic equivalents for the Arabic “kha” and “qaf,” which are not present in the Western language, and mark a clear boundary between East and West.
“We’re interested in redeeming the other organs of language, be it the throat or the nose, often eclipsed by the tongue,” the art collective said in a statement. “Alphabets are eminently political vehicles. We tend to imagine them as innocent, but Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic each accompanied imperial projects.”
Meanwhile, two floors above hang colorful patchwork quilts from Basra-born Hawash, now based in Helsinki, is showing colorful patchwork quilts, created using traditional Iraqi artisan techniques that Hawash learned by watching her mother sew.
According to Hawash, sanctions on Iraq at the time meant tha textiles and fabrics were scarce, so Iraqis were forced to use old clothing and materials drawn from the house in order to stitch their jodaleia (quilts).
Hawash and her husband — also an artist — sought refuge in Amman because of persecution before relocating to Finland with the help of Artists at Risk. The exiled artists were the first AR-ICORN Safe Haven Helsinki residents.
“I was threatened many times for not wearing a hijab,” Hawash said, standing next to a quilt depicting a woman cutting her hair. “In our culture, many women cut their hair as a form of resistance and a way to distance themselves from the ‘weaker sex.’” Her textile works address political decay, social and economic justice, the refugee issue and migration, religious freedom and other humanitarian issues. She also draws inspiration from Iraqi folklore.
For Oksanen, the presence of these Middle Eastern works is vital to the success of ARS22.
“There is growing interest in artists from the Arab world,” she told Arab News. “It is relevant to look outside the Western world, and to acknowledge how histories and present concerns are entangled.”